2464 A. ELLERMANN the individual only for what she does, not for what she is. … The individual is selected according to “achievement,” not “ascription,” that is, according to her agency rather than according to what she is immutably born with’ (2005, 2–3). The second set of developments that fuelled optimism about the trajectory of immigrant rights was the attainment of residence and family unification rights for Europe’s guest workers. Thomas Hammar’s (1985) seminal work on denizenship is testament to these developments. Whereas previously scholars had distinguished between temporary guest workers and citizens, the concept of the denizen captures the emergence of a qualitatively new status held by non-citizen permanent residents who enjoy civil, social, and economic rights largely on a par with citizens. Discussions of denizenship in the 1990s thus had a hopeful undertone, in line with the rise of postnationalist perspectives that posited that the progressive grounding of immigrant rights in human rights and universal personhood had rendered the nation-state and, thus, national citizenship, largely obsolete (Soysal 1994; Jacobson 1996; Feldblum 1998). Today, most will agree that the scholarly optimism of 1980s and 1990s was misplaced. Without denying the import of the policy developments that inspired these arguments, the feminist, critical race, and critical legal scholarship that has emerged since the 2000s has made it clear that we have good reason to doubt that we live in an era of non-discriminatory immigration, integration, and citizenship policy. In a similar vein, the growing literature on precariousness draws attention to the increasing legal stratification of immigration status. Far from reflecting a linear progression from alien to denizen to citizen, status can travel along downward trajectories that – even for permanent residents and certain citizens – can result in legal precarity and loss of status. The articles in this Special Issue engage with these debates by examining the multiple ways in which immigration and citizenship law continues to create hierarchies among migrants that mirror the intersection of non-meritocratic attributes of social group membership such as gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, religion, and class. We show that access to territory and citizenship is governed by highly differentiated legal distinctions that, far from being meritocratic, closely map onto social group membership. This Special Issue provides an empirical and normative contribution to the critical turn in migration studies at a time when populist anti-immigration mobilisation across Europe and the United States no longer shies away from breaking anti-populist norms of non-discrimination (Freeman 1995). As group-based arguments against immigrant admission and inclusion are once again becoming naturalised in public debate, migration scholars need to take seriously the claim that group-based discrimination remains an integral part of migration and citizenship policy. Far from providing a comprehensive overview of what has become a vast interdisciplinary literature, this article maps two important and interrelated developments in the study of migration and citizenship with which this Special Issue engages. First, the ‘politics of belonging’ in the Global North remains shaped by the intersection of multiple axes of inclusion and exclusion that are (re)produced by immigration and citizenship policy. Second, status precarity is on the rise. Whereas legal precarity has long been associated with undocumented and temporary immigration status, over the past two decades precarity has penetrated all immigration status, including those that have long been understood as secure and ‘permanently permanent’ (Rajkumar et al. 2012). The introduction