Borders and Belonging: Borders and Belonging: Time as a Dimension of Immigration Policy

Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press 2025) is a comprehensive yet compact analysis of responses by governments, communities, and people to human  migration. It is for a readership that wants to view migration issues from a combination of many different perspectives. Though working primarily with policies and trends in the United States, the book interprets them for an intended worldwide audience.

By combining questions that are rarely asked together, this book’s approach is unique. Borders and Belonging starts with an inquiry into why citizenship and immigration restrictions might be justified or troubling. The book next suggests ways to think about objections to national borders as they exist today. People sometimes make claims based on their humanity; in other words, they object to national borders that inflict harm that no human being should have to endure. At other times, people make claims of a different sort, claims based on belonging, that is, that they are part of communities in a given country and that national borders erase or disregard that belonging.

Borders and Belonging next applies these concepts to analyze who should be able to enter a country, and how to think about someone entering for what may seem to be a temporary or indefinite stay. The book then looks at responses to people without lawful status and at approaches to immigration enforcement. The final three chapters of Borders and Belonging delve deeper, starting with ways to respond to immigration skeptics or opponents, and then discussing what it means to address the root causes of migration. The last chapter of the book explores the injustices that national borders can enable, the best ways to make decisions about immigration, and the role of history in making immigration policy. Borders
and Belonging reflects a synthesis of many ways -- all essential -- to think about national borders and migration.

Hiroshi Motomura is a teacher and scholar of immigration and citizenship, with influence across a range of academic disciplines and in federal, state, and local policymaking. His book, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (Oxford 2006) won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PROSE) Award from the Association of American Publishers as the year’s best book in Law and Legal Studies, and was chosen by the U.S. Department of State for its Suggested Reading List for Foreign Service Officers. He is a co-author of two immigration-related casebooks: Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy (9th ed. West 2021), and Forced Migration: Law and Policy (2d ed. West 2013), and he has published many widely cited articles on immigration and citizenship. His most recent book, Immigration Outside the Law (Oxford 2014), won the Association of American Publishers' Law and Legal Studies 2015 PROSE Award and was chosen by the Association of College and Research Libraries as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.