As Rachel Humphris states, ‘this book opens up new questions for academic and political debates about citizenship, migration and belonging’ (p 16). These are all debates which are highly topical in the UK as it contemplates the realities of, and reasons for, Brexit. And it is as both an academic and politician that I read the work and found in particular her notion of ‘intimate state encounters’, which frames the study, highly illuminating.

One of feminism's contributions to citizenship theory has been to interrogate the public-private divide, which previously confined questions of citizenship to the public sphere and ignored the relevance of the private, domestic sphere and the care work undertaken within it. The opening up of the domestic sphere as a site of citizenship has been an important element in the multi-scalar conceptualisation of citizenship, as stretching from the intimate and domestic through to the global rather than simply being linked to the nation-state.

Rachel's analysis of intimate state encounters throws new light on what everyday citizenship can mean through a study of a highly marginalised, racialised group – Romanian Roma – when the domestic and the nationstate meet in their homes. It explores the gendered complexities of these encounters, which to a large extent involves mothers having to meet frontline (typically female) workers’ expectations of ‘good motherhood’.

While in some cases intimate state encounters could play a positive role in the women's lives this very much depended on judgements of deservingness and appropriate signs of gratitude, and on sentiment rather than on the exercise of rights. This will be of interest to students of streetlevel bureacracy. Here, though, we see the representatives of the state (and also volunteers) operating behind the domestic front door. It brings home how the state is not some faceless monolith but, ‘digital by default’ notwithstanding, in some domains encounters with the state are highly personalised, and this is especially true of those such as Romania Roma women and members of marginalised groups more generally. These are just some aspects of the study which will provide rich pickings for students of citizenship and the operation of the welfare state.

Read as a politician, the book helps us understand the realities of the government's ‘hostile environment’ policy, now rebranded a ‘compliant environment’, even though it was still in its infancy when the study was conducted.