In November 1999, a Cuban child named Elian Gonzalez washed up on the shore of Florida after a harrowing journey from Cuba that took the life of his mother. Over the next several months, members of his family and politicians in Cuba and the United States competed for custody of the boy, and hence to determine where he would live and what country's passport he would hold. As an unaccompanied minor, an undocumented immigrant, a potential asylum seeker, and a Cuban in the United States, Gonzalez embodied a number of important exceptions to immigration laws. Four months after the conflict was resolved, and Gonzalez was returned to Cuba in his father's custody, the 2000 U.S. presidential election took place. During what turned out to be a similarly unprecedented controversy, post-election investigations revealed that Florida's voter rolls had systematically excluded ex-felons who were entitled to vote, and who were disproportionately both African-American and registered Democrats. Florida, or even the United States, is not exceptional in this; controversies over how, and to whom, rights are made available regularly erupt in all liberal democratic states. Disputes over the rights of former colonial subjects in the United Kingdom, guestworkers in France and Germany, and indigenous persons in New Zealand illustrate the diverse and global nature of questions about who is a citizen and what rights and statuses citizenship confers.

The statuses held by these groups do not fully conform to standard definitions of citizenship.