| Over the past few decades, undocumented immigrants have established a tangible presence in North America and Europe. Regardless of the social, cultural, and economic contributions they make to their societies of residence, they remain unrecognized. As non-citizens, they are largely excluded from the rights and privileges associated with citizenship. Despite this non-recognition, undocumented immigrants have increasingly "come out of the shadows" in recent years to claim their rights.;Scholarship on migration and citizenship is unable to fully grasp the meaning of undocumented activism because it fails to acknowledge the importance of legal status on the one hand and privileges institutional adaptation as a driver of citizenship transformation on the other hand. This study investigates the transformation of citizenship in times of global migration from the perspective of the non-citizen, the liminal subject located betwixt and between statuses. I introduce a theoretical understanding of "non-citizen citizenship" that assigns a central place to the political practices whereby non-citizens make claims to belonging, inclusion, and recognition. Accordingly, I adopt a hermeneutic approach to study the processes of strategic (dis)-identification through which undocumented immigrants become rights-claiming subjects.;Based on comparative ethnographic research in civic organizations in Chicago and Brussels, this research demonstrates how undocumented activists make claims to recognition in their societies of residence. I argue that schools and churches respectively operate as "safe spaces" for undocumented immigrants' self-organization and representation. I then outline how undocumented youth embraced the power of storytelling as a political tool in Chicago. I contend that storytelling is employed as a community-building, mobilizing, and claims-making social movement practice. In Brussels, I describe how, in the absence of political openings, gaining public visibility became the sans-papiers' primary objective. I argue that the sans-papiers politicized their bodies through hunger strikes, occupations, and marches so as to claim specific rights.;On a broader level, this transatlantic comparative case study shows that regardless of the circumstances, undocumented activists contest prevailing dichotomies of citizen/non-citizen and legal/illegal by creatively (re)-inventing ways of being political. While non-citizen citizenship differs depending on the political context, it nevertheless points towards a reconfiguration of citizenship in the twenty-first century. |
