This collection explores how Western countries have historically distinguished between categories of migrants—such as labor, refugee, family, and postcolonial migrants. Covering France, the United States, Turkey, Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark, the contributors explain how concepts such as “refugee,” “family,” and “difference” have been defined through policy and public debate. Tightly intertwined, these definitions are continuously changing with the economic and geopolitical climate, as well as in relation to migrants’ gender, class, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and countries of destination and origin.

This incisive volume combines two important issues in contemporary debates over migration: gender and illegal migration. The authors reconsider migration scholarship through the lens of gender in order to investigate definitions of citizenship and the differences in mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion for men and women. Additionally, through applying an interdisciplinary and comparative historical framework that spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the volume also produces a comprehensive account of illegal migration in nations and regions such as the United States, the Middle East, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Mexico, Malaysia, Pakistan, and the horn of Africa.