turns to immigrant citizenship with a focus on California to carefully assess where the state currently stands with respect to progressive state citizenship and to situate the present moment in a sweep of the state’s history, which saw it pioneer and champion anti-Chinese and anti-immigrant legislation from its founding through the late 1990s and only move toward more pro-immigrant policies in the last two decades. We then explore key milestones in immigrant rights over the past decade and pinpoint 2015 as the year when progressive state citizenship became crystallized. Finally, we trace key factors that incubated and enabled the development of progressive state citizenship in California, including voter backlash against racial propositions, partisan shifts in the state legislature, and the growing strength of social movement actors across various regions, aided by long-term investment strategies by private foundations.

draws attention to comparisons between California and other states in their provision of immigrant citizenship rights. The authors start with the border dividing California and Arizona, two states that lie on opposite ends of the spectrum with respect to progressive and regressive state citizenship, respectively. And yet, Arizona is not the only exclusionary state with respect to immigrant rights today. Indeed, the authors’ analysis reveals that Alabama is about as exclusionary as Arizona and that states like Georgia and Tennessee are close behind in their exclusionary laws on immigrant state citizenship. In this chapter, the authors situate various states along a continuum from the most inclusive to the most exclusionary with respect to each of five dimensions of citizenship rights. They also conduct a fifty-state quantitative analysis to identify the reasons why some states have proceeded farther than others in the development of progressive state citizenship.