american nationality essay

• Immigration

The Complicated Truth About What U.S. Citizenship Means Today

T he first time I saw the Statue of Liberty was 25 years ago, from a noisy ferry that brought me and hundreds of other eager tourists across New York Harbor. Back then I was a foreign student, in Manhattan for three days to attend an academic conference on linguistics. I had only one afternoon to devote to sightseeing, and faced with the choice of which landmark to visit, I settled immediately on Ellis Island. The site loomed large in my imagination, likely because of its romantic portrayal in the American movies I had grown up watching. I ambled through the stately inspection room, where original chandeliers cast their pale light, sat for a few minutes on the wooden benches, then went inside the exhibit rooms, filled with artifacts documenting the arrival of immigrants.

I still remember the jolt of surprise I felt when I came across a portrait of three Moroccan men and a little boy, all clad in national dress–cloak, djellaba, cross-body bag, leather slippers. It was a trace of a history I didn’t know existed. After the surprise wore off, I began to wonder about their names, their pasts, their families, their reasons for emigrating. Years later, researching this picture online, I discovered that the photographer, an employee of the Executive Division of Immigration, had scribbled “Arab jugglers” on the back of the print. These were performers, then, seeking fame or fortune here. They forged new identities and became Americans, just like the other 12 million immigrants and refugees who passed through Ellis Island from 1882 to 1954. Or at least, that is how the story goes: America was formed from huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

As I walked around the exhibit rooms at the Ellis Island immigration museum, it never occurred to me that someday I would become an immigrant too, and eventually a citizen. At the time, my goal had been to complete a graduate degree in linguistics and return to Morocco. But my life took an unexpected turn when I met and fell in love with an American. I said yes to him, and yes to staying here. Years passed, during which I learned more about the country I now called home: its charms and foibles, its culture and history, its claims to being a “nation of immigrants.” And I came to understand that, like any origin story, this one leaves out inconvenient details.

The boundaries of Americanness, which seem so elastic in the myth of a “nation of immigrants,” have in fact been very rigid–and always, always contested. At the founding of the United States, American citizenship was available exclusively to “free white persons.” It took decades of struggle, and a bloody civil war, before citizenship was extended to formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Indigenous people, who were members of sovereign nations, did not have full access to citizenship until 1924. And for much of this country’s history, a slew of race-based immigration laws, like the Chinese Exclusion Act, prevented most immigrants from outside Western Europe from coming to the U.S. or claiming U.S. citizenship.

It is tempting to think that this ugly history is behind us. Yet even a glance at current headlines makes it clear how deeply entrenched white-supremacist ideas about Americanness remain. The Trump Administration announced in 2019 that it would cut the number of refugees the U.S. will resettle in 2020 to no more than 18,000, the lowest number since the program was created 40 years ago. These refugees come principally from Asia, Africa and Latin America, which is to say they often come from countries the President has frequently disparaged. Ken Cuccinelli, the acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, has long been an opponent of birthright citizenship and last fall told reporters that he doesn’t believe a constitutional amendment would be needed to end it. And Stephen Miller, the White House aide who has long echoed white-nationalist talking points and who is widely credited with being the architect of the Muslim ban, has pushed for sweeping changes to immigration laws that would favor people who speak English.

There are also rhetorical clues from this Administration and its supporters about who gets to be a “real” American. Last summer, Donald Trump called on Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib to “go back” to the “crime-infested places” from which they came. (All but Omar were born in the U.S.) More recently, conservative cable hosts like Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade insinuated that Alexander Vindman–an official at the National Security Council who testified that the President had asked the leader of Ukraine to investigate a political rival in exchange for military aid–might not be entirely loyal to the U.S. because he was an immigrant. It didn’t matter that Vindman was an active-duty officer in the U.S. Army; his allegiance was called into question.

Being American isn’t just a state of being, whether native or acquired. It’s a relationship between an individual and the nation-state. To be an American means, among other things, to have the right to vote in state and federal elections, to have protection from unreasonable searches, to be free to speak or worship or assemble without government interference. In the past, these rights, protections and liberties were not granted equally to all, and they still aren’t today. For instance, millions of formerly incarcerated people in states like Alabama, Kentucky, Florida and Mississippi have lost the right to vote and are therefore shut out of the democratic process. This has vastly disproportionate effects on black men. By comparison, Vermont and Maine, the two whitest states in the union, allow both incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people to vote. Citizenship is supposed to be an equalizer, yet in many ways it still functions as a tiered system that mirrors past racial hierarchies.

Four years ago, while I was visiting New York for a literary event, I took my daughter and niece to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It was a cloudy day in June, but the air was thick with humid heat. Both girls were excited about seeing the national landmarks; both undertook ancestry searches at the interactive exhibits. Although neither site was new to me any longer, I felt just as moved as the first time I’d seen them. There is something deeply seductive about these symbols. Even with the awareness of America’s history of colonial expansion and white supremacy, the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is still a potent lure.

I live with this contradiction every day, with the knowledge that the bleak past and the better future meet in the present moment. Citizenship is both an idea and an ideal, the journey from one to the other a measure of the nation’s progress. I wish this journey could be taken in a giant leap, even as I fear it will be walked slowly, fearfully, and with many steps back along the way. Yet I keep the faith. Perhaps it’s because I’m a novelist, whose work involves constant use of the imagination. Or perhaps it’s because I’m an immigrant, whose vantage point grants the privilege to look at the country from the inside and the outside. Either way, I know that promise is the best catalyst for progress.

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• American Academy of Arts 
and Sciences

What does it mean to be an American?

Sarah Song, a Visiting Scholar at the Academy in 2005–2006, is an assistant professor of law and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism (2007). She is at work on a book about immigration and citizenship in the United States.

It is often said that being an American means sharing a commitment to a set of values and ideals. 1 Writing about the relationship of ethnicity and American identity, the historian Philip Gleason put it this way:

To be or to become an American, a person did not have to be any particular national, linguistic, religious, or ethnic background. All he had to do was to commit himself to the political ideology centered on the abstract ideals of liberty, equality, and republicanism. Thus the universalist ideological character of American nationality meant that it was open to anyone who willed to become an American. 2

To take the motto of the Great Seal of the United States, E pluribus unum – "From many, one" – in this context suggests not that manyness should be melted down into one, as in Israel Zangwill's image of the melting pot, but that, as the Great Seal's sheaf of arrows suggests, there should be a coexistence of many-in-one under a unified citizenship based on shared ideals.

Of course, the story is not so simple, as Gleason himself went on to note. America's history of racial and ethnic exclusions has undercut the universalist stance; for being an American has also meant sharing a national culture, one largely defined in racial, ethnic, and religious terms. And while solidarity can be understood as "an experience of willed affiliation," some forms of American solidarity have been less inclusive than others, demanding much more than simply the desire to affiliate. 3 In this essay, I explore different ideals of civic solidarity with an eye toward what they imply for newcomers who wish to become American citizens.

Why does civic solidarity matter? First, it is integral to the pursuit of distributive justice. The institutions of the welfare state serve as redistributive mechanisms that can offset the inequalities of life chances that a capitalist economy creates, and they raise the position of the worst-off members of society to a level where they are able to participate as equal citizens. While self-interest alone may motivate people to support social insurance schemes that protect them against unpredictable circumstances, solidarity is understood to be required to support redistribution from the rich to aid the poor, including housing subsidies, income supplements, and long-term unemployment benefits. 4 The underlying idea is that people are more likely to support redistributive schemes when they trust one another, and they are more likely to trust one another when they regard others as like themselves in some meaningful sense.

Second, genuine democracy demands solidarity. If democratic activity involves not just voting, but also deliberation, then people must make an effort to listen to and understand one another. Moreover, they must be willing to moderate their claims in the hope of finding common ground on which to base political decisions. Such democratic activity cannot be realized by individuals pursuing their own interests; it requires some concern for the common good. A sense of solidarity can help foster mutual sympathy and respect, which in turn support citizens' orientation toward the common good.

Third, civic solidarity offers more inclusive alternatives to chauvinist models that often prevail in political life around the world. For example, the alternative to the Nehru-Gandhi secular definition of Indian national identity is the Hindu chauvinism of the Bharatiya Janata Party, not a cosmopolitan model of belonging. "And what in the end can defeat this chauvinism," asks Charles Taylor, "but some reinvention of India as a secular republic with which people can identify?" 5 It is not enough to articulate accounts of solidarity and belonging only at the subnational or transnational levels while ignoring senses of belonging to the political community. One might believe that people have a deep need for belonging in communities, perhaps grounded in even deeper human needs for recognition and freedom, but even those skeptical of such claims might recognize the importance of articulating more inclusive models of political community as an alternative to the racial, ethnic, or religious narratives that have permeated political life. 6  The challenge, then, is to develop a model of civic solidarity that is "thick" enough to motivate support for justice and democracy while also "thin" enough to accommodate racial, ethnic, and religious diversity.

We might look first to Habermas's idea of constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotismus). The idea emerged from a particular national history, to denote attachment to the liberal democratic institutions of the postwar Federal Republic of Germany, but Habermas and others have taken it to be a generalizable vision for liberal democratic societies, as well as for supranational communities such as the European Union. On this view, what binds citizens together is their common allegiance to the ideals embodied in a shared political culture. The only "common denominator for a constitutional patriotism" is that "every citizen be socialized into a common political culture." 7

Habermas points to the United States as a leading example of a multicultural society where constitutional principles have taken root in a political culture without depending on "all citizens' sharing the same language or the same ethnic and cultural origins." 8  The basis of American solidarity is not any particular racial or ethnic identity or religious beliefs, but universal moral ideals embodied in American political culture and set forth in such seminal texts as the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Based on a minimal commonality of shared ideals, constitutional patriotism is attractive for the agnosticism toward particular moral and religious outlooks and ethnocultural identities to which it aspires.

What does constitutional patriotism suggest for the sort of reception immigrants should receive? There has been a general shift in Western Europe and North America in the standards governing access to citizenship from cultural markers to values, and this is a development that constitutional patriots would applaud. In the United States those seeking to become citizens must demonstrate basic knowledge of U.S. government and history. A newly revised U.S. citizenship test was instituted in October 2008 with the hope that it will serve, in the words of the chief of the Office of Citizenship, Alfonso Aguilar, as "an instrument to promote civic learning and patriotism." 9 The revised test attempts to move away from civics trivia to emphasize political ideas and concepts. (There is still a fair amount of trivia: "How many amendments does the Constitution have?" "What is the capital of your state?") The new test asks more open-ended questions about government powers and political concepts: "What does the judicial branch do?" "What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful?" "What is freedom of religion?" "What is the 'rule of law'?" 10

Constitutional patriots would endorse this focus on values and principles. In Habermas's view, legal principles are anchored in the "political culture," which he suggests is separable from "ethical-cultural" forms of life. Acknowledging that in many countries the "ethical-cultural" form of life of the majority is "fused" with the "political culture," he argues that the "level of the shared political culture must be uncoupled from the level of subcultures and their prepolitical identities." 11  All that should be expected of immigrants is that they embrace the constitutional principles as interpreted by the political culture, not that they necessarily embrace the majority's ethical-cultural forms.

Yet language is a key aspect of "ethical-cultural" forms of life, shaping people's worldviews and experiences. It is through language that individuals become who they are. Since a political community must conduct its affairs in at least one language, the ethical-cultural and political cannot be completely "uncoupled." As theorists of multiculturalism have stressed, complete separation of state and particularistic identities is impossible; government decisions about the language of public institutions, public holidays, and state symbols unavoidably involve recognizing and supporting particular ethnic and religious groups over others. 12 In the United States, English language ability has been a statutory qualification for naturalization since 1906, originally as a requirement of oral ability and later as a requirement of English literacy. Indeed, support for the principles of the Constitution has been interpreted as requiring English literacy. 13 The language requirement might be justified as a practical matter (we need some language to be the common language of schools, government, and the workplace, so why not the language of the majority?), but for a great many citizens, the language requirement is also viewed as a key marker of national identity. The continuing centrality of language in naturalization policy prevents us from saying that what it means to be an American is purely a matter of shared values.

