Veneers of Citizenship

Peter J. Spiro teaches law at Temple University and is the author of Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization which charts the trajectory of American citizenship and shows how American identity is unsustainable in the face of globalization.  The article below looks at citizenship in the light of July 4th.

As happens every July 5th, tomorrow’s newspapers will carry reports of attractively diverse groups of immigrants naturalizing as U.S. citizens in uplifting ceremonies, flags waving, with predictable but heartfelt welcomes from judges and elected officials. This Independence Day ritual is perhaps the only public relations play of the federal government’s immigration agencies that seems to work. It bears out all our longings that citizenship hold a sacred place as a source of national pride and renewal.
But the veneers of citizenship are wearing thin.

Start with the naturalization ceremonies themselves. The uplifting July 4th ceremonies are not the norm. More than half of all naturalizing immigrants take their oaths of citizenship in administrative procedures at local offices of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, successor to the old INS.

The surroundings are drab, often on the same hallways as hearing rooms in which less fortunate immigrants fight deportation. Low-level USCIS bureaucrats preside. As applicants stand in line to finalize their paperwork (after which they receive a 102-page pamphlet on U.S. history and a cheaply-produced American flag, apparently not made in China), the space takes on the feel of a waiting room. President Bush delivers a taped welcome via outdated technology along with a cloying version of “America the Beautiful.” The backdrop has all the transformative feel of a DMV.

Which it might as well be, for many of the participants. In their Sunday best and accompanied by families, the event has clearly retained its traditional significance for some. One has to feel a little sorry for these citizens-momentarily-to-be, given the tawdriness of the official reception.

But others by all appearances might as well be signing up for their drivers licenses. And who can blame them. The application process leading up to this day is slow and expensive. Application backlogs now stretch out as long as two years. In August 2007, the application fee almost doubled, to $675. For an immigrant family of four, that’s more than $2500. Those July 4th ceremonies would look a lot less dignified with money orders in the picture.

It doesn’t buy you all that much. The rights of citizenship are vanishingly small. In this presidential election year, those stories tomorrow will include quotes from new citizens looking forward to casting ballots in November. But studies consistently show that naturalized citizens are less likely to register and vote than their native-born counterparts. In 2006, for instance, only 37% of naturalized citizens voted, compared to 49% of native citizens. Voting rights can’t be motivating many naturalization applicants.

The recent spikes in naturalization applications have more prosaic explanations. Some rushed to file under the wire of the fee increase. Since a harsh 1996 rewrite of the immigration law and more so since 9/11, many immigrants have acquired citizenship on a defensive basis, to insulate themselves absolutely from deportation.

Others are looking for the advantages that citizens have in securing the admission of relatives. Permanent resident aliens can’t petition for the admission of their parents, for example. Citizens can.

Some applicants are even becoming citizens by way of an exit strategy. Citizens are free to come and go from the United States. Not so green-card holders, who may lose their permanent residency status after absences as short as six months. A growing number of aliens have been acquiring U.S. citizenship so that they can return to their homelands, secure in their travel privileges in and out of the U.S. to visit family and friends or to take advantages of retirement and other public benefits.

And a significant majority of naturalization applicants are holding on to their native citizenship even as they acquire American nationality. Nineteen out of the top twenty source countries for immigrants to the U.S. now accept dual citizenship. U.S. citizenship can play a sort of add-on function, subordinated to homeland ties.

So naturalization applicants may not be acting on sentimental attachments in becoming American citizens.

None of which is to say that naturalization for instrumental purposes should be policed, or in any event that it could be. But citizenship as an institution looks thinner after one brings into view those applicants who are not waving any flags against the backdrop of those dreary immigration agency offices.

Recent debates on immigration reform have been unthinkingly framed in terms of “a path to citizenship,” as if citizenship’s meaning were clear. But it’s time to get beyond our July 4th renderings of citizenship. The move might supply a focal point for revisiting the disasters of our immigration policy. It might also lead us to a new understanding of what membership in the national community does, and does not, stand for going forward.