In the United States, the right to territorial belonging is the only inalienable right U.S. citizens have, and this right is exclusive to U.S. citizens.
Most scholarship on citizenship examines how rights are distributed within a polity, yet rarely considers how citizenship can function as a barrier to territorial rights - the right to live in a particular place. This talk draws from interviews with 30 Jamaican deported former legal permanent residents of the United States to address the question: What can we learn about the construction of citizenship in the 21st century through a consideration of people denied territorial rights? Addressing this question enhances our understanding of citizenship in two ways: 1) Tanya Golash Boza calls into question the assumption that citizenship rights are hierarchical and argue that social, cultural, and legal citizenship rights are non-convergent; and 2) she provides evidence that alienage is not always a salient aspect of the lives of non-U.S. citizens. Instead, it becomes relevant at certain points, and facing deportation is one of those points.
