American

In 1995, at the beginning of the last week of August, on the afternoon of an inhumanly hot and intolerably humid day, I arrived at Newark Airport to live in the United States. I was twenty two years old and about to start as a graduate student at Princeton. I have been here more or less the whole time since. I spent six years on an F-1 Visa while getting my PhD. After that, I lived and worked in Tucson for seven years. My conception of what counts as an inhumanly hot day changed. During that time I was on an H1-B Visa sponsored by my employer, the University of Arizona. Subsequently, I was granted Permanent Residency—a Green Card—through marriage. In 2009 I moved to North Carolina. My conception of what counts as an intolerably humid day changed. I am an immigrant to this country. I have made my life here. My two children are Americans. And now, as of yesterday, so am I.

Q1. What is the supreme law of the land?

• The Constitution

When I sat down to write something about becoming a citizen, I was immediately tangled up in a skein of questions about the character of citizenship, the politics of immigration, and the relationship of individuals to the state. These have all been in the news recently; perhaps you have heard about it. These questions ask how polities work, how they impose themselves upon us, how power is exercised. They are tied up with deep-rooted principles, claims and myths—as you please—about where authority comes from and how it is or whether it ever has been justly applied. These are not easy matters to understand in principle or resolve in practice. Nor can they simply be dismissed. But I am not writing this note because I want to take on these questions, even though I acknowledge them. I am writing this because I do not want to forget how I felt yesterday.

Q12. What is the “rule of law”?

• Everyone must follow the law.
• Leaders must obey the law.
• Government must obey the law.
• No one is above the law.

If you are a legal permanent resident of the United States, you apply to be naturalized as a citizen by filling out Form N-400. Part 1 of the form asks for information about your eligibility for becoming a citizen. Parts 2 and 3 ask about your name, address, country of birth, and also identifying information about you including your race and ethnicity. In Part 4 you list everywhere you have lived in the past five years. In Parts 5 and 6 you tell about your marital history and your children. Part 7 is your employment and schooling. In Part 8 you document all the times you have been outside the United States in the past five years even though, as a Lawful Permanent Resident, the state already knows this about you. Frankly, it already knows all the other stuff about you, too. Every time you enter the country you are photographed and fingerprinted.

Q14. What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful?

• Checks and balances
• Separation of powers

Part 9 consists of thirty seven questions designed, in the main, to establish whether you are a person of good moral character and also whether you understand, assent to, and are willing to swear to each component of the Oath of Allegiance to the United States. After filling out the form you go to a biometrics appointment where your identity is once again confirmed and you are once again fingerprinted and photographed. Then your citizenship interview is scheduled. At the interview you are assessed by a USCIS Officer on several points, including whether you can speak, read, and write English at a basic level. They also check once again whether you understand and are willing to take the Oath of Allegiance that will make you a citizen. Finally, you must also pass the Civics Test.

Q24. Who does a U.S. Senator represent?

• All people of the state

The test has one hundred questions. At the interview you are asked up to ten of them at random and you must get six right. There is a Civics Booklet and Study Guide for the test. It is eighty five pages long. Its index is also a list of all one hundred questions and their acceptable answers. The test covers the Constitution, the branches of government, some elements of U.S. history and geography, the rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizens, and national symbols and holidays.

Q50. Name one right only for United States citizens.

• Vote in a federal election
• Run for federal office

Some of them are not what you would call tricky. For example, Q90. What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States? (The Atlantic Ocean.) Others have the character of trivia questions. Q7. How many amendments does the Constitution have? (Twenty seven.) Q66. When was the Constitution written? (1787.) But others are not trivial at all. I think many Americans would get them wrong if asked. And I feel confident every one of the fifty or so people who took the Oath with me on Friday knew them backwards and forwards. The distinction articulated in questions fifty and fifty-one, for example, eludes quite a number of people who should know better.

Q51. What are two rights of everyone living in the United States?

