Citizenship of the United States

• 1. Introduction

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  Citizenship of the United States is a legal status that shapes almost every dimension of life in America, from the right to vote to protection from deportation. In 1996, more than one million people became citizens through naturalization in a single year. That number captures something extraordinary: an ongoing, massive commitment by people from around the world to attach themselves permanently to one country and its laws.

  What exactly does United States citizenship grant, and what does it require? How did a nation founded on civic participation come to define belonging almost entirely in legal terms? And what happens when the rules become so complex that overworked examiners are described as preferring to err on the side of rejection? Those questions run through the history of American citizenship from its colonial roots to its modern controversies.

• 2. Rights and Duties

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  United States citizens have the right to reside and work in the country without fear of removal. Lawful permanent residents share some of these protections, but a key difference separates them: permanent residents can be deported if convicted of a serious crime; citizens cannot be placed into deportation proceedings at all.

  Voting for federal office in all fifty states and the District of Columbia is restricted to citizens only. The Constitution bars states from restricting citizens from voting on grounds of race, color, sex, previous condition of servitude, failure to pay taxes, or age for those at least eighteen years old. Several states, however, bar citizen felons from voting even after they have completed any custodial sentence.

  The Constitution sets specific citizenship tenure requirements for Congress: members of the House must have been citizens for seven years before taking office, and senators for nine years. For the presidency and vice presidency, the requirement is stricter still: the Constitution requires a natural-born citizen who has been a resident for fourteen years.

  Jury duty stands as the one obligation that falls exclusively on citizens. Federal and state courts uniformly exclude non-citizens from jury pools today. The Johns Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg observed that the professional military has limited the need for citizen soldiers; military service is not currently compelled, though both male citizens and male permanent residents must register with the Selective Service System. United States citizens are also taxed on their worldwide income regardless of where they live.

• 3. Birthright and Naturalization

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  The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, settled a foundational question: all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. That amendment was tested directly in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which the Supreme Court affirmed that an ethnic Chinese person born in the United States becomes a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause.

  Birthright citizenship extends to the territories Congress has designated. By act of Congress, every person born in Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands is a citizen at birth. The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 defined the national territory for this purpose as the fifty states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Virgin Islands, and the Palmyra Atoll. American Samoa remains an exception: people born there become non-citizen nationals, not citizens.

  The naturalization pathway requires applicants to have been permanent residents for five years, or three years if married to a citizen. They must demonstrate good moral character, meaning no felony convictions, pass an English and civics test, and satisfy immigration officials that they are of sound mind. In 2006, the government replaced an older citizenship test, which asked questions like how many stars are in the flag, with a ten-question oral examination designed to probe whether immigrants understand the principles of American democracy. Six correct answers constitute a passing grade.

  For immigrants who serve in the armed forces, the path can be shorter. A 2009 newspaper report noted that the military was recruiting skilled immigrants on temporary visas with the promise of citizenship in as little as six months in exchange for service in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2002, President Bush signed an executive order eliminating the three-year waiting period for service personnel, making them immediately eligible. By June 2003, twelve non-citizens had died on active duty during the Iraq war.

• 4. A History of Exclusion

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  Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in 1835, described New England town hall meetings as the earliest form of American democracy, where men gathered regularly to discuss local affairs and keep self-government sturdy. Over time, that participatory model gave way to a narrower, more legalistic definition of belonging.

  For most of American history, naturalization was explicitly restricted by race. The Supreme Court held in its 1922 Ozawa v. United States decision that a Japanese person, born in Japan but resident in the United States for twenty years, could not be naturalized under the law then in force. The court noted that in all naturalization acts from 1790 to 1906, the privilege of naturalization was confined to white persons, with persons of African nativity and descent added in 1870. In 1923, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind extended that exclusion to Indian persons.

  Women faced a different form of legal subordination. From the 22nd of September 1922, until the Nationality Act of 1940, a woman holding United States citizenship could lose it simply by marrying an alien or a person ineligible for citizenship. The Equal Nationality Act of 1934 was a partial corrective: it allowed foreign-born children of an American mother and an alien father, if they had entered US territory before eighteen and lived in the country for five years, to apply for citizenship for the first time. It also equalized expatriation and naturalization rules between men and women, though it was not applied retroactively.

  The Supreme Court's 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe extended a protection in the other direction, entitling illegal immigrants to free public education from kindergarten through high school. By 2008, an estimated 65,000 illegal immigrant students were enrolled in American secondary schools.

