citizenship history essay

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Why Study History? (1998)

In 2020, Peter N. Stearns revisited his “Why Study History? (1998)” essay with “ Why Study History? Revisited ” in Perspectives on History.

By Peter N. Stearns

People live in the present. They plan for and worry about the future. History, however, is the study of the past. Given all the demands that press in from living in the present and anticipating what is yet to come, why bother with what has been? Given all the desirable and available branches of knowledge, why insist—as most American educational programs do—on a good bit of history? And why urge many students to study even more history than they are required to?

Any subject of study needs justification: its advocates must explain why it is worth attention. Most widely accepted subjects—and history is certainly one of them—attract some people who simply like the information and modes of thought involved. But audiences less spontaneously drawn to the subject and more doubtful about why to bother need to know what the purpose is.

Historians do not perform heart transplants, improve highway design, or arrest criminals. In a society that quite correctly expects education to serve useful purposes, the functions of history can seem more difficult to define than those of engineering or medicine. History is in fact very useful, actually indispensable, but the products of historical study are less tangible, sometimes less immediate, than those that stem from some other disciplines.

In the past history has been justified for reasons we would no longer accept. For instance, one of the reasons history holds its place in current education is because earlier leaders believed that a knowledge of certain historical facts helped distinguish the educated from the uneducated; the person who could reel off the date of the Norman conquest of England (1066) or the name of the person who came up with the theory of evolution at about the same time that Darwin did (Wallace) was deemed superior—a better candidate for law school or even a business promotion. Knowledge of historical facts has been used as a screening device in many societies, from China to the United States, and the habit is still with us to some extent. Unfortunately, this use can encourage mindless memorization—a real but not very appealing aspect of the discipline. History should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society, and because it harbors beauty. There are many ways to discuss the real functions of the subject—as there are many different historical talents and many different paths to historical meaning. All definitions of history's utility, however, rely on two fundamental facts.

History Helps Us Understand People and Societies

In the first place, history offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave. Understanding the operations of people and societies is difficult, though a number of disciplines make the attempt. An exclusive reliance on current data would needlessly handicap our efforts. How can we evaluate war if the nation is at peace—unless we use historical materials? How can we understand genius, the influence of technological innovation, or the role that beliefs play in shaping family life, if we don't use what we know about experiences in the past? Some social scientists attempt to formulate laws or theories about human behavior. But even these recourses depend on historical information, except for in limited, often artificial cases in which experiments can be devised to determine how people act. Major aspects of a society's operation, like mass elections, missionary activities, or military alliances, cannot be set up as precise experiments. Consequently, history must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings. This, fundamentally, is why we cannot stay away from history: it offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives.

History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be

The second reason history is inescapable as a subject of serious study follows closely on the first. The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened—whether a shift in political party dominance in the American Congress, a major change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans or the Middle East—we have to look for factors that took shape earlier. Sometimes fairly recent history will suffice to explain a major development, but often we need to look further back to identify the causes of change. Only through studying history can we grasp how things change; only through history can we begin to comprehend the factors that cause change; and only through history can we understand what elements of an institution or a society persist despite change.

The Importance of History in Our Own Lives

These two fundamental reasons for studying history underlie more specific and quite diverse uses of history in our own lives. History well told is beautiful. Many of the historians who most appeal to the general reading public know the importance of dramatic and skillful writing—as well as of accuracy. Biography and military history appeal in part because of the tales they contain. History as art and entertainment serves a real purpose, on aesthetic grounds but also on the level of human understanding. Stories well done are stories that reveal how people and societies have actually functioned, and they prompt thoughts about the human experience in other times and places. The same aesthetic and humanistic goals inspire people to immerse themselves in efforts to reconstruct quite remote pasts, far removed from immediate, present-day utility. Exploring what historians sometimes call the "pastness of the past"—the ways people in distant ages constructed their lives—involves a sense of beauty and excitement, and ultimately another perspective on human life and society.

History Contributes to Moral Understanding

History also provides a terrain for moral contemplation. Studying the stories of individuals and situations in the past allows a student of history to test his or her own moral sense, to hone it against some of the real complexities individuals have faced in difficult settings. People who have weathered adversity not just in some work of fiction, but in real, historical circumstances can provide inspiration. "History teaching by example" is one phrase that describes this use of a study of the past—a study not only of certifiable heroes, the great men and women of history who successfully worked through moral dilemmas, but also of more ordinary people who provide lessons in courage, diligence, or constructive protest.

History Provides Identity

History also helps provide identity, and this is unquestionably one of the reasons all modern nations encourage its teaching in some form. Historical data include evidence about how families, groups, institutions and whole countries were formed and about how they have evolved while retaining cohesion. For many Americans, studying the history of one's own family is the most obvious use of history, for it provides facts about genealogy and (at a slightly more complex level) a basis for understanding how the family has interacted with larger historical change. Family identity is established and confirmed. Many institutions, businesses, communities, and social units, such as ethnic groups in the United States, use history for similar identity purposes. Merely defining the group in the present pales against the possibility of forming an identity based on a rich past. And of course nations use identity history as well—and sometimes abuse it. Histories that tell the national story, emphasizing distinctive features of the national experience, are meant to drive home an understanding of national values and a commitment to national loyalty.

