Introduction

Summary

This introduction provides an overview of the argument of the book. Although citizenship is often believed to reside exclusively at the national scale, the introduction describes how there is a distinctively local idea of citizenship that exists alongside federal citizenship. Where federal citizenship is distributed based on nationality, local citizenship has generally been made available to all residents regardless of nationality. Although local and federal citizenship have long been complementary, globalization is now causing them to come into conflict. That Donald Trump was elected on a stridently nationalistic, anti-immigrant, and anti-urban political platform at the same time that cities like San Francisco extended local voting rights to noncitizen residents who are ineligible to vote in state and federal elections illustrates how divergent ideas about local and federal citizenship are the sources of a major political crisis.