• 5. Dual Citizenship and Renunciation

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  The earliest recorded instances of dual citizenship trace to a conflict before the French Revolution, when the British captured American ships and forced sailors back to Europe. The British Crown considered those persons British subjects by birth and compelled them to fight in the Napoleonic Wars.

  Today, United States law permits multiple citizenship. A person naturalized as an American must renounce allegiance to other countries during the naturalization ceremony, but the State Department has stated explicitly that a United States citizen may naturalize in a foreign state without any risk to their United States citizenship. The Supreme Court's decision in Afroyim v. Rusk confirmed that a citizen does not lose citizenship by voting in a foreign election or acquiring foreign citizenship, provided there was no intent to relinquish it.

  For those who do wish to give up citizenship, the process is formal and expensive. The administrative fee stands at US$2,350. Out of an estimated three to six million United States citizens residing abroad, between five and six thousand relinquished citizenship each year in 2015 and 2016. Under the Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2008, an expatriation tax applies to many who give up citizenship, though payment is due on the normal tax date of the following year and is not a prerequisite for the relinquishment itself.

  One lesser-known pathway involves grandparents. Section 322 of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, added in 1994, allowed children of a citizen parent who did not acquire citizenship at birth to use a grandparent's physical presence in the United States to qualify. In 2006, there were 4,000 applications using that provision, and Israel comprised ninety percent of those taking advantage of it.

• 6. The Cost and Politics of Belonging

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  Naturalization fees were US$60 in 1989. By 2007, the application fee had risen to US$595, with an additional US$80 computerized fingerprinting fee added that same year. On the 23rd of December 2014, fees rose again, to US$640. The Migration Policy Institute's Doris Meissner, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner, doubted that fee increases deter citizenship-seekers, but in 2009 the number of immigrants applying for citizenship plunged sixty-two percent; the slowing economy and the cost of naturalization were the reasons cited.

  The demand in better economic times has been enormous. From 1920 to 1940, roughly 200,000 immigrants became citizens each year. After a postwar spike, the level settled to about 150,000 annually before returning to 200,000 around 1980. By the mid-1990s through 2009, annual naturalizations rose to around 500,000 with considerable variation. The number of naturalized citizens in the country rose from 6.5 million in the mid-1990s to 11 million by 2002.

  Politics has shadowed the process throughout. In 1997, efforts emerged to strip citizenship from 5,000 newly approved immigrants thought to have been wrongly naturalized. An examination of 1.1 million people granted citizenship from September 1995 to September 1996 found roughly 4,946 cases in which a criminal arrest should have disqualified an applicant, or in which an applicant had lied about their criminal history. Before the 2008 election, one report suggested that the USCIS would complete 930,000 applications in time for newly processed citizens to vote in November of that year.

  In 2006, mass protests numbering hundreds of thousands took place throughout the United States demanding citizenship for illegal immigrants. Demonstrators carried banners reading "We Have A Dream Too". One estimate placed the number of illegal immigrants in the country that year at 12 million. Writer Tom Barry, writing in the Boston Review in 2009, criticized the crackdown on illegal immigration for flooding federal courts with nonviolent offenders and dramatically increasing the US prison population, noting that the United States incarceration rate was five times greater than the average rate in the rest of the world.

• 7. Honorary and Corporate Citizenship

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  "Honorary Citizen of the United States" has been granted only eight times by an act of Congress or by presidential proclamation. The eight recipients are Sir Winston Churchill, Raoul Wallenberg, William Penn, Hannah Callowhill Penn, Mother Teresa, the Marquis de Lafayette, Casimir Pulaski, and Bernardo de Galvez y Madrid, Viscount of Galveston and Count of Galvez.

  The USCIS created the Outstanding American by Choice Award to recognize naturalized citizens who have made remarkable contributions. Past recipients named in the source include author Elie Wiesel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize; Indra K. Nooyi, who served as CEO of PepsiCo; and John Shalikashvili, who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  Corporations, treated as persons under the law, can also carry United States citizenship. The airline Virgin America sought to be treated as an American air carrier by the Department of Transportation to secure access to foreign air routes and overseas airports. Its competitor Alaska Airlines responded by requesting a review, arguing that Virgin violated a provision limiting foreign ownership in a United States air carrier to twenty-five percent of the voting interest. The case illustrates how citizenship, originally conceived for individuals, has been extended into the realm of commercial and legal strategy far beyond any town hall meeting.