SEPTEMBER 5, 2025
Borders and Belonging: What Is Fair Immigration Policy in the Year 2025?
It can be daunting to think affirmatively about fair immigration policy in the year 2025. One might debate federal initiatives in the news, but what are the ideas that drive critiques (or praise)? What should the way forward look like? How might you go from what you’re against to what you’re for?

I hope that my new book, Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy (Oxford 2025), is a guide to answers. The book offers a comprehensive yet compact analysis of responses to human migration. It works primarily with trends in the United States, but the book interprets them for a worldwide audience.

By connecting questions rarely asked together, the book’s approach is unique. It starts by asking why national borders might be justified and then looks at objections to such borders. People might make claims based on their humanity, or they might make claims based on belonging to communities in a country. Borders and Belonging next applies these ideas to analyze admissions, both “temporary” and “permanent.” The book then looks at people without lawful status and at enforcement. The next two chapters explore skepticism about immigration and what it means to address migration’s root causes. The book ends by synthesizing its analysis of the injustices that borders enable, by suggesting how to make immigration decisions, and by assessing history’s role in policymaking.

Borders and Belonging reflects an synthesis of many perspectives -- all essential – on national borders and migration. I hope it also offers ways to understand current events and what they mean for the future of immigration policy in the United States and around the world.

Hiroshi Motomura (UCLA Law) is a teacher and scholar of immigration and citizenship, with influence across a range of academic disciplines and in federal, state, and local policymaking. His book, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (Oxford 2006) won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PROSE) Award from the Association of American Publishers as the year’s best book in Law and Legal Studies, and was chosen by the U.S. Department of State for its Suggested Reading List for Foreign Service Officers. Motomura’s latest book is Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy (2025) is published by Oxford University Press.

Faculty Profile.