Book Review: Citizen outsider: Children of North African immigrants in France

• Author: Jesus A. Campos
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1057567718786777
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Second, she focuses not only on how narrators learn about their legal status and learn how to

navigate life without documents such as a U.S. birth certificate, passport, or driver’s license but also

on how narrators learn to tell their stories and decide to make their stories public. They learn to

navigate their parents’ feelings of guilt and shame, a guilt and shame that can reverberate in their

own lives. They learn to manage their own feelings of isolation, anger, and fear. As one of Bishop’s

narrators eloquently stated, “It’s hard to be considered valuable in America, or to be considered

yourself as valuable, or consider yourself important when the government is working against you.”

Above all, they learn to “enact, in daring and surprising ways, the public belonging to which they

aspire.” Without legal citizenship, they embrace a cultural citizenship and an identity as activists that

mitigates their loneliness and fear and fosters a sense of community and belonging.

Finally, she turns the stories of undocumented immigrants around to discover what they say about

their audience. They refract upon the audience to show us the exclusionary nature of American

nationalism and the deep flaws in U.S. immigration policy. Throughout history, immigration policy

has been used to limit the American dream to those who aspire to higher education, speak English,

and are racialized as White. Undocumented immigrants are therefore asked to highlight their

deservingness and earn their citizenship. Their personal histories are subject to a level of scrutiny

that few U.S. citizens could bear and most would resent. Thus, their stories raise questions about the

country we are and aspire to be.

Although Bishop’s book provides several insights into the narrators and narratives of the immi-

grant rights movement, it is important to remember that her story too is a public performance with its

own limitations and biases. Most obviously, her narrators all live in New York City. As an urban,

democratic stronghold home to U.S. citizens and noncitizens from around the globe, New York City

allows undocumented immigrants to live in relative anonymity. They are not easily mar ked as

outsiders, and local laws and policies have been introduced to protect their rights and improve their

access to publically funded education, health, and social services. Undocumented immigrants living

in rural America, the Southeast, and Republican strongholds do not experience these same privileges

and may experience greater legal and racial vulnerability. Additionally, we learn about the narrators

and their narratives but learn little about how their stories influence and affect the lives of their

family and friends. Every story can be told through multiple narrators, each with a different per-

spective. Future work could build in additional perspectives to help us more fully understand the

immigrant rights activists leading the immigrant rights movement. Finally, her work captures a

unique time period (2015–2016) in the immigrant rights movement. It will be essential to continue

collecting the stories of these and future activists and to situate their narratives within the broader

history of the U.S. civil rights movement.

Beaman, J. (2017).

Citizen outsider: Children of North African immigrants in France.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 152 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-52029-426-4.

Reviewed by: Jesus A. Campos, Texas Southern University, Houston, TX, USA

DOI: 10.1177/1057567718786777

In Citizen Outsider, American scholar Jean Beaman uses ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to

examine the upward mobility of 45 French-bornchildrenofNorthAfricanImmigrantsor

“Maghrebin” individuals within French society. The book targets the marginalization that is expe-

rienced by the children of North African immigrants through the denial of “cultural citizenship” and

Book Reviews 479