Another misconception about constitutional patriotism is that it is necessarily more inclusive of newcomers than cultural nationalist models of solidarity. Its inclusiveness depends on which principles are held up as the polity's shared principles, and its normative substance depends on and must be evaluated in light of a background theory of justice, freedom, or democracy; it does not by itself provide such a theory. Consider ideological requirements for naturalization in U.S. history. The first naturalization law of 1790 required nothing more than an oath to support the U.S. Constitution. The second naturalization act added two ideological elements: the renunciation of titles or orders of nobility and the requirement that one be found to have "behaved as a man . . . attached to the principles of the constitution of the United States." 14  This attachment requirement was revised in 1940 from a behavioral qualification to a personal attribute, but this did not help clarify what attachment to constitutional principles requires. 15 Not surprisingly, the "attachment to constitutional principles" requirement has been interpreted as requiring a belief in representative government, federalism, separation of powers, and constitutionally guaranteed individual rights. It has also been interpreted as disqualifying anarchists, polygamists, and conscientious objectors for citizenship. In 1950, support for communism was added to the list of grounds for disqualification from naturalization – as well as grounds for exclusion and deportation. 16 The 1990 Immigration Act retained the McCarthy-era ideological qualifications for naturalization; current law disqualifies those who advocate or affiliate with an organization that advocates communism or opposition to all organized government. 17 Patriotism, like nationalism, is capable of excess and pathology, as evidenced by loyalty oaths and campaigns against "un-American" activities.

In contrast to constitutional patriots, liberal nationalists acknowledge that states cannot be culturally neutral even if they tried. States cannot avoid coercing citizens into preserving a national culture of some kind because state institutions and laws define a political culture, which in turn shapes the range of customs and practices of daily life that constitute a national culture. David Miller, a leading theorist of liberal nationalism, defines national identity according to the following elements: a shared belief among a group of individuals that they belong together, historical continuity stretching across generations, connection to a particular territory, and a shared set of characteristics constituting a national culture. 18  It is not enough to share a common identity rooted in a shared history or a shared territory; a shared national culture is a necessary feature of national identity. I share a national culture with someone, even if we never meet, if each of us has been initiated into the traditions and customs of a national culture.

What sort of content makes up a national culture? Miller says more about what a national culture does not entail. It need not be based on biological descent. Even if nationalist doctrines have historically been based on notions of biological descent and race, Miller emphasizes that sharing a national culture is, in principle, compatible with people belonging to a diversity of racial and ethnic groups. In addition, every member need not have been born in the homeland. Thus, "immigration need not pose problems, provided only that the immigrants come to share a common national identity, to which they may contribute their own distinctive ingredients." 19

Liberal nationalists focus on the idea of culture, as opposed to ethnicity or descent, in order to reconcile nationalism with liberalism. Thicker than constitutional patriotism, liberal nationalism, Miller maintains, is thinner than ethnic models of belonging. Both nationality and ethnicity have cultural components, but what is said to distinguish "civic" nations from "ethnic" nations is that the latter are exclusionary and closed on grounds of biological descent; the former are, in principle, open to anyone willing to adopt the national culture. 20

Yet the civic-ethnic distinction is not so clear-cut in practice. Every nation has an "ethnic core." As Anthony Smith observes

[M]odern "civic" nations have not in practice really transcended ethnicity or ethnic sentiments. This is a Western mirage, reality-as-wish; closer examination always reveals the ethnic core of civic nations, in practice, even in immigrant societies with their early pioneering and dominant (English and Spanish) culture in America, Australia, or Argentina, a culture that provided the myths and language of the would-be nation. 21

This blurring of the civic-ethnic distinction is reflected throughout U.S. history with the national culture often defined in ethnic, racial, and religious terms. 22

Why, then, if all national cultures have ethnic cores, should those outside this core embrace the national culture? Miller acknowledges that national cultures have typically been formed around the ethnic group that is dominant in a particular territory and therefore bear "the hallmarks of that group: language, religion, cultural identity." Muslim identity in contemporary Britain becomes politicized when British national identity is conceived as containing "an Anglo-Saxon bias which discriminates against Muslims (and other ethnic minorities)." But he maintains that his idea of nationality can be made "democratic in so far as it insists that everyone should take part in this debate [about what constitutes the national identity] on an equal footing, and sees the formal arenas of politics as the main (though not the only) place where the debate occurs." 23

The major difficulty here is that national cultures are not typically the product of collective deliberation in which all have the opportunity to participate. The challenge is to ensure that historically marginalized groups, as well as new groups of immigrants, have genuine opportunities to contribute "on an equal footing" to shaping the national culture. Without such opportunities, liberal nationalism collapses into conservative nationalism of the kind defended by Samuel Huntington. He calls for immigrants to assimilate into America's "Anglo- Protestant culture." Like Miller, Huntington views ideology as "a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking in racial, ethnic, or cultural sources of community," and he rejects race and ethnicity as constituent elements of national identity. 24 Instead, he calls on Americans of all races and ethnicities to "reinvigorate their core culture." Yet his "cultural" vision of America is pervaded by ethnic and religious elements: it is not only of a country "committed to the principles of the Creed," but also of "a deeply religious and primarily Christian country, encompassing several religious minorities, adhering to Anglo- Protestant values, speaking English, maintaining its European cultural heritage." 25 That the cultural core of the United States is the culture of its historically dominant groups is a point that Huntington unabashedly accepts.

Cultural nationalist visions of solidarity would lend support to immigration and immigrant policies that give weight to linguistic and ethnic preferences and impose special requirements on individuals from groups deemed to be outside the nation's "core culture." One example is the practice in postwar Germany of giving priority in immigration and naturalization policy to ethnic Germans; they were the only foreign nationals who were accepted as permanent residents set on the path toward citizenship. They were treated not as immigrants but "resettlers" (Aussiedler) who acted on their constitutional right to return to their country of origin. In contrast, non-ethnically German guestworkers (Gastarbeiter) were designated as "aliens" (Auslander) under the 1965 German Alien Law and excluded from German citizenship. 26 Another example is the Japanese naturalization policy that, until the late 1980s, required naturalized citizens to adopt a Japanese family name. The language requirement in contemporary naturalization policies in the West is the leading remaining example of a cultural nationalist integration policy; it reflects not only a concern with the economic and political integration of immigrants but also a nationalist concern with preserving a distinctive national culture.

Constitutional patriotism and liberal nationalism are accounts of civic solidarity that deal with what one might call first-level diversity. Individuals have different group identities and hold divergent moral and religious outlooks, yet they are expected to share the same idea of what it means to be American: either patriots committed to the same set of ideals or co-nationals sharing the relevant cultural attributes. Charles Taylor suggests an alternative approach, the idea of "deep diversity." Rather than trying to fix some minimal content as the basis of solidarity, Taylor acknowledges not only the fact of a diversity of group identities and outlooks (first-level diversity), but also the fact of a diversity of ways of belonging to the political community (second-level or deep diversity). Taylor introduces the idea of deep diversity in the context of discussing what it means to be Canadian:

Someone of, say, Italian extraction in Toronto or Ukrainian extraction in Edmonton might indeed feel Canadian as a bearer of individual rights in a multicultural mosaic. . . . But this person might nevertheless accept that a Québécois or a Cree or a Déné might belong in a very different way, that these persons were Canadian through being members of their national communities. Reciprocally, the Québécois, Cree, or Déné would accept the perfect legitimacy of the "mosaic" identity.

Civic solidarity or political identity is not "defined according to a concrete content," but, rather, "by the fact that everybody is attached to that identity in his or her own fashion, that everybody wants to continue that history and proposes to make that community progress." 27 What leads people to support second-level diversity is both the desire to be a member of the political community and the recognition of disagreement about what it means to be a member. In our world, membership in a political community provides goods we cannot do without; this, above all, may be the source of our desire for political community.

Even though Taylor contrasts Canada with the United States, accepting the myth of America as a nation of immigrants, the United States also has a need for acknowledgment of diverse modes of belonging based on the distinctive histories of different groups. Native Americans, African Americans, Irish Americans, Vietnamese Americans, and Mexican Americans: across these communities of people, we can find not only distinctive group identities, but also distinctive ways of belonging to the political community.

Deep diversity is not a recapitulation of the idea of cultural pluralism first developed in the United States by Horace Kallen, who argued for assimilation "in matters economic and political" and preservation of differences "in cultural consciousness." 28  In Kallen's view, hyphenated Americans lived their spiritual lives in private, on the left side of the hyphen, while being culturally anonymous on the right side of the hyphen. The ethnic-political distinction maps onto a private-public dichotomy; the two spheres are to be kept separate, such that Irish Americans, for example, are culturally Irish and politically American. In contrast, the idea of deep diversity recognizes that Irish Americans are culturally Irish American and politically Irish American. As Michael Walzer put it in his discussion of American identity almost twenty years ago, the culture of hyphenated Americans has been shaped by American culture, and their politics is significantly ethnic in style and substance. 29  The idea of deep or second-level diversity is not just about immigrant ethnics, which is the focus of both Kallen's and Walzer's analyses, but also racial minorities, who, based on their distinctive experiences of exclusion and struggles toward inclusion, have distinctive ways of belonging to America.

While attractive for its inclusiveness, the deep diversity model may be too thin a basis for civic solidarity in a democratic society. Can there be civic solidarity without citizens already sharing a set of values or a culture in the first place? In writing elsewhere about how different groups within democracy might "share identity space," Taylor himself suggests that the "basic principles of republican constitutions – democracy itself and human rights, among them" constitute a "non-negotiable" minimum. Yet, what distinguishes Taylor's deep diversity model of solidarity from Habermas's constitutional patriotism is the recognition that "historic identities cannot be just abstracted from." The minimal commonality of shared principles is "accompanied by a recognition that these principles can be realized in a number of different ways, and can never be applied neutrally without some confronting of the substantive religious ethnic-cultural differences in societies." 30 And in contrast to liberal nationalism, deep diversity does not aim at specifying a common national culture that must be shared by all. What matters is not so much the content of solidarity, but the ethos generated by making the effort at mutual understanding and respect.

Canada's approach to the integration of immigrants may be the closest thing there is to "deep diversity." Canadian naturalization policy is not so different from that of the United States: a short required residency period, relatively low application fees, a test of history and civics knowledge, and a language exam. 31 Where the United States and Canada diverge is in their public commitment to diversity. Through its official multiculturalism policies, Canada expresses a commitment to the value of diversity among immigrant communities through funding for ethnic associations and supporting heritage language schools. 32 Constitutional patriots and liberal nationalists say that immigrant integration should be a two-way process, that immigrants should shape the host society's dominant culture just as they are shaped by it. Multicultural accommodations actually provide the conditions under which immigrant integration might genuinely become a two-way process. Such policies send a strong message that immigrants are a welcome part of the political community and should play an active role in shaping its future evolution.

The question of solidarity may not be the most urgent task Americans face today; war and economic crisis loom larger. But the question of solidarity remains important in the face of ongoing large-scale immigration and its effects on intergroup relations, which in turn affect our ability to deal with issues of economic inequality and democracy. I hope to have shown that patriotism is not easily separated from nationalism, that nationalism needs to be evaluated in light of shared principles, and that respect for deep diversity presupposes a commitment to some shared values, including perhaps diversity itself. Rather than viewing the three models of civic solidarity I have discussed as mutually exclusive – as the proponents of each sometimes seem to suggest – we should think about how they might be made to work together with each model tempering the excesses of the others.

What is now formally required of immigrants seeking to become American citizens most clearly reflects the first two models of solidarity: professed allegiance to the principles of the Constitution (constitutional patriotism) and adoption of a shared culture by demonstrating the ability to read, write, and speak English (liberal nationalism). The revised citizenship test makes gestures toward respect for first-level diversity and inclusion of historically marginalized groups with questions such as, "Who lived in America before the Europeans arrived?" "What group of people was taken to America and sold as slaves?" "What did Susan B. Anthony do?" "What did Martin Luther King, Jr. do?" The election of the first African American president of the United States is a significant step forward. A more inclusive American solidarity requires the recognition not only of the fact that Americans are a diverse people, but also that they have distinctive ways of belonging to America.

