Citizenship was built for people who stay put, and Laguerre argues that it no longer fits. He begins with Randolph Bourne's account of a transnational America, a country remade by each wave of arrivals and, through them, tied to the places those arrivals came from, so that the state ceases to be the only site where citizenship is practised.

Haitian Americans are the case. Their primary ties run to Haiti, secondary ones to fellow migrants in Montreal, Paris and Santo Domingo, and the group is stratified less by ethnicity than by legal status, since refugee, student, resident, citizen and undocumented each mark out a different daily life.

From this Laguerre argues that equality is won on the ground of citizenship rather than ethnicity, and that citizenship must be redefined to hold plural allegiance. Diaspora here is both a place of residence and a state of mind, passed on across generations.