LAUSR

I thank the reviewers for their insightful comments on Citizens in Motion. The book seeks to steer migration and citizenship studies towards analysing emigration, immigration and remigration trends under the same framework – an approach which the book terms ‘contemporaneous migration’ – rather than treating them as discrete phenomenon for study. Citizens in Motion shows how studying these migration trends simultaneously draws out contestations over rights and belonging within a migration site, as well as the citizenship constellations that are forged across migration sites. Such an approach highlights the multiple, contingent ways in which fraternity (i.e. similarity) and alterity (i.e. difference) interface, not only in the countries where migrants have moved abroad but also the countries which they have left. The book uses the case of Chinese migration in Canada and Singapore to illustrate these examples, and further examines the changes taking place in China, the ‘ancestral land’, which is fast evolving into an immigration society. In so doing, Citizens in Motion also draws out the interethnic and co-ethnic tensions that coexist in multicultural societies experiencing multidirectional migration. Ishan Ashutosh approaches the book’s arguments through the lens of critical diaspora studies, rightly noting that ‘diaspora’ – as an object of study – should not be treated as an ‘appendage of the nation state’. Ashutosh’s reading of Citizens in Motion reiterates the book’s central aims to ‘[prie] apart . . . essentialised notions of culture’, in particular the assumed affinity between co-ethnics, as well as bring to view the effects of ‘temporal coding’ (Ho, 2019: 55) on debates and practices of citizenship and belonging. Incisively, Ashutosh captures a theoretical puzzle that the book engages with by asking ‘what are the implications of routing migration theory through contemporaneous migration – emigration, immigration and remigration – instead of diaspora’s mobilities of dispersal, settlement, connections, and return?’. A concise response would be that Citizens in Motion draws from both critical diaspora and transnationalism studies, but it also destabilises the tendency of research in these fields to deploy spatial imaginations that fix migration hubs as either ‘sending’ or ‘receiving’ sites. As Ashutosh observes, the book also addresses the significance of temporality in the social constructions of race and ethnicity that undergird both nation and diaspora. This analysis of temporality is not only limited to the states’ narrative of time but also the discordant temporalities experienced by migrants themselves (e.g. Chapter 2). Where I depart from Ashutosh’s reading of Citizens in Motion is that the book does more than ‘privilege the mobility of those entitled to formal rights’; rather it extends analyses