• 1 For comments on earlier versions of this essay, I am grateful to participants in the Kadish Center Workshop on Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory at Berkeley Law School; the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism; and the UCLA Legal Theory Workshop. I am especially grateful to Christopher Kutz, Sarah Paoletti, Eric Rakowski, Samuel Scheffler, Seana Shiffrin, and Rogers Smith.
• 2 Philip Gleason, "American Identity and Americanization," in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups , ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1980), 31–32, 56–57.
• 3 David Hollinger, "From Identity to Solidarity," Dædalus 135 (4) (Fall 2006): 24.
• 4 David Miller, "Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Theoretical Reflections," in Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracies , ed. Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 328, 334.
• 5 Charles Taylor, "Why Democracy Needs Patriotism," in For Love of Country? ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 121.
• 6 On the purpose and varieties of narratives of collective identity and membership that have been and should be articulated not only for subnational and transnational, but also for national communities, see Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• 7 Jürgen Habermas, "Citizenship and National Identity," in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy , trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1996), 500.
• 9 Edward Rothstein, "Connections: Refining the Tests That Confer Citizenship," The New York Times , January 23, 2006.
• 10 See http://www.uscis.gov/files/nativedocuments/100q.pdf (accessed November 28, 2008).
• 11 Habermas, "The European Nation-State," in Between Facts and Norms , trans. Rehg, 118.
• 12 Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition , ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
• 13 8 U.S.C., section 1423 (1988); In re Katz , 21 F.2d 867 (E.D. Mich. 1927) (attachment to principles of Constitution implies English literacy requirement).
• 14 Act of Mar. 26, 1790, ch. 3, 1 Stat., 103 and Act of Jan. 29, 1795, ch. 20, section 1, 1 Stat., 414. See James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship , 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 239–243. James Madison opposed the second requirement: "It was hard to make a man swear that he preferred the Constitution of the United States, or to give any general opinion, because he may, in his own private judgment, think Monarchy or Aristocracy better, and yet be honestly determined to support his Government as he finds it"; Annals of Cong. 1, 1022–1023.
• 15 8 U.S.C., section 1427(a)(3). See also Schneiderman v. United States , 320 U.S. 118, 133 n.12 (1943), which notes the change from behaving as a person attached to constitutional principles to being a person attached to constitutional principles.
• 16 Internal Security Act of 1950, ch. 1024, sections 22, 25, 64 Stat. 987, 1006–1010, 1013–1015. The Internal Security Act provisions were included in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, ch. 477, sections 212(a)(28), 241(a)(6), 313, 66 Stat. 163, 184–186, 205–206, 240–241.
• 17 Gerald L. Neuman, "Justifying U.S. Naturalization Policies," Virginia Journal of International Law 35 (1994): 255.
• 18 David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 25.
• 19 Ibid., 25–26.
• 20 On the civic-ethnic distinction, see W. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); David Hollinger, Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995); Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
• 21 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 216.
• 22 See Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
• 23 Miller, On Nationality , 122–123, 153–154.
• 24 Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 12. In his earlier book, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1981), Huntington defended a "civic" view of American identity based on the "political ideas of the American creed," which include liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, and private property (46). His change in view seems to have been motivated in part by his belief that principles and ideology are too weak to unite a political community, and also by his fears about immigrants maintaining transnational identities and loyalties – in particular, Mexican immigrants whom he sees as creating bilingual, bicultural, and potentially separatist regions; Who Are We? 205.
• 25 Huntington, Who Are We? 31, 20.
• 26 Christian Joppke, "The Evolution of Alien Rights in the United States, Germany, and the European Union," Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices , ed. T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001), 44. In 2000, the German government moved from a strictly jus sanguinis rule toward one that combines jus sanguinis and jus soli , which opens up access to citizenship to non-ethnically German migrants, including Turkish migrant workers and their descendants. A minimum length of residency of eight (down from ten) years is also required, and dual citizenship is not formally recognized. While more inclusive than before, German citizenship laws remain the least inclusive among Western European and North American countries, with inclusiveness measured by the following criteria: whether citizenship is granted by jus soli (whether children of non-citizens who are born in a country's territory can acquire citizenship), the length of residency required for naturalization, and whether naturalized immigrants are permitted to hold dual citizenship. See Marc Morjé Howard, "Comparative Citizenship: An Agenda for Cross-National Research," Perspectives on Politics 4 (2006): 443–455.
• 27 Charles Taylor, "Shared and Divergent Values," in Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism , ed. Guy Laforest (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), 183, 130.
• 28 Horace M. Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924), 114–115.
• 29 Michael Walzer, "What Does It Mean to Be an 'American'?" (1974); reprinted in What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience (New York: Marsilio, 1990), 46.
• 30 Charles Taylor, "Democratic Exclusion (and Its Remedies?)," in Multiculturalism, Liberalism, and Democracy , ed. Rajeev Bhargava et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 163.
• 31 The differences in naturalization policy are a slightly longer residency requirement in the United States (five years in contrast to Canada's three) and Canada's official acceptance of dual citizenship.
• 32 See Irene Bloemraad, Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

What Does it Mean to be an American? Reexamining the Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship

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How have immigration and citizenship changed in the U.S.

Throughout the colonial period, migration to the American continent was an open process. The desire to create permanent settlements prevented the creation of immigration restrictions during the 17th and 18th centuries. It wasn’t until after America became its own independent nation that it began to grapple with issues of citizenship and immigration.

Who is an American?

From the beginning, America was an experiment. Never before had a nation been created from such a heterogeneous population. Individuals like Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur described the “American” in 1782 as European or the descendant of a European, which resulted in a “strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country.” Crèvecoeur explained that it was common to find families where the “grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations… Here [in America] individuals of all nations are melted into a new race whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.” [1] While Crèvecoeur may have been impressed by the sheer “heterogeneity” of the American family, it was clear that it was characterized by purely European ancestry. The earliest immigration and naturalization laws would reflect a desire to protect the relationship between whiteness and American identity.

The very first census and naturalization law emerged in the United States in the same year: 1790. Moreover, they both shared a commonality: the word “white.”

The first census recorded males heads of households, free white males over the age of sixteen, free white males under the age of sixteen, free white females, all other free persons (by sex and color), and slaves. Additionally, the Constitution gave congress the power to establish a uniform naturalization system that manifested in the Naturalization Act of 1790. According to this Act, only “free white person[s]” of good character who had resided in the U.S. for two years could become citizens of the United States. [2] Though it clearly restricted citizenship to others of European ancestry, the Founding Fathers considered this an open immigration policy.

From 1790 through the passage of the 14th Amendment (which established birthright citizenship), whiteness would define the limits of American citizenship. Additionally, for decades, no non-white immigrant could become a naturalized citizen of the United States. It was only until the 1940s that persons of Asian origin could become eligible for naturalized citizenship.

The Naturalization Act was modified again in 1795, and in 1798—each time increasing the residency requirement for citizenship. 1798 also saw the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts. These Acts, which were passed under a Federalist administration, were designed to restrict free speech, and made it easier for the government to deport foreigners. President John Adams supported these laws because of concerns he had about French radicalism penetrating the United States. Under the assumption that foreigners brought radicalism and disquiet, these laws also made it harder for new immigrants to vote.

19th Century

The first half of the 19th century was relatively quiet in relation to immigration and citizenship milestones. However, there were two that would have a significant impact on American history: the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and the Dred Scott decision (1857). The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American war. Under the terms of the treaty, Mexico ceded the territories of present-day New Mexico, Nevada, California, and part of Utah to the United States. In return, the United States would pay Mexico $15 million dollars, and would bestow U.S. citizenship to the Mexican citizens in the regions that had just been ceded. There was uproar about the incorporation of millions of Mexican nationals into the folds of American citizenship (since citizenship was still limited to whites).

While the United States was embroiled in conflict with Mexico, Dred Scott, a slave, sued for his freedom. Scott’s master was a surgeon, and Scott was forced to accompany him during some of his travels. In the course of these travels, he visited Illinois (a free state) and the Wisconsin territory. Scott sued because he believed that his residence in a free state had freed him. After about ten years of appeals, his case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision was read in March 1857. Rather than simply state that Scott was a slave, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney stated in the majority opinion that blacks were not citizens, and could not sue. Cementing that the rights and privileges of citizenship were reserved for white Americans.

In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act. The Page Act signaled a shift in American immigration policy. Rather than define who could come in to the United States, this act sought to define who could not come to the United States. The Page Act—often neglected in the study of American immigration laws—was, in many ways, a precursor to the more frequently studied Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. After the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, anti-Chinese hostility rose throughout the U.S. but became much more visible in the West Coast. Chinese laborers, who had been instrumental to the completion of the rail, were now seen as foreign competition for scarce jobs.

The Page Act prevented the immigration of anyone from “China, Japan, or any Oriental country” who was coming into the United States for contract labor. It also sought to ban single women from these countries from entering the United States because it was feared these women were entering the U.S. for immoral purposes (like prostitution). The Act, therefore, was justified as something to protect American families and homes by eliminating coolie labor competition (thereby protecting an American standard of living) and preventing prostitutes from seducing American men and introducing foreign diseases to the nation.

The Chinese Exclusion Act followed the Page Act, in 1882, which was the first immigration law to target individuals because of race. It excluded Chinese laborers, but did not prevent wholesale immigration of Chinese to the U.S. It did allow for exceptions for “qualified” immigrants. However, since the Act excluded “skilled and unskilled laborers” and those in the mining industry, it meant that very few Chinese were actually allowed to enter. This Act was renewed in 1892 as the Geary Act and remained in effect until 1943 when wartime conditions (specifically, the fact that the U.S. was allied with China) justified the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act and subjected Chinese Immigration to a quota limit.

20th Century

In the 20th century, Immigration Acts (1903, 1906, 1917, 1918) and Naturalization Acts (1906) continued to circumscribe the limits of American identity. These immigration acts declared those with certain diseases inadmissible, and created an Asiatic Barred Zone (1917). From the Page Act through 1918, the focus was on the type of immigrants entering the United States—hence, an era of “qualitative” immigration restriction. This would change, in 1924 with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, or the Immigration Act of 1924, and would move the U.S. into an era of quantitative restriction. [3]

In the 1920s, William Dillingham, a Vermont Senator, introduced the quota system to restrict immigration. According to his original suggestions, the U.S. would issue 350,000 new visas per year at a quota of 3% of the nationalities present in the 1910 census. President Wilson opposed it, but President Harding passed it when he was elected. In 1924, when the law needed to be reviewed, the quota system was simply adjusted. For the Johnson-Reed Act, the quota system was based on 2% of the population of the nationalities present in the 1890 census. This was an explicit attempt to preserve U.S. racial homogeneity, as the 1890 census would have fewer individuals from Southern and Eastern Europe—the people of which most Americans considered members of distinct and inferior races.

Though the Johnson-Reed Act did not impose quotas on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere (due in large part to agribusiness demands in the American Southwest), it was clear that immigrants from Mexico, in particular were not desirable. When the Depression reached its nadir, individuals of Mexican ancestry—whether citizen or not—were targeting with much of the same hostility that the Chinese experienced in the late 19th century.

However, rather than simply restrict Mexican immigration, Americans recognized that their solution was right across the border. Using rhetoric that suggested that all Mexicans were immigrants, many states embarked on a massive deportation campaign referred to euphemistically (and erroneously) as “repatriation” (since approximately 60% of those deported were American citizens). The desire or acceptance of Mexicans in the United States hinged upon labor demands. When World War II pulled America out of the Great Depression, suddenly, Mexican labor was crucial again and led directly to the Bracero Program.

In 1952, the Immigration and Nationality Act (or McCarran-Walter Act) was passed. This act upheld the national origin quotas, but also ended Asian exclusion. The decision to retain immigration quotas was based on concerns about communist infiltration and the threat of communist immigrants to the foundations of American society. The quotas in the McCarran-Walter Act were set at one-sixth of one percent of each nationality’s population in the 1920 census. It continued with the tradition of excluding Western Hemisphere nations form the quota system. The Act also focused on family reunification and prioritized immigrants with special skills. Which are policies that remain to this day.

