JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2465 concludes with an overview of the Special Issue’s individual contributions and identifies some remaining research needs. Intersecting social hierarchies and the politics of belonging Immigration and citizenship policy has always been an exercise in boundary drawing. By regulating access to territory and membership in a world populated by nation-states, immigration policy remains one of the most consequential tools for the demarcation of social inclusion and exclusion. There is no question that the postwar shift in admissions criteria from race and national origin, on the one hand, to skill and family ties, on the other, signified a historic shift in the normative and legal basis of inclusion in the Global North (Fitzgerald and Cook-Martín 2014). Yet, to conclude that ‘if the contemporary Western nation-state still excludes, then in an individualistic and non-discriminatory way’ (Joppke 2005, 54), is too categorical a claim to be able to capture the complexities of immigration and citizenship policy. Not only does this claim ignore the possibility that immigration policy may not be internally coherent, but, as the present-day populist turn across Europe and the United States reminds us, we have little reason to assume that immigration policy will necessarily follow an upward trajectory toward ever greater inclusion. The recent interest in a critical re-examination of immigration and citizenship law has shown the persistence of group bias in immigrant selection (Jasso 1988; Legomsky 1993– 1994; Law 1996; Fitzpatrick 1997; Abu-Laban 1998; Johnson 1998; Dauvergne 2000; Boucher 2007; Orgad and Ruthizer 2010; Tannock 2011; Walsh 2011; El-Lahib and Wehbi 2012; Block 2016; Boucher 2016; Bonjour and Duyvendak 2018; Elrick and Winter 2018). Unlike earlier accounts of immigration and citizenship policy which limited the scope of exclusion to race, ethnicity, and national origin, contemporary analyses routinely bring an intersectional approach to the study of inclusion and exclusion. This body of scholarship starts from the premise that marginalisation and discrimination reflect the intersecting nature of various axes of social stratification – such as race and gender – which are created and maintained by the dynamic interaction of individual and institutional factors (Crenshaw 1989; Brah and Phoenix 2004; Hancock 2007; Bassel 2010; Dhamoon 2011). While most intersectional analyses interrogate contemporary policy developments, some intersectional studies have also shed new light on the race-based immigration systems of old. These studies show that the intersection of race, gender, and class sometimes created openings for policy exemptions from exclusion. High class status in particular could supersede race-based exclusion and facilitate the admission of wealthy and welleducated non-white immigrants. In fact, as Natalie Masuoka points out in her study of racial identity in the United States, during the early settlement period class and servitude were stronger determinants of social hierarchy than race (2017, 22). Similarly, focusing on late nineteenth century U.S. immigration law, Daniel Tichenor (2014) shows that the intersection of class and race allowed for the inclusion of non-white members of certain occupational and professional groups. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, for instance, exempted Chinese merchants and their wives from exclusion, and, in the years following the Act, additional exemptions were passed for certain skilled workers, artists, singers, professors, and religious ministers. In this issue, Tichenor and Jacobson (2020) continue this