ABSTRACT
The security of U.S. citizenship has, in recent years, been shaped by invidious assumptions about what it means to be authentically American. Citizens who challenge those assumptions find themselves in danger of abandonment by the state. This chapter considers the cases of three such people. In each, the U.S. unsettles its own socio-legal citizenship order, which has traditionally been conceptualised in contractual terms, secure and predictable for those “inside” but owing nothing to those “outside.” Instead, recent decades have seen the U.S. federal government unilaterally denying the insider status of people belonging to certain marginalised groups.