Selected Suggested Readings

Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction , New York: Vintage Books, 1986.

Eithne Luibheid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America , Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

• ↑ Letters from an American Farmer.
• ↑ [1] , Library of Congress.
• ↑ [2] , Office of the Historian.

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02 American National Identity in a Globalized World as a Topic in the Advanced EFL-Classroom

In order to make an issue as complex and controversial as that of ‘national identity’ teachable in the advanced EFL-classroom, it has to be reduced to exemplary aspects and illustrated with concrete examples. Therefore, I will suggest an appropriate “Course Opener,” briefly survey the historical unfolding of the American identity concept in order to provide teachers with the necessary background knowledge, and then suggest two teaching units, the first of which traces some major developments by means of “classic” texts, whereas the second deals with the crucial issue of whether a shared language is a prerequisite for a shared identity.

Opening the Course

Oh, say can you see By the dawn’s early light What so proudly we hailed At the twilight’s last gleaming

is rendered as

Amanece:­ ¿lo véis a la luz de la aurora Lo que tanto aclamamos la noche al caer? Sus estrellas, sus franjas flotaban ayer, En el fiero combate en señal de victoria. 1

The History of American Identity

Thomas Nast, “The American River Ganges,” Harper’s Weekly, 30 September 1871, http://www.yale.edu/glc/archive/1106.htm .

• the question as to which and how many immigrants are to be admitted to the U.S. and how they are to be assimilated has been and still is of decisive importance for America’s national identity, and that
• in the course of its history, America’s national identity has always oscillated between the unum and the plures , the unifying power of a shared creed and the diversifying tendencies of many ethnicities.

At present, both the revival of ethnicity and the concurrent doubts as to the salience of the creed have led to what some diagnose as a crisis of nationality, and it is against this background that Huntington advances his controversial thesis. For him “the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers” provided the unifying element for all later immigrant groups, who adopted the key elements of that culture, namely the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a ‘city on a hill.’ 20

• a creedal America , lacking its historic cultural core, and united only by a common commitment to the principles of the American Creed;
• a bifurcated America , with two languages, Spanish and English, and two cultures, Anglo-Protestant and Hispanic;
• an exclusivist America , once again defined by race and ethnicity and that excludes and/or subordinates those who are not white and European;
• a revitalized America reaffirming its historic Anglo-Protestant culture, religious commitments, and values and bolstered by confrontations with an unfriendly world;
• some combination of these and other possibilities. 21

It would be interesting to speculate on which of these identities will result from the combined onslaught of a growing stream of Hispanic and Asian immigrants who bring other cultures and languages, the erosive impact of cosmopolitan intellectuals who reject the concept of ‘nation’ as obsolete, the leaders of global corporations who want to profit from the dismantling of national borders, and militant multiculturalists who jeer at the notion that an immigrant society should even try to achieve cultural unity. And it would be fascinating to join in the quarrel about whether Huntington is right when he argues that these developments endanger the coherence of the U.S. and jeopardize its future as a liberal democracy and that only a revival of a civic patriotism on a religious basis can stop the ongoing disintegration. 22 Such speculations, however, are beyond the limits of the EFL-classroom.

Unit 1: A Historical Survey by Means of Central Texts

He is neither an European, nor the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. […] He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.

And answering his question “What, then, is the American, this new man?” he maintained that most immigrants wanted to forget the oppression, religious persecution, and poverty from which they had fled and that their attachment to their home country was limited to “the knowledge of the language” and “the love of a few kindred.” He argued that they speedily forgot their roots according to ubi panis ibi patria and turned into ‘Americans.’ In his view, Americans were created through a metamorphosis , a radical transformation effected by a new geographical and social environment, the shedding of “all [their] ancient prejudices and manners,” and the adoption of a new orientation resulting from a “new mode of life,” a “new government,” and a “new rank.” For him, immigrants became Americans “by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater,” and it was upon American soil, personified as a nourishing Earth Mother, that “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.” 23

“The Ford English School Graduation Ceremony,” Peter Freese, ed. From Melting Pot to Multiculturalism: E pluribus unum? – Resource Book. (München: Langenscheidt, 2005), 88.

The “Melting Pot” exercises were dramatic in the extreme: A deckhand came down the gang plank of the ocean liner, represented in canvas facsimile. “What cargo?” was the hail he received. “About 230 hunkies,” he called back. “Send’em along and we’ll see what the melting pot will do for them,” said the other and from the ship came a line of immigrants, in the poor garments of their native lands. Into the gaping pot they went. Then six instructors of the Ford school, with long ladles, started stirring. “Stir! Stir!” urged the superintendent of the school. The six bent to greater efforts. From the pot fluttered a flag, held high, then the first of the finished product of the pot appeared, waving his hat. The crowd cheered as he mounted the edge and came down the steps on the side. Many others followed him, gathering in two groups on each side of the cauldron. In contrast to the shabby rags they wore when they were unloaded from the ship, all wore neat suits. They were American in looks. And ask anyone of them what nationality he is, and the reply will come quickly, “American!” “Polish-American?” you might ask. “No, American,” would be the answer. For they are taught in the Ford school that the hyphen is a minus sign. 25

The Anglo-Saxon is the representative of two great ideas, which are closely related. One of them is that of civil liberty, […] The other […] is that of a pure spiritual Christianity […] these are the forces which, in the past, have contributed most to the elevation of the human race, and they must continue to be, in the future, the most efficient ministers to its progress. It follows, then, that the Anglo-Saxon […] sustains peculiar relations to the world‘s future, is divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother‘s keeper. […] Does it not look as if God were not only preparing in our Anglo-Saxon civilization the die with which to stamp the peoples of the earth, but as if he were also massing behind that die the mighty power with which to press it? [In the near future the world] will enter upon a new stage of its history – the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled […]. 29

Or they can add a passage from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), in which he deplored the admission of immigrants of inferior racial stock and predicted America’s ethnic suicide:

God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. […] And of all our race he has marked the American people as His chosen Nation finally to lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all profit, glory, happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world‘s progress, guardians of its righteous peace.” 31

But even without these additions, the basic selection offers material for a discussion of almost all the crucial aspects of America’s identity and, moreover, provides the desirable transfer value concerning parallel problems in present-day Germany.

Unit 2: The Language Issue

• maintained bilingual education with native-language instruction continued alongside English,
• transitional bilingual education with native-language instruction being gradually phased out,
• English-only education, sometimes with ‘structured immersion’ programs in which the level of English is geared to the students’ comprehension (US-English 37 ), and
• bilingual education instructing English-speaking and non-English-speaking children in both languages (English Plus 38 ).

“Mexifornia Driver Licence,” http://lighthousepatriotjournal.wordpress.com/2006/06/27/california-responds-to-forest-fires

The situation differs from state to state. In California, for example, proliferating Spanish-language bill-board are triggering increasing resistance in conservative quarters; and the influential “Save Our State” lobby fights against the ‘invasion’ by foreigners, and extremely xenophobic documents like this driving license 42 are being circulated in the Internet:

[B]ilingualism has not worked out as planned; rather the contrary. Testimony is mixed, but indications are that bilingual education retards rather than expedites the movement of Hispanic children into the English-speaking world and that it promotes segregation more than it does integration. It nourishes self-ghettoization, and ghettoization nourishes racial antagonism. […] Using some language other than English dooms people to second-class citizenship in American society. […] The bilingual campaign has created both an educational establishment with a vested interest in extending the bilingual empire and a political lobby with a vested interest in retaining a Hispanic constituency. […] bilingualism is an elitist, not a popular, movement […] institutional bilingualism remains another source of the fragmentation of America, another threat to the dream of “one people.” 45

The bilingualism issue has always been mainly an English-Spanish problem, but today a large majority of Hispanic parents want their children to learn English as fast as possible. In his moving autobiographical book Hunger of Memory (1982), the Chicano intellectual Richard Rodriguez delivers a brilliant plea for learning English as a prerequisite for cultural integration; and in his bestseller The Americano Dream: How Latinos Can Achieve Success in Business and in Life (1998), the successful Latino entrepreneur Lionel Sosa defines the mastery of English as the necessary requirement for economic success:

[…] it is essential for Latinos dealing with Anglo businesses to speak the same language. By this I don’t mean just being fluent in the language of business—English. I mean understanding those subtleties that are part of any communication, things that are implied or left unsaid, a kind of code that can be learned only by acute observation and practice. 46

1  Both the original text and the Spanish version of “nuestro himno” are available in Peter Freese, ed., Viewfinder Special – Teacher’s Book (München: Langenscheidt, 2008), 377– 79, and audio clips of parts of both versions can be found on the accompanying Audio CDs, CD 2, Nos. 25 and 26. Under the search word <Francis Scott Key> the Internet offers portraits, historical paintings, and a facsimile of the original manuscript, which can be used as additional teaching tools. 2    See, e.g., the article “Bush says anthem shouldn’t be sung in Spanish” in the Seattle Times , 29 April 2006 http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/ nationworld/2002960428_anthem29.html, and many other newspaper articles which are easily available on the Internet when one uses the search word <nuestro himno + Bush>. 3    See the website http://www.stroebele-online.de/suchen/129925.html?searchshow=deutschlandlied , from which the Turkish version can be downloaded as an audio file.

4  Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 274.

5 “Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen,” Der Spiegel , 40 (2 October 2006): 49.

6  See Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? America’s Great Debate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). This book is also available in both an American and a British paperback edition.

7   Philip Gleason, “American Identity and Americanization,” in Stephan Thernstrom, ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass., and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 31.

8  Quoted in Forrest Church, “The American Creed,” The Nation , 16 September 2002; here quoted from http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020916/church .

9  As quoted in the entry on “William Tyler Page” in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyler_Page .

10  Further relevant cartoons are reprinted and analyzed in Peter Freese, “Between Assimilation and Nativism: Popular Expressions of the Changing Concepts of American Identity,” in Negotiations of America’s National Identity , ed. by Roland Hagenbüchle and Josef Raab in cooperation with Marietta Messmer (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1999), vol. II, 248–71. This essay is also available in Peter Freese, Teaching ‘America’: Selected Essays (München: Langenscheidt-Longman, 2002), 51–77.

11  The text of this essay, which Kallen would later extend into his more comprehensive study Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea (1956), is available on the informative website http://home.apu.edu/~rgeib/edu-526/melting-pot-v-salad-bowl/

12  Philip Gleason, “American Identity and Americanization,” 46.

13  Quoted in Forrest Church, “The American Creed.”

14  Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream,” in Peter Freese, ed. The American Dream: Humankind’s Second Chance? Viewfinder New Edition (München: Langenscheidt, 2005 and ff.), 23, lines 121f.

15  In a speech delivered in 1938 to the Augustana Historical Society, which was published in 1952 in an abridged version in Commentary .

16  Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: From the Old World to the New (London: Watts and Co., 1953), 3.

17  The relevant literature is legion. Some influential books are Dinesh D’souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: The Free Press, 1991; as paperback, with a new introduction by the author, New York: Vintage Books, 1992); Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper & Row, 1990; as a paperback New York: Harper Collins, rpt. 1991); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1992 and ff.); Rick Simonson and Scott Walker, eds. The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy (Saint Paul: The Graywolf Press, 1988) [a decidedly multicultural companion piece to E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987 and ff.; as a paperback, ed. by Pat Mulcahy. New York: Vintage Books, 1988). – For an interesting survey of the fuzzy notion of ‘multiculturalism’ see also “Multiculturalism in Education,” http://www.start-at-zero.com/papers/multiculturalism/ , and for its often faddish application to EFL-teaching see Peter Freese, “The Chances and Limits of ‘Intercultural Understanding’ in the Advanced EFL-Classroom,” Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 33, no. 3 (2000): 247–63; rpt. in Peter Freese, Teaching ‘America’: Selected Essays (München: Langenscheidt-Longman, 2002), 11–30.

