JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2469 contrast, in the feminised forced marriage context, human rights arguments have rendered the practice of forced marriage acultural, allowing for their heavy-handed criminalisation. Also in this issue, Matthew Gibney (2020) shifts our attention from discrimination in immigration law to the acquisition and loss of citizenship. Citizenship, far from being a mere legal status, is intimately tied to the ‘boundaries of belonging:’ ‘t is about demarcating who “we” are, who is part of “us,” and who is not’ (Bonjour and Block 2016, 779). However, being a citizen of a state does not necessarily equal ‘belonging’ to such state. Individuals and groups who are considered as ‘others,’ that is, as belonging to different ethnic, national or racial groups, are usually not considered as belonging to a host country’s community (Yuval-Davis 2007). Gibney’s historical analysis of the involuntary loss of citizenship through denationalisation shows that, while legal norms surrounding the prohibition of statelessness have curtailed the states’ denationalisation power, this has not erased discrimination from its use. On the contrary, enforcement practices in Britain demonstrate that the use of denationalisation has become effectively reserved for naturalised citizens from Muslim-majority countries. In other words, ‘it seems that the imaginative leap required to justify turning a citizen into an alien still requires that the individual in question be part of a group already viewed as less than full citizens’ (2020, 2566). Status diversification and the rise of legal precariousness Until recently, studies of legal status differentiation focused on four basic, vertically and hierarchically ordered, status groups: undocumented residents, temporary residents, permanent residents, and citizen residents. Whereas undocumented and temporary status was marked by legal precarity, permanent residence and citizenship were associated with ‘security of presence’ (Rajkumar et al. 2012). The recently emerging literature on the ‘precarity of place’ (Banki 2013) within migration studies, however, has moved beyond the binaries of illegal-legal (Kubal 2013) and citizen-noncitizen (Bosniak 2000; Menjívar 2006) in favour of a more fluid and non-linear understanding of precarity/precariousness.1 Goldring et al. emphasise the many pathways that can result in precarity as a ‘less-than-full immigration status’ that ‘conveys a combination of ongoing risk and uncertainty’ (2009, 239, 245). Precarity thus is no longer limited to formally illegal or temporary immigration status. On the contrary, “[c]itizenship and rights associated with legal immigration status are becoming increasingly precarious and conditional on requirements that are often difficult to meet or maintain. … The concept of precarious status reflects insecurities associated with policies designed to … curb the overall number of permanent immigrants on the part of states of immigration, and the tendency to make citizens increasingly individually responsible for their existence” (Goldring, Berinstein, and Bernhard 2009, 245). In other words, immigration tracks may follow a non-linear movement which includes the possibility of downward mobility, and, thus, the experience of legal precarity and loss of status even for certain permanent residents and citizens. As precarity has come to pervade every immigration status, the meaning of permanence and temporariness has shifted. Rajkumar et al.’s study of the production of temporariness in Canada (2012) advances a multidimensional conception of temporariness that, instead of conceiving of residence status as a temporary-permanent binary, distinguishes between ‘temporarily temporary,’ ‘permanently temporary,’ and ‘temporarily permanent’ status.