Introduction to: Borders and Belonging

UCLA Law, Aug. 2024

"This excerpt is the Introduction to: Hiroshi Motomura, Borders and Belonging (Oxford University Press forthcoming early 2025). Borders and Belonging is a comprehensive yet compact analysis of responses by governments, communities, and people to human migration. It is for a general audience that wants to view migration issues from 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 -- 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 genuinely 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 immigration policy. Borders and Belonging reflects an synthesis of many ways -- all essential -- to think about national borders and migration."