18  For details see Peter Freese, “Universality vs. Ethnocentricity, or; the Literary Canon in a Multicultural Society,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 44, no. 2 (1996): 155–70, and the literature referred to.

19  See Janice Radway, “What’s in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, 20 November, 1998,” American Quarterly 51, no. 1 (1999): 1–32.

20  Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? America’s Great Debate , xvii.

21  See ibid .

22  See, e.g. Jim Sleeper’s review, http://hnn.us/articles/4987.html , or Francis Fukuyama’s comments, http://www.slate.com/id/2101756.

23  All quotations from the reprint in Peter Freese, ed., From Melting Pot to Multiculturalism: E pluribus unum? Viewfinder New Edition (München: Langenscheidt, 2005 and ff.), 13–14.

24 Quoted from Peter Freese, ed., Israel Zangwill, “The Melting Pot” (München: Langenscheidt, 2 nd ed., 2006), 29.

25  This text is available in Peter Freese, From Melting Pot to Multiculturalism: E pluribus unum? – Resource Book (München: Langenscheidt, 2005), 88.

26  The relevant passage from Middlesex is available in Peter Freese, From Melting Pot to Multiculturalism: E pluribus unum? – Resource Book (München: Langenscheidt, 2005), 89.

27  See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., “America’s Influence: Out Ten Contributions to Civilization,” Atlantic Monthly 203 (March 1959): 67.

28  Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1963).

29  Rpt. in Peter Freese, ed., The American Dream: Humankind’s Second Chance? 41.

30 Rpt. in Peter Freese, ed., From Melting Pot to Multiculturalism: E pluribus unum? 26–27.

31  Rpt. in Peter Freese, ed., The American Dream: Humankind’s Second Chance? 44–45.

32  The widespread myth, cultivated by such national-socialist propagandists as Colin Ross, that German had almost become the official language of the United States, is not true. Karl J. R. Arndt, “German as the Official Language of the United States of America,” Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht, deutsche Sprache und Literatur 68, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 129–50, shows that this myth goes back to two events. (1) Seven years after the passing of the Constitution, German-American citizens from Virginia petitioned the Third Congress that all federal laws should be printed in 3,000 copies in German and English, but the House of Representatives rejected this request with a small majority. (2) There are vague reports that in the legislative assembly of Pennsylvania a petition for making German the official language narrowly failed.

33  See Richard L. Worsnop, “Bilingual Education,” The CQ Researcher 3, no. 30 (13 August 1993): 705.

34  Welcome to the United States: A Guide for New Immigrants (Washington: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, no date), available from http://bookstore.gpo.gov .

35  See Abigail M. Thernstrom, “Language: Issues and Legislation,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups , 619–29.

36 The contemporary situation is discussed in detail by Berndt Ostendorf, “Einwanderungsland USA: Zwischen NAFTA und Terrorismus,” Rat für Migration: Politische Essays zu Migration und Integration , 1 (2007), PDF/Ostendorf-Einwanderungsland-USA.pdf.

37  See http://www.us-english.org/ .

38  See http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ JWCrawford/engplus.htm.

39  The complete texts of the two laws are available under http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/72xx/doc7208/s2611.pdf and under http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-4437.

40  Material about the demonstrations on 1 May 2006, known as El Gran Paro Estadounidense, the Great American Boycott, or the Day Without Immigrants, can be found under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Boycott .

41  See the title story “Who Gets to Be an American?” and the polls in Time , 10 April 2006.

42  See under http://lighthousepatriotjournal.files.wordpress.com/ 2006/06/mexifornia-license.jpg.

43  See Charles Krauthammer, “In Plain English: Making It Official. Having a unifying language is a secret of America’s success. Why mess with it?” Time International , 12 June 2006, 74.

44   English Language Advocates , http://www.elausa.org/main/programs.htm. —John Micklethwait, “Oh, say, can you see?” The Economist , 11 March 2000, p. 13, points to the Californian Proposition 227 , “[which] replaced bilingual education, which around half the students with poor English were receiving, with crash courses in English. Bilingual education, originally invented as a way to steer funds to poor people in the southwest, has always produced disappointing results. It is now merely a sop to the teachers’ unions. Since bilingual education was banned in California about a year ago, test scores have risen. Even more tellingly, the students who were put on the English crash course or into mainstream classes are well ahead of those still stuck in bilingual ones.”

45  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr ., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society , 109 and 108ff.

46  Lionel Sosa , The Americano Dream: How Latinos Can Achieve Success in Business and in Life (New York: Plume Books, 1999), 105.

47  “Proposition 209: Text of Proposed Law,” http://Vote96.ss.ca.gov/Vote96/html/BP/209text.htm .

48  See Sue Anne Presley, “Texas Campus Attracts Fewer Minorities,” Washington Post , 28 August 1997, A01; also under http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/affirm/stories/aa082897.htm .

49  Cisneros’ text and excerpts from Rodriguez’ and Sosa’s books can be found in Peter Freese, ed., From Melting Pot to Multiculturalism . —An audio version of Cisneros’ texts as read by herself is available in the CDs accompanying Peter Freese, ed., Viewfinder Special , CD2, No. 34.

50  An annotated edition of Mohr’s story is available in Peter Freese, ed., New York Stories (München: Langenscheidt, 1998 and ff.), 103–22.

51   The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N was so successful that Rosten soon followed it with a sequel, The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N .

52   The set of Civics Flash Cards (Washington: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, no date) is available from http://bookstore.gpo.gov .

Suggested Citation

Essay: A Multicultural Nationalism?

Cross-national group loyalties can neither be wished away or erased. Yet the idea of the American nation is worth defending against multicultural attack. Herewith some ground rules for a culturally diverse nation.

by T. Aleinikoff

December 10, 2001

The twentieth century is closing with a pessimistic assessment of America's continued dedication to its national motto, E Pluribus Unum . Multiculturalism, bilingual education, and record levels of immigration are said to have fractured America. In response, nativists want to cut immigration sharply and establish English as the official language. The Commission on Immigration Reform-Barbara Jordan's last act of public service-has called for a new Americanization movement to assimilate new immigrants. Meanwhile, multiculturalists continue to assail assimilation as illegitimately "hegemonic," and cosmopolitans say that we should gladly accept our growing diversity and recognize that in this age of "transnationalism" many people will cross borders so easily that they will establish ties and allegiances to more than one country. Neither multiculturalists nor cosmopolitans lose much sleep over the fate of the nation-state or are overly concerned about preserving a strong American national identity.

I want to stake out a different position in this debate. Contrary to the nativists, the increasing and resilient diversity-the polyethnism-of the United States is a current and future fact. Multiple subnational and cross-national group loyalties can be neither wished away nor erased. Yet the idea of the nation-of the American nation-is worth defending against multicultural and cosmopolitan attack. A progressive American nationalism must be forward-looking, welcoming an America becoming rather than bemoaning an America lost. It is not enough to say, as some liberal assimilationists propose, that we should seek unity in commitment to a set of timeless civic values, including the value of diversity. America is an open-ended proposition. We cannot simply expect newcomers to assimilate to our culture, but must accept that they will change it. This view translates into policy recommendations-I will call them "ground rules"-intended to foster a nation comfortable with cultural diversity and culturally diverse groups loyal to the nation. Immigration policies ought to be forthrightly based on national interests-but once admitted, immigrants must be accepted as full participants in the making of America.

The Past as Present

Today's controversies are an eerie echo of the debate over immigration and assimilation that gripped the nation in the opening years of the century. Henry James, touring New York City in 1906 after nearly a quarter century in Europe, visited Ellis Island-"the first harbour of refuge and stage of patience for the million or so of immigrants knocking at our official door." The scene was overpowering to James. He wrote that it brought home to the observer "the degree in which it is his American fate to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien." James himself now felt alien in his native land, as if the newcomers had taken "settled possession" and natives had lost it-"the implication of which, in its turn, is that, to recover confidence and regain lost ground, we, not they, must make the surrender and accept the orientation." Despite his "sense of dispossession," he did not give up the vision of "some such close and sweet and whole national consciousness as that of the Switzer and the Scot."

What James found troubling, others found bracing. In widely read essays and books, Horace Kallen suggested a model of "cultural pluralism" to replace the idea of the melting pot. Writing in the Nation in 1915, Kallen challenged both the fact and wisdom of the assimilation of immigrants to Anglo-Saxon America. He argued that the very process of Americanization produced "dissimilation" by bringing to light "permanent group distinctions." What was needed was not unison-everyone "singing the old Anglo-Saxon theme 'America'"-but rather harmony, in which the older theme might well be dominant but nonetheless "one among many." Such themes, according to Kallen, were "ancestrally determined." In his famous phrase, we can change our politics, philosophies, and spouses, but we "cannot change [our] grandfathers." Thus, the task before America was to provide "conditions under which each may attain the perfection that is proper to its kind."

Intellectual and essayist Randolph Bourne took a third position. Although a scion of New England WASPdom, he had none of James's sense of dispossession. Like Kallen, he was enthralled by the possibilities presented by the immigration of new groups to America. But in his remarkable essay "Trans-national America," published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1916, Bourne depicted an understanding of American nationality more fluid and open than Kallen's. American culture and traditions had always been supplied by immigrants. "The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first immigrant" whose "predominance in America [is] little more than a predominance of priority." New groups that sustain and expand their cultures here add something distinct to America: "The foreign cultures have not been melted down or run together, made into some homogeneous Americanism, but have remained distinct but cooperating to the greater glory and benefit, not only of themselves but of all the native 'Americanism' around them."

Bourne noted the absence in the United States of the nationalist brutality occurring elsewhere in the world. The mix of groups that produced horrible bloodshed in Europe was "somehow non-explosive" in America. The United States has been witnessing, "however unappreciatively, . . . a thrilling and bloodless battle of Kulturs" that "has been played out peacefully here in the mind." Remarkably, America had achieved "a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed." As historian David Hollinger has noted, where Kallen stressed the autonomy and fixed identity of each ethnic group, Bourne saw a dynamic, open-ended interaction that would change both the immigrant and native cultures. The result would be "not a nationality, but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors."

"As long as we thought of Americanism in terms of the melting-pot," Bourne wrote, "our American cultural tradition lay in the past. It was something to which the new Americans were to be moulded. In the light of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future. It will be what we all together make out of this incomparable opportunity of attacking the future in a new key."

Has the world of James, Kallen, and Bourne returned? The same cleavages are visible today between nativists and cultural pluralists, between those who feel dispossessed and those who insist America is enriched by immigrants. But the idea of the United States as "a nation of immigrants" is now firmly established. When James wrote, the Statue of Liberty had not yet become our national symbol of immigration; Emma Lazarus's poem attracted little national attention until the 1930s. It was not until after the significant reductions in immigration brought about by the imposition of the National Origin Quota system in the 1920s that America could rewrite its national story to glorify its immigrant roots. That story is now taken for granted.

Today's discussion of immigration has also become linked to debates about multiculturalism. The result is that "Americanism" seems under challenge not just from new immigrant communities, but also from groups pressing "counter-hegemonic" agendas. To some, then, the threat of dispossession and balkanization appears greater today.

In addition, naturalization-once the mark of Americanization-is now controversial. Some are disturbed by the recent dramatic increase in citizenship applications, suggesting that immigrants have been seeking naturalization for the wrong reasons-either to exert their ethnic group's special interests or to maintain eligibility for welfare benefits. Republicans have also accused the Clinton administration of "dumbing down" standards and expediting naturalization for political gain.

Yet another distinctive development today is the rise of dual citizenship. Although immigrants naturalizing in the United States must take an oath renouncing citizenship elsewhere, that renunciation is not binding on the country of origin. Increasingly those countries are permitting their nationals to retain citizenship despite naturalization in the U.S. Furthermore, over the past three decades the Supreme Court has radically restricted the power of Congress to strip citizenship from U.S. citizens. Simply naturalizing in another country cannot be grounds for denationalization unless the U.S. citizen specifically intends to relinquish citizenship.