Studying History Is Essential for Good Citizenship

A study of history is essential for good citizenship. This is the most common justification for the place of history in school curricula. Sometimes advocates of citizenship history hope merely to promote national identity and loyalty through a history spiced by vivid stories and lessons in individual success and morality. But the importance of history for citizenship goes beyond this narrow goal and can even challenge it at some points.

History that lays the foundation for genuine citizenship returns, in one sense, to the essential uses of the study of the past. History provides data about the emergence of national institutions, problems, and values—it's the only significant storehouse of such data available. It offers evidence also about how nations have interacted with other societies, providing international and comparative perspectives essential for responsible citizenship. Further, studying history helps us understand how recent, current, and prospective changes that affect the lives of citizens are emerging or may emerge and what causes are involved. More important, studying history encourages habits of mind that are vital for responsible public behavior, whether as a national or community leader, an informed voter, a petitioner, or a simple observer.

What Skills Does a Student of History Develop?

What does a well-trained student of history, schooled to work on past materials and on case studies in social change, learn how to do? The list is manageable, but it contains several overlapping categories.

The Ability to Assess Evidence . The study of history builds experience in dealing with and assessing various kinds of evidence—the sorts of evidence historians use in shaping the most accurate pictures of the past that they can. Learning how to interpret the statements of past political leaders—one kind of evidence—helps form the capacity to distinguish between the objective and the self-serving among statements made by present-day political leaders. Learning how to combine different kinds of evidence—public statements, private records, numerical data, visual materials—develops the ability to make coherent arguments based on a variety of data. This skill can also be applied to information encountered in everyday life.

The Ability to Assess Conflicting Interpretations . Learning history means gaining some skill in sorting through diverse, often conflicting interpretations. Understanding how societies work—the central goal of historical study—is inherently imprecise, and the same certainly holds true for understanding what is going on in the present day. Learning how to identify and evaluate conflicting interpretations is an essential citizenship skill for which history, as an often-contested laboratory of human experience, provides training. This is one area in which the full benefits of historical study sometimes clash with the narrower uses of the past to construct identity. Experience in examining past situations provides a constructively critical sense that can be applied to partisan claims about the glories of national or group identity. The study of history in no sense undermines loyalty or commitment, but it does teach the need for assessing arguments, and it provides opportunities to engage in debate and achieve perspective.

Experience in Assessing Past Examples of Change . Experience in assessing past examples of change is vital to understanding change in society today—it's an essential skill in what we are regularly told is our "ever-changing world." Analysis of change means developing some capacity for determining the magnitude and significance of change, for some changes are more fundamental than others. Comparing particular changes to relevant examples from the past helps students of history develop this capacity. The ability to identify the continuities that always accompany even the most dramatic changes also comes from studying history, as does the skill to determine probable causes of change. Learning history helps one figure out, for example, if one main factor—such as a technological innovation or some deliberate new policy—accounts for a change or whether, as is more commonly the case, a number of factors combine to generate the actual change that occurs.

Historical study, in sum, is crucial to the promotion of that elusive creature, the well-informed citizen. It provides basic factual information about the background of our political institutions and about the values and problems that affect our social well-being. It also contributes to our capacity to use evidence, assess interpretations, and analyze change and continuities. No one can ever quite deal with the present as the historian deals with the past—we lack the perspective for this feat; but we can move in this direction by applying historical habits of mind, and we will function as better citizens in the process.

History Is Useful in the World of Work

History is useful for work. Its study helps create good businesspeople, professionals, and political leaders. The number of explicit professional jobs for historians is considerable, but most people who study history do not become professional historians. Professional historians teach at various levels, work in museums and media centers, do historical research for businesses or public agencies, or participate in the growing number of historical consultancies. These categories are important—indeed vital—to keep the basic enterprise of history going, but most people who study history use their training for broader professional purposes. Students of history find their experience directly relevant to jobs in a variety of careers as well as to further study in fields like law and public administration. Employers often deliberately seek students with the kinds of capacities historical study promotes. The reasons are not hard to identify: students of history acquire, by studying different phases of the past and different societies in the past, a broad perspective that gives them the range and flexibility required in many work situations. They develop research skills, the ability to find and evaluate sources of information, and the means to identify and evaluate diverse interpretations. Work in history also improves basic writing and speaking skills and is directly relevant to many of the analytical requirements in the public and private sectors, where the capacity to identify, assess, and explain trends is essential. Historical study is unquestionably an asset for a variety of work and professional situations, even though it does not, for most students, lead as directly to a particular job slot, as do some technical fields. But history particularly prepares students for the long haul in their careers, its qualities helping adaptation and advancement beyond entry-level employment. There is no denying that in our society many people who are drawn to historical study worry about relevance. In our changing economy, there is concern about job futures in most fields. Historical training is not, however, an indulgence; it applies directly to many careers and can clearly help us in our working lives.

Why study history? The answer is because we virtually must, to gain access to the laboratory of human experience. When we study it reasonably well, and so acquire some usable habits of mind, as well as some basic data about the forces that affect our own lives, we emerge with relevant skills and an enhanced capacity for informed citizenship, critical thinking, and simple awareness. The uses of history are varied. Studying history can help us develop some literally "salable" skills, but its study must not be pinned down to the narrowest utilitarianism. Some history—that confined to personal recollections about changes and continuities in the immediate environment—is essential to function beyond childhood. Some history depends on personal taste, where one finds beauty, the joy of discovery, or intellectual challenge. Between the inescapable minimum and the pleasure of deep commitment comes the history that, through