This book examines the ways in which demographic anxieties and attempts to govern them are shaping ideas about citizenship. Demographic anxieties are often expressed regarding immigration but also arise in relation to other demographic changes unfolding in the contemporary ‘Global North’ – most notably, the longstanding trend towards lower birth rates and consequent population ageing. With particular attention to changing gender roles and life courses, the book examines how unfolding demographic transformations, including but not limited to immigration, and efforts to manage these changes are interacting and transforming ideas about citizenship.

Citizenship is, of course, a multi-functional and multi-dimensional concept – it is used to describe both a formal legal status as a member of a bounded political community and an ideal of equal membership, with associated rights and duties and political participation. A voluminous body of literature has emerged in the last decades around the ways in which international migration challenges states' right, ability and willingness to control who enters and stays in their territory, as well as the assumed cultural and religious uniformity of the (nation) state. Such analyses, often focusing on the legal regulation of immigration and citizenship, capture part of the picture of the ways in which immigration shapes ideas about citizenship. However, they typically leave out or only cursorily refer to the remarkable demographic changes which stimulate and underpin continuing immigration, knowledge of which is driving states to encourage or at least tolerate further immigration, albeit with considerable anxiety and constant efforts to minimise those impacts of international mobility that they consider most detrimental. These changes have to do with the trend towards lower birth rates and consequent population ageing, and they include dramatic shifts in gender and family dynamics, as well as changes in age structures and adaptations of the life course. When immigration is viewed with attention to these demographic transformations, which form the context for continuing immigration, a more nuanced picture of the manifold challenges to citizenship emerges. The topic then raises issues around not just sovereignty, control over borders and national identity but gender roles, reproduction, intergenerational responsibilities and family life and relationships.