In light of these new conditions, the old strategies are not up to the task: the molding of a nation in a time of growing polyethnism. The right would have us return to a time when immigrants were nearly all white and were eager to abjure their allegiances to failing monarchies in order to join an experiment in republicanism. But the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Improvements in communication and transportation, economic integration fostered by free trade agreements, and large flows of people back and forth between democracies have produced settled immigrant communities here with close ties to home countries. Dominicans in the United States-both resident aliens and naturalized and native-born citizens-will continue to return regularly to the island, to visit, bring back food items, and perhaps to vote. The United States, as Arjun Appadurai, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, has noted, is a place where "people come to seek their fortunes but are no longer content to leave their homelands behind." No amount of old-style Americanization will make these multiple ties and connections vanish. So the conservative agenda cannot succeed.

But liberals too may be wrong when they assume, based on past history, that assimilation is a foregone conclusion. There is a difference this time around. The waves of immigration early in this century largely came to a halt with the enactment of the discriminatory legislation of the 1920s. There is no such likelihood today. Even if efforts to pass some restrictions do succeed, more than 500,000 new immigrants will probably continue to arrive each year. The number of aliens seeking naturalization will also likely remain high. By becoming citizens, they can immediately sponsor spouses and children who now are on long waiting lists to gain lawful residence in the United States. Perhaps the American assimilation machine will continue to function smoothly. New immigrants are learning English at a faster rate than earlier generations, as Geoffrey Nunberg has noted in these pages [" Lingo Jingo: English-Only and the New Nativism ," July-August 1997]. A recent survey of new immigrants sponsored by the National Science Foundation concludes that legal immigrants are, on average, better schooled than the native-born U.S. population. But the strong maintenance of immigrant ties to home countries may suggest a different kind of assimilation than in the past.

Some might not be concerned with whether or not assimilation is declining. Won't we all benefit, they may ask, from living among a collection of nations-with ties to all the peoples of the world-that happen to find a home within the traditional geographical boundaries of the U.S.? Appadurai sees the United States as "a free trade zone for the generation, circulation, importation, and testing of the materials for a world organized around diasporic diversity."

In fact, we would lose a great deal by giving up on the idea of the nation. Much recent writing discusses the coming of a borderless world, with free-flowing capital and labor and transnational communities. But for the foreseeable future, states will remain the loci of power; both self-government and the protection of individual rights depend almost entirely on states. Nonterritorial, transnational communities do not have armies, fire departments, passports, legislatures, or courts. One of the welcome developments of the late twentieth century, the spread of democratic self-rule, has been attained fully within the state structure. Loyalties to groups may well cross national boundaries, but court jurisdiction to enforce constitutional rights against discrimination based on national origin, race, or gender rarely does.

Furthermore, it is hardly clear that a weakening of national identity and state boundaries would foster a cosmopolitan spirit. In a discussion of the morality of immigration control, Michael Walzer writes that "Neighborhoods can be open only if countries are at least potentially closed. . . . To tear down the walls of the state is not . . . to create a world without walls, but rather to create a thousand petty fortresses." As national identity encourages us to look beyond those petty fortresses, so too it encourages us to look beyond the immediate demands of those alive today to the interests of future generations.

The New Assimilationism

The tensions are apparent: a growing transnational reality and yet strong justifications for the nation-state. Today as in the past, assimilationism proposes to resolve the dissonance. The traditional version seeks to mold new immigrants into an existing American stock, reasserting Western values and excluding people who do not abide by them. Another version of the melting pot recognizes that the later arrivals to the United States have had a significant impact on what it means to be American. According to this account, the various groups melt into a new alloy, distinct from each contributing group. Recently, critics have attacked this conception of the melting pot for not recognizing continuing group loyalties, and thus they have proposed new metaphors: America as a salad bowl, mosaic, or kaleidoscope.

In his recent book, Assimilation, American Style , Peter Salins seeks to revive assimilation as a goal of public policy, arguing that it is consistent with ethnic diversity. Properly understood, Salins says, assimilation means identification with and commitment to America and American ideals. It requires taking pride in the American idea (defined primarily as dedication to the principles of individual rights, liberty, equality, self-government, and the rule of law), learning English, and having a commitment to the Protestant ethic. Salins seeks to avoid both too strong a melting pot metaphor, which "exaggerates the degree to which immigrants' ethnicity is likely to be extinguished by exposure to American society," and the "profoundly insidious" cultural pluralist metaphors, which suggest "that the product of assimilation is mere ethnic coexistence without integration." His conclusions are that Americans should end affirmative action and bilingual education programs, combat illegal immigration, oppose reductions in legal immigration, and support naturalization.

Salins renders a service by saving assimilationism from the melting pot metaphor. But he is too quick to characterize multiculturalism in its worst light (the rhetorical move he attributes to opponents of assimilation). A multiculturalism that denies the legitimacy or wisdom of a national idea is mistaken, but a multiculturalism that informs the national idea makes a valuable contribution. For example, Salins writes that our "master myth" is America as "the land of new beginning," and he identifies immigrants as the central characters in this story. "As the land of the new beginning, America had no choice but to be made up of immigrants. That was the whole idea." But one might well ask where this myth puts slaves and their descendants and American Indians. They are apparently not part of the "whole idea," and this is exactly the point of a well-rendered multiculturalism.

Although Salins properly notes that American culture is a product of many influences and is under constant revision, he misses the dynamic relationship between those newly arriving and those already here. He says immigrants make a contract: They will be accepted as members if and when they learn English, affirm the American idea, and live up to the Protestant ethic, as if they can never hope to affect America and its traditions. We hardly note the immigrant roots of words our children speak as standard English, from schlep to salsa, macaroni to macarena. (Indeed, with no recognition of the irony, we identify English as the world's lingua franca!) Immigrants have lately also shaped our understanding of the Protestant ethic. Cubans in Miami, Iranians in Los Angeles, and Koreans in New York-few of whom are Protestant-have provided different models of hard work and success that are now being touted for native minority groups.

Salins thus repeats the old error of seeing America as fixed and placing the needed adjustment exclusively on the immigrant's side. A more accurate understanding pictures America as a contract under constant renegotiation. Bourne suggested as much: "America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it."

Permeability and the National Idea

Bourne identified two elements that were crucial to the "effective integration" of the various cultures meeting in the United States. The first was a cosmopolitan outlook, which included "an intellectual sympathy which is not satisfied until it has got at the heart of the different cultural expressions, and felt as they feel." The second was the end of prejudice against non-Anglo-Saxon cultures. These elements constitute a principle of mutuality, based on empathy and nondiscrimination. Mutuality is distinct from tolerance, which is a live-and-let-live concept that requires distance, sometimes privacy. Mutuality demands active engagement, learning about others in their own terms-not a suspension of judgment, but judgment based on information and interaction. Tolerance is a politics of peaceful coexistence; mutuality is a politics of recognition. Recognition changes the observer. This is the lesson and promise of multiculturalism that has gotten lost in the culture wars. Largeness of mind, in Clifford Geertz's terms, comes from seeing ourselves as a "case among cases, a world among worlds"; without this recognition of others, "objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham."

Mutuality moves us beyond assimilationism. But we need to stop short of the strong multiculturalism that, like Kallen, proclaims "permanent group distinctions." A second perspective must come into play: a principle of permeability, which insists on both the reality of group boundaries and the ability to cross them. An exclusively descent-based theory of group identity is no longer tenable. To a significant degree, group identity in modern America is volitional, the product of chosen affiliations as much as unchosen parentage. Scholars for some time have reported the "optional" nature of ethnic identity for white European Americans, documenting, in the words of Mary Waters, "the lack of equivalency between ethnic ancestry and identity." Census data show shifts in ethnic identification unexplainable by demographic change, such as the 255 percent increase from 1960 to 1990 in persons identifying themselves as American Indians. Even if we can't change our grandparents, we can and do choose which grandparents we recognize as endowing us with our national origin, ethnicity, religion, or other group membership.

The ethnic option, however, remains more available to whites than nonwhites, and deep ethnic and racial consciousness continues to pervade American culture and constrain choice. The ever-present racial divide shows the distance we must travel to a society where group boundaries become truly permeable. David Hollinger posits a "postethnic America"-a world in which "ethno-racial affiliations" would be "subject to revocable consent." The goal of postethnicity is not the destruction of group affiliations. Rather, it is "the renewal and critical revision of those communities of descent whose progeny choose to devote their energies to these communities even after experiencing opportunities for affiliating with other kinds of people." Hollinger's world may be the best contemporary rendering of Bourne's transnationalism. It describes an America where group identities persist but are more fluid than under Kallen's account of cultural pluralism.

The existence of mutually respecting groups gets us much but not all of the way there. The important question is how such groups interact. What is required is an identification with a whole beyond the parts. Henry James's yearning for a "close and sweet and whole national consciousness" need not be seen as either overly romantic or nativist. If one believes that the idea of the American nation is worth preserving, there must be a coming together, a common ground, for society's constituent parts. A cultural unity is not in the cards, and a mutual commitment to liberal political principles including diversity-although important-produces a thin unity that may be little more than an agreement to disagree, tolerance without mutuality. What the unum has a right to ask of the pluribus , to use Lawrence Fuchs's figure, is that groups identify themselves as American. To be sure, there may be significant disagreement over what it means to see oneself as an "American." But the central idea is that a person be committed to this country's continued flourishing and see himself or herself as part of that ongoing project. The allegiance, the common identification, need not be exclusive, but it must be paramount.

Here, then, is a strategy of integration for a new century. It values attachment to the nation, and respects mutuality and permeability. The survival of subnational communities, many with significant economic and cultural ties to countries of origin, is not just a fact-it is a fact that America can live with and profit by. An American nationalism that respects principles of mutuality and permeability can fit the society that America will become in the next century.

Ground Rules

The task at hand is to develop policies that foster a nation at peace with its constituent groups and groups that identify with the nation. Immigration to the United States is not a right, and it ought to be regulated in a manner that best serves the economic and social interests of the nation while respecting values of family unification and protection of refugees. Here, too, Bourne got it about right: "It would be folly to absorb the nations faster than we could weave them. We have no duty either to admit or reject. It is purely a matter of expediency. What concerns us is the fact that the strands are here. We must have a policy and an ideal for an actual situation." With these considerations in mind, here are some ground rules for a progressive nationalism.

First, we have a right to control our borders, and it is appropriate for the federal government to devote substantial resources to doing so. Continued public support for legal immigration depends on a serious commitment to stop illegal immigration. Complete control of the border is not possible at a price this country is willing to pay, but enforcement can be improved. Recent increases in border patrol staffing are a good start.

Second, we need a national reexamination of appropriate levels of legal immigration, shorn of the usual shibboleths from the left and the right. There is nothing magic about the current number of legal immigrants granted entry each year. As a recent blue-ribbon panel of the National Academy of Sciences found, immigration is a net economic plus for the United States as a whole, but there are costs to immigration and they are borne disproportionately by lower-wage workers and a few geographical regions. The federal government should contribute funds to offset the medical and educational costs faced by communities with large concentrations of newcomers. We should also reconsider what kinds of immigrants we admit. It is difficult to justify an admissions category for unskilled labor, and it borders on the perverse to continue to add to a ten-year waiting list of brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens. Paying more attention to skills and placing less weight on family relationships-perhaps through a "point system," as Canada has used for some time-ought to be on the table.

Third, we must resist a growing tendency to harden the line between citizens and immigrants. Policies that tighten the circle of membership have two perverse effects. They make the integration of immigrants more difficult, and they encourage resident aliens to naturalize for instrumental reasons rather than identification with America. National policy must recognize immigrants as "citizens in training," affording them the means of a productive and healthy life in the United States. Until recently, permanent resident aliens were eligible for most jobs, opportunities, and benefits in the United States, the central exceptions being voting, jury service, and federal civil service employment. Last year's welfare law, however, terminated most means-tested benefits for permanent resident aliens. Society has a right, if not a duty, to provide for full members first, but immigrants are not exactly guests. They are close family members of U.S. citizens, skilled workers filling important jobs, refugees fleeing persecution, and applicants for naturalization. In daily life, resident immigrants are largely indistinguishable from citizens; they work, attend PTA meetings, join houses of worship-and pay taxes. In the recent budget agreement, Congress reversed the unconscionable provisions of the welfare law that took away Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Medicaid from immigrants who had been receiving benefits. (The goal of welfare reform-fostering participation in the workforce-could hardly apply to the elderly and disabled beneficiaries of such programs.) But Congress did not restore food stamps to needy immigrants already in the country, nor did it alter rules that will prospectively bar permanent resident immigrants from participation in social safety net programs. These harsh rules ought to be repealed.

