The world is facing legal challenges as more and more people cross borders not only as international migrants and refugees but also as working people moving across local boundaries within a country. How can existing legal systems govern individual identities in these moving demographics? The question arises in particular as to where people “belong“: the place in which they actually live, or the place from which they originate. Such information is critical for legal purposes, for example, where they are legally entitled to vote and receive social welfare and where they are obligated to pay taxes. This panel will accordingly examine how law is taking on these challenges, such as the transformation of democracy (Kondo), the enfranchisement of foreign residents (Okitsu), threats to residence-based taxation (Fuchi), and the determination of social security benefits for legal immigrants (Sekine) and asylum seekers (Ohnishi) from a comparative perspective.