Peter Nyers is Associate Professor of the Politics of Citizenship and Intercultural Relations in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University. He is the author of Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation(Routledge 2019). Professor Nyers was interviewed by Julia Wong, a third year Philosophy student at the University of Toronto. In an extensive interview, Professor Nyers explained his concept of irregular citizenship and what citizenship might be in a borderless world.   With our current political climate characterised by difference, considerations of citizenship flow from our alertness to otherness and to the fragmentation in our communities. Professor Peter Nyers brings forth a way of thinking about citizenship that refocuses on the polysemy of citizenship experiences. Turning away from the study of citizenship through the legal and formal lens, Nyers’ forthcoming book, Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation, asks the question: ‘what unmakesthe citizen?’   Citizenship is both an issue of status and of performance. While the legal, or formal, nature of citizenship justifiably carries much weight in refugee and migrant social movements, Nyers emphasises the performative aspect of citizenship. “What it means to be a citizen demands an intersectional analysis to understand it, to see how these relations of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and sexuality overlap and reinforce each other,” he said. In this way, citizenship is polysemic: it is experienced differently according to these arbitrary, but defining, characteristics. In Nyers’ view, we should seek an understanding of who political beings are, who has political presence or visibility, and who can make claims and enact responsibilities and obligations. This investigation centres upon citizenship not as a gained status, but as the ways that people enact themselves as citizens.   Nyers’ concept of irregular citizenship stems from this understanding of varying citizen experience. He problematises “the borderline between the citizen and the non-citizen.” Citizens are thought of as secure in status, residence, and rights. The migrant, as an outsider, occupies precarious or permanent status without the formal right to participate politically, and may, in the case of undocumented migrants, be an “absent presence within our society.” Irregular citizenship questions this hard line of Citizen and Outsider, uncovering “how contemporary forms of government and power relations are also undermining the assuredness that we have about citizenship as this stable category.”   In virtue of their incomplete status or non-status, migrants and refugees...