Fourth, public policies should pursue the goal of a nation of English speakers. A single language does not guarantee civil peace, but it can help sustain a common nationality, enable groups to understand each other better, and make markets national in scope. But there is no need to designate English as the "official language" of the United States, because nearly all children or grandchildren of immigrants are fluent English speakers-no less today than earlier in our history. Restricting public business to English would be an ugly gesture of exclusion.

Finally, wishing away or seeking to eliminate cultural differences is not a productive response to polyethnism. To be sure, we ask allegiance of newcomers to the nation, but the nation must welcome them in a way that fosters their allegiance. Bourne wrote that integration and dedication to the American project could only come when no group felt that "its cultural case is being prejudged." This demands a politics of recognition, not a politics of group-blindness. It is simply wrong to lay the fracturing of America at the feet of immigrants. This is the problem with resurrection of the term "Americanization"; it seems to promise cultural unity once immigrants agree to acculturate. Our cultural differences result not from newcomers refusing to become Americans, but rather from citizens who have different ideas about what being American means.

We live in tender times, when assertions of subnational or transnational affiliations are too frequently read as disloyalty and claims about the value of the nation-state are too frequently deemed nativist. We would do well to heed Bourne's call for an open-minded and optimistic view of America. "The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great American democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun," he wrote. "Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it will have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto encompassed." That confidence ought to inform our view of immigration and our country.

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The Law That Made Puerto Ricans U.S. Citizens, yet Not Fully American

The jones act was part of a legal patchwork that bolstered commercial ties to the island but treated residents as foreigners.

Pro-statehood demonstration in San Juan, Puerto Rico, April 19, 1997. Photo courtesy of John McConnico/Associated Press.

By Charles R. Venator-Santiago | March 6, 2018

It has been 101 years since the citizens of Puerto Rico were collectively naturalized as U.S. citizens under the Jones Act of 1917. The act was meant to deal with the fact that Puerto Rico was neither a U.S. state nor an independent country. “It was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense,” said a 1901 Supreme Court decision.

But citizenship created contradictions, including that Puerto Rico still feels something less than fully American. Puerto Ricans cannot vote for the U.S. president when they live in the territory, but they can when they reside in one of the 50 U.S. states or the District of Columbia. And in crisis—notably during Puerto Rico’s 2017 bankruptcy, and the federal response to the devastation of the island by Hurricane Maria—the inequality of Puerto Rico is often exposed, and questions are asked again about the Jones Act.

Chief among them, what did the Jones Act actually do?

To understand the Jones Act, it is best to start with a clarification of what the law was not.

It was not the first Congressional statute conferring U.S. citizenship on persons born in Puerto Rico. It was not the last such statute. And the law did not change Puerto Rico’s status as a U.S. territory. But the Jones Act, in its collective extensive of American citizenship to Puerto Rico residents, proved to be a crucial glue, cementing enduring relationships between residents of Puerto Rico and of the United States.

In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States annexed Puerto Rico. The terms of the annexation were outlined in the Treaty of Paris peace accords ratified in 1899. Unlike prior treaties of territorial annexation, the Treaty of Paris did not contain a provision extending or promising to extend U.S. citizenship to the inhabitants of Puerto Rico.

As documented in the so-called Red Book files (the official correspondence of the negotiations between the United States and Spain), President McKinley opposed granting citizenship to the “less civilized” non-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Puerto Rico and the other annexed Spanish territories. Instead, Section Nine of the Treaty invented a local “nationality” that barred island-born inhabitants from either retaining their Spanish citizenship or acquiring U.S. citizenship. This local nationality required Puerto Ricans to establish a new allegiance with the United States, while simultaneously barring their membership in the U.S. political community. It allowed the federal government to selectively rule Puerto Ricans as foreigners in a domestic or constitutional sense. However, the Treaty established that Congress could subsequently enact legislation to determine the civil and political status of Puerto Ricans.

In 1900, Congress enacted the Foraker Act, which established the island’s territorial status and affirmed the citizenship provision of the Treaty of Paris. Even though the United States had annexed Puerto Rico, Section Three of the Foraker Act treated Puerto Rico as a foreign territorial possession for purposes of imposing tariffs, duties, or taxes on merchandise trafficked between the island and the mainland. And Section Seven invented a Puerto Rican citizenship to describe the status of island-born Puerto Ricans. A year later, the Supreme Court affirmed Congress’ power to selectively rule Puerto Rico as a foreign territorial possession in a domestic or constitutional sense.

But the Puerto Rican citizenship invented for Puerto Rico clashed with various federal citizenship and nationality laws. For example, the prevailing passport law of the period limited the issuance of passports to U.S. citizens, so Puerto Rican merchants who sought to travel found themselves unable to acquire a U.S. passport. In response to this and other administrative problems created by the Puerto Rican citizenship, Congress in 1906 began to enact legislation granting individual Puerto Ricans the ability to acquire U.S. citizenship by traveling to the mainland and undergoing the prevailing naturalization process. In effect, Puerto Ricans were able to acquire citizenship individually, just like any other racially eligible immigrant. This was the first law granting Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship.

But it wasn’t enough. Between the enactment of the Foraker Act of 1900 and the Jones Act of 1917, Congress debated upwards of 30 bills containing citizenship provisions for Puerto Rico. Federal lawmakers supported the collective naturalization of the inhabitants of Puerto Rico for a wide array of reasons. Some in Congress were concerned that depriving Puerto Ricans of U.S. citizenship would allow neighboring Latin American countries to describe the United States as a colonial empire. Other lawmakers believed that depriving Puerto Ricans of U.S. citizenship was bad for business, and still others thought that preventing Puerto Rico inhabitants from acquiring a U.S. citizenship would foster disloyalty and threaten the U.S. military or strategic interests in Puerto Rico.

And as members of Congress considered the issue, they decided that the risks of rectifying these problems were low. Most importantly, policymakers agreed that that extending U.S. citizenship to Puerto Rico did not bind Congress to grant statehood to the island.

While the Jones Act wouldn’t pass until 1917, the legislative record shows that Congress had effectively decided to collectively naturalize the residents of Puerto Rico three years earlier, before the U.S. entered World War I. But they still didn’t propose making Puerto Rico a state because a majority of lawmakers opposed the admission of a state primarily inhabited by non-white citizens.

Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, the debate centered on whether the residents of the island would acquire U.S. citizenship via individual or collective naturalization. This reflected a larger, longer-term discussion over whether Puerto Rico’s future should be one of independence from the U.S., or of an autonomous entity within the U.S., or of statehood.

By 1914, both parties in Puerto Rico believed that the extension of citizenship to Puerto Rico was imminent. The leadership of the Partido Unión , who advocated either territorial autonomy and/or independence, sought to establish a pact supporting the extension of U.S. citizenship with the leadership of the Partido Republicano , which advocated for statehood as a way of demanding more democratic reforms to the prevailing territorial government. Unlike the supporters of the Partido Republicano , who believed that the collective naturalization of Puerto Ricans could serve as a bridge to statehood, the leadership of the Partido Unión argued that individual citizenship would provide more civil liberties for Puerto Ricans and would be compatible with either territorial autonomy or independence. Federal lawmakers took these debates into account when drafting the citizenship provision of the Jones Act.

The Jones Act of 1917 amended the Foraker Act of 1900 to address a number of lingering problems in the local government. It also included a citizenship provision that incorporated the local partisan debates over the manner in which citizenship was extended to Puerto Rico under the terms of Section Five.

The first clause of this citizenship provision granted individual Puerto Rican citizens a choice between retaining their status quo or acquiring U.S. citizenship. Only 288 Puerto Ricans chose to retain their Puerto Rican citizenship. The second clause collectively naturalized island-born Puerto Ricans residing in the island who chose not to retain their Puerto Rican citizenship. Two additional clauses granted different types of alien residents the ability to acquire U.S. citizenship by following simple legal procedures within various time frames. In the end, most Puerto Rican citizens residing in the island acquired U.S. citizenship by simply doing nothing.

Yet, while the Jones Act collectively naturalized the inhabitants of Puerto Rico, it did not change the island’s territorial status. Puerto Rico remained an unincorporated territory or a foreign territorial possession for citizenship and constitutional purposes. Because persons born in Puerto Rico were born outside of the United States, they could only acquire a derivative form of parental or jus sanguinis citizenship.

For constitutional purposes, persons born in Puerto Rico were not citizens at birth, but they were naturalized citizens like the child of any U.S. citizen born in a foreign country. This meant that only the children of citizens born in Puerto Rico could acquire U.S. citizenship. The children of aliens, and of some mixed marriages, born in Puerto Rico could not acquire U.S. citizenship at birth. Even though the Jones Act granted U.S. citizenship to the majority of the inhabitants of Puerto Rico, it also created thousands of stateless residents of the island.

In order to address this problem, Congress subsequently amended the citizenship provision of the Jones Act on three occasions over the next two decades. The 1927 amendment made it possible for the remaining 288 Puerto Rican citizens and other aliens residing in the island to naturalize through an expedited process. In 1934, Congress introduced a territorial form of birthright citizenship permitting the children of Puerto Ricans born in the island to acquire U.S. citizenship at birth.

In addition, this amendment extended the Cable Act of 1922 to Puerto Rico and began to eliminate the application of the doctrine of Coverture in Puerto Rico. The doctrine of Coverture stipulated that a U.S. woman acquired the citizenship of her husband as a direct result of marriage. The 1934 amendment allowed U.S. citizen women residing in Puerto Rico to retain their U.S. citizenship after marrying an alien. A subsequent 1938 amendment retroactively naturalized Puerto Rico-born residents. Taken together, these corrective amendments sought to collectively naturalize island-born Puerto Ricans who either did not acquire U.S. citizenship at birth or lost it along the way.

Two years later, Congress replaced the Jones Act with the Nationality Act of 1940. It extended a statutory form of birthright or jus soli citizenship to Puerto Rico that was anchored in the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. According to the Nationality Act of 1940, birth in Puerto Rico was now tantamount to birth in the United States. Since 1940, Congress has enacted several laws that affirm the Nationality Act’s citizenship provisions for Puerto Rico and grant all persons born in the island U.S. native-born citizenship status.

But even though the Nationality Act settled questions of citizenship, it did not deal with the larger question of the island’s political future.

Even though the Jones Act citizenship was fairly short-lived (1917-1940), it was important historically. The Jones Act was not only the first law that collectively naturalized the majority of Puerto Ricans residing on the island, but also it was the first law that collectively naturalized the inhabitants of a territory that was not meant to become a state of the United States. Although Congress had previously collectively naturalized individual Native American nations, and later all Native Americans, it had not treated the land they inhabited as territories or potential states for constitutional purposes.

To this extent, the Jones Act represented an advance for American citizenship: Never before had the country extended citizenship to an annexed, albeit unincorporated, territory that was not considered a state-in-the-making. Finally, the Jones Act citizenship was an early affirmation of a permanent and irrevocable relationship between Puerto Ricans and the United States. Once Congress clothed Puerto Ricans with U.S. citizenship, it could not strip them of this right.

Read as a whole, this patchwork of citizenship laws illustrate the contradictory U.S. territorial law used to rule Puerto Rico for more than a century. On the one hand, the United States continues to govern Puerto Rico as an unincorporated territory—and that is a foreign possession in a domestic or constitutional sense. Simultaneously, federal citizenship laws treat Puerto Ricans as members of the U.S. political community.

In part, these territorial laws create a two-storied home. Citizens residing in the first floor—the mainland—enjoy the full legal and political rights of membership in the U.S. political community, whereas citizens residing in the basement—or Puerto Rico—live with a second-class status determined by the laws and policies Congress and the Supreme Court extend to the island.