• Freedom of expression
• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of assembly
• Freedom to petition the government
• Freedom of religion
• the right to bear arms

At the ceremony, everyone taking the Oath sat on one side of the room. Family members and guests all sat on the other side of the room, or stood at the back when they ran out of seats. We were assigned specific seats because at the end of the ceremony new citizens get their certificate of citizenship, and these must be handed out in the right order. We were reminded, in a nice moment of practical ordinary-language philosophy, that while the certificate was an important document, it was the moment of taking the oath that would make us citizens. On the way in we had to surrender our Green Cards, which I knew was going to happen but nevertheless gave me a small and unexpected jolt.

The ceremony room was the kind of place, if you are an academic like me, you might expect to be named “Salon C” or “Wabash Room” or “Sequoia East” and be the site of a sparsely-attended conference talk. The two main differences were the words stenciled on the slightly dropped ceiling, and the fact that the room was full up and alive with nervous energy. At the front of the room there was a large-screen TV. The person leading the ceremony—who, coincidentally, was the USCIS Officer who had interviewed me a couple of months ago—introduced himself and welcomed everyone. All the staff were dignified and low-key delighted. The ceremony opened with a two-minute video that consisted of Ken Burns effect pans over still images and with W.G. Snuffy Walden music underneath. The Statue of Liberty. Ellis Island. Immigrants arriving in the nineteenth century at various locations. And then photographs of the modern equivalents of those people. I began to worry that I might have something in my eye.

The room filled up. It looked just as you might imagine. Some people looked like me, which is to say a middle-aged Irish guy in a standard-issue blazer and tie. There was a guy from Ghana in an immaculate suit. A couple from Algeria held their baby son. A family from the Republic of the Congo had their three young sons sit in the guest area. The boys all wore identical red-white-and-blue check. A German man looked dapper in a lavender shirt. An Indian woman had a green and gold sari. A Chinese family all in a row. A Romanian delightedly offering to take pictures of anyone in need of a photo. A Mexican man in cream-colored linen. A Peruvian woman’s bold floral dress. A family whose two children were wearing tiny plastic Stars and Stripes cowboy hats. It looked like America.

Q63. When was the Declaration of Independence adopted?

• July 4, 1776

I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin represented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, immediately to my left, was from the United Kingdom. There were twenty seven countries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in particular was enormously, irresistibly moving. It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth—as you please—that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.

Q59. Who lived in America before the Europeans arrived?

• American Indians
• Native Americans

Q74. Name one problem that led to the Civil War.

• Slavery
• Economic reasons
• States’ rights

Q84. What movement tried to end racial discrimination?

• Civil Rights (Movement)

But isn’t it more complicated than that? You know as well as I do that it is. So much more complicated. So much more painful. So much more dangerous. So much more messed-up. I will think about and work on strands and threads of that impossible tangle tomorrow, just like I have thought about and worked on bits and pieces of it since I came here. But I will not forget this moment. I will not forget what it felt like.

Now all standing, we raised our hands and took the oath. Once we stopped speaking, we were citizens. We watched a two-minute congratulatory video from President Trump. Even though the video was short, you could see that, in his usual way, he was improvising and riffing around what was on his teleprompter. The result was that he said some odd-sounding things, like how we had U.S. citizenship “like no-one has ever had it before”. It did not matter. The video finished. We filed out of our seats in row order to get our certificate of citizenship. And that was the end.

Afterwards people milled about in the room, delighted, shaking hands, hugging one another. I hugged my daughter. I hugged my friends who had come down from New York at the last minute on an overnight bus to be there. I counted my blessings. There was a little staged area in the corner where people could pose for photographs against a backdrop. At the rear of the room, volunteers were set up and ready to register you to vote if you wanted. People were smiling and crying. Children were running around meeting one another. We were gently reminded that there was another ceremony due to start in twenty minutes.

Q95. Where is the Statue of Liberty?

• New York (Harbor)
• Liberty Island
• Also acceptable are New Jersey, near New York City, and on the Hudson (River).

A new line began to form outside.