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Background Essay: Rights, Equality, and Citizenship

Directions:

Keep these discussion questions in mind as you read the background essay, making marginal notes as desired. Respond to the reflection and analysis questions at the end of the essay.

Discussion Questions

• Is suffrage a right or a privilege?
• Is suffrage necessary for a person to be considered a citizen?
• Is legal equality necessary for liberty?
• Can a person be free if not equal under the law?

Introduction

What is equality? What is the connection between equality and citizenship? The principle of equality means that all individuals have the same status regarding their claim to natural rights and treatment before the law. Our definition of citizenship has expanded throughout American history, most often through claims to our natural equality. The story of women’s suffrage is an example of the patience, determination, and sacrifice necessary to carry out long term change within a constitutional order. The word, suffrage, meaning “the right to vote,” originated with the Latin suffragium, meaning “a vote cast in an assembly, or influence given in support of a candidate.”

The Declaration of Independence asserts as a self-evident truth that all people were created equal. Something “self-evident” is a plain truth that does not need to be proven through reasoned deduction from other principles. It is apparent immediately (or self-evident) to any reasonable observer that there are no natural differences among people which give one person or group of people (such as kings and queens) the power to rule over others without their consent. All have equal rights and dignity.

In his Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), as part of an argument against slavery, English philosopher John Locke theorized that all people are born free: “The natural liberty of man [human beings] is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man [humans], but to have only the law of nature for his rule.”

Almost a century later, Samuel Adams quoted Locke regarding the natural liberty of man, agreeing that all people are created equally free; there are no natural rulers.

Equality and Natural Rights

Further, the Declaration asserts that it was “self-evident” that human beings were “endowed by their Creator” with certain rights. In the Founders’ view, since rights come from God, the creator of our human nature, an individual’s natural rights could be neither given nor taken away. They are, to use the Declaration’s word, unalienable

The term “natural” here refers to human nature. Natural rights are those rights humans have at birth, including life, liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and others. No person or government can “give” an individual these rights; they are part of what it means to be human. One can know natural rights are natural because they can all be exercised without requiring anything from others. Natural rights are sometimes called negative rights for this reason. They are also called inherent rights because they inhere in humanity: they are an essential characteristic of human nature.

Painting depicting Thomas Jefferson and his fellow committee members presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress. Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull, 1819. United States Capitol.

“Nobody Can Give More Power Than He Has Himself”

The assertion of inherent rights remains the foundation for the principle of equality. In the same argument against slavery, Locke reasoned:

“This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a man’s preservation, that he cannot part with it…for a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another, to take away his life, when he pleases. Nobody can give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own life, cannot give another power over it.”

In other words, Locke maintained, individual lives and the rights that flow from human nature belong to the Creator

Again, Adams echoes Locke in The Rights of the Colonists (1772):

“It is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defense of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate [make void] such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.”

Because humans are born with inherent rights, these rights are the same under any political system. An unjust government— including a tyrannical majority—may abuse or abridge the people’s inherent rights, but can never remove them, since these rights are essential to human nature.

But not all rights are inherent. Political rights, for example, may vary through times and places, because, unlike natural rights, they are given by government. Many political rights, including voting and serving on juries, have been expanded to more groups of people throughout American history through claims to natural and inherent equality. Although people use the term “rights” to refer to them, these rights conferred by civil society could more accurately be considered privileges—abilities that can be justly given or denied by government under certain conditions. For example, a driver’s license will be granted if a person passes a driving test, but can be revoked for drunk driving or too many accidents. A person can lose the ability to serve on a jury and to vote if convicted of a felony. People have inherent rights by nature, but must have permission in order to exercise a privilege.

Samuel Adams by John Singleton Copley, about 1772; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The U.S. Constitution

The Declaration asserted two more principles that were self-evident: that in order to secure our rights, “governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that when a government repeatedly abuses the peoples’ rights, the people have the power and the duty to “alter or abolish” it and create a new government that will better protect their rights and ensure their safety and happiness.

After a time under the Articles of Confederation, many observers recognized the need for a more powerful central government, giving rise to a convention of the states in 1787. The resulting new Constitution’s opening lines “We the people…ordain and establish this Constitution” outlined a government of limited powers, recognizing the sovereignty of the individual and protecting the natural right of the people to govern themselves.

With this right to self-government come many responsibilities. In fact, it could be argued that citizenship is more about responsibilities than about rights. Individuals are free to make choices about their government and direct their own lives within a system that guarantees the equal right (and responsibility) of others to do the same. The Constitution reflects the sovereignty of the individual, by limiting the national government to certain enumerated powers, leaving everything else to the states and to the people.

Theory vs. Practice

Despite the bold proclamation, the principle of equality was not meaningfully reflected in the lives of all people during the early republic. Enslaved persons and Native Americans were unable to exercise their inherent rights and were not afforded political rights. The Constitution sanctioned slavery both explicitly and implicitly: it gave Congress the power to ban the international slave trade, but mandated a 20-year waiting period before doing so. The Constitution also allowed slave states to count three-fifths of their enslaved population toward the calculation of those states’ representation in Congress. Though this compromise prevented slave states from having even greater power (they had wanted to count their entire slave populations), the policy tolerated the practice of owning and trading in human beings. Though many of the leading Founders were convinced of the evils and injustices of slavery, they did not end it in their lifetimes.

Women also lacked legal equality. Enslaved women and Native American women were denied all of their rights. Among white women, and depending on varying state laws, widows had some political rights and could own property, but married white women had no legal status at all under the traditional doctrine of coverture. The English jurist William Blackstone explained this doctrine in 1765. Through marriage, husband and wife become one person under the law: “the  very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything.”

The Constitution left voting requirements to the states, and so states could adopt different policies. Some states did away with property requirements but still required voters to be taxpayers. Some states required a tax to vote, or a poll tax. Vermont became the first state to grant universal male suffrage in 1777. New Jersey allowed property-owning white women and free African Americans to vote for a short time before that right was revoked in 1807.

Extending Equality

The Founding generation did not perfectly live out its ideal of equality. However, it provided a foundation for greater expansion of liberty through time. Through sustained effort and commitment over time, Americans have persistently appealed to Founding documents and their root principles to insist on changes that gradually recognized and protected both natural and civil rights.

The women’s suffrage movement provides a model for implementing social and legal change to better align institutions with principles of liberty, justice, and equality. The pathway for change was long. Seventy-two years passed between the Declaration of Independence assertion of self-evident and equal natural rights and the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, where women planned to “discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman.” In most parts of America in 1848 it was considered improper—even illegal—for women to speak in public meetings. Now they were convening one. It took another seventytwo years of struggle for women to achieve a constitutional amendment—the Nineteenth in 1920—protecting their right to vote, and guaranteeing their opportunity to participate more fully in the political process.

The Constitution contains the means to institute the meaningful changes required to bring it more in line with the governing principles on which it was founded. One of these methods is the amendment process, which is slow but effective. Reformers committed to equality and justice endured hardship and sacrifice to implement the amendment process to end slavery, and to grant the vote to black men, women, and people ages 18-21. Other methods of aligning the law with these principles, particularly equality, result from the system of checks and balances. The Supreme Court in 1954 checked the power of majorities in states when it ruled segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Congress has also invoked its enumerated powers to protect legal equality with laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Appeals to equality continue today as Americans debate the meaning of the principle as it applies to undocumented immigrants, the unborn, LGBTQ community members, disabled people, and many others.

REFLECTION AND ANALYSIS QUESTIONS

• On what basis did John Locke and Samuel Adams claim that slavery was unjust?
• List four truths the Declaration of Independence asserts are self-evident.
• What is a natural right?
• Should voting be considered a right or a privilege? Explain your choice.
• Do you agree with Locke that there are limits to what we can consent to? Does consent make any action good? Explain why or why not
• Some say that natural rights do not exist because so many governments have abused them throughout history. (Indeed, the Founders argued that the British King and Parliament were abusing theirs.) They say that if a right cannot be exercised effectively, it does not exist. Evaluate this assertion.
• The Founding generation did not fully live out its ideal of equality. Which ideals do people fail to live up to in modern times?
• Principles: equality, republican/representative government, popular sovereignty, federalism,inalienable rights
• Virtues: perseverance, contribution, moderation, resourcefulness, courage, respect, justice

Essay on Nationality

Students are often asked to write an essay on Nationality in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Nationality

What is nationality.

Nationality is like a big group that people belong to because of where they were born or their family’s background. It’s like being part of a country’s big family. This family has its own flag, language, and traditions. When you’re born, you usually join the same nationality as your parents.

The Importance of Nationality

Nationality is important because it gives people a sense of belonging and identity. It’s like wearing your home country’s sports team jersey and feeling proud. It connects people and creates a community with shared customs and beliefs.

Can Nationality Change?

Yes, nationality can change. If someone moves to a new country and decides to stay there forever, they can become a part of that new country. It’s like switching teams but in a way that is about where you live and consider your home.

Nationality and Culture

Nationality often shapes the food we eat, the songs we sing, and the stories we tell. It’s like a special flavor that makes each country unique. This includes holidays, clothes, and even the way people greet each other!

250 Words Essay on Nationality

Nationality is like being part of a big family with people from the same country. It’s the bond that people share because they were born in the same place, or because the country’s laws say they belong there. It’s like being on a team and wearing the same jersey.

Importance of Nationality

Nationality is important because it gives us a sense of who we are and where we come from. It’s our identity on the world map. Just like our names tell who we are, our nationality tells us about our roots. It can also bring people together, making them feel like they are a part of something big.

Rights and Duties

Having a nationality also means you have certain rights and duties. Rights are like special gifts from your country, like going to school or getting protection. Duties are like chores for the good of your country, such as following laws and respecting others.

Celebrating Nationality

People celebrate their nationality in many ways. They sing songs, dance, and have special days like Independence Day. These celebrations are like big birthday parties for the country where everyone remembers their history and culture.

Nationality is a special part of who we are. It’s about belonging to a country and sharing its stories, traditions, and future. It’s a thread that ties people together, giving them a place in the world’s big family.

500 Words Essay on Nationality

Nationality is a word that tells us about the country where a person was born, or the country they belong to. It’s like being part of a big family. Just like your family has a last name, your nationality tells people which country is your home. For example, if you were born in Japan, your nationality is Japanese. It’s like a tag that comes with your birth or sometimes it’s given to you when you become a part of a new country.

Why is Nationality Important?

Nationality is important because it gives people a sense of belonging. It’s like being on a team. You cheer for your country in sports, you celebrate your country’s holidays, and you learn about your country’s history in school. It also means you have certain rights, like being able to live in that country, go to school, and get help from the government if you need it.

Flags and Symbols

Each country has its own flag and symbols. When you see your country’s flag, it makes you feel proud. It’s like wearing your school’s uniform – it shows which team you’re on. The flag is very special because it stands for your country’s history and what it believes in. For example, the stars on the American flag represent the 50 states.

Language and Culture

Your nationality also connects you to a language and a culture. If you’re Spanish, you might speak Spanish and celebrate traditions like the Running of the Bulls. Culture includes food, music, clothes, and stories that have been shared in your country for a long time. It’s like the secret recipes your family has or the songs you sing together.

Yes, nationality can change. If someone moves to a new country and decides to make that place their home, they can become a citizen of that new country. It’s like if you moved to a new school and started wearing a new uniform. You become part of a new team, but you can still remember and love the old one.

Respecting All Nationalities

It’s very important to respect everyone’s nationality. Just like you wouldn’t want someone to be mean about your family, you shouldn’t be mean about someone’s country. Every nationality has its own special things to be proud of. When you meet someone from a different country, it’s like making a new friend who can teach you about their home.

Nationality is a way of showing where you come from and which country you call home. It’s about being part of a community with its own flag, language, and traditions. While nationality is an important part of who we are, it’s also important to remember that every nationality deserves respect. Just like every person in a school is different but still part of the same big family, each nationality makes the world a more interesting and diverse place.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on National Pride
• Essay on Fashion Industry
• Essay on My Vision As A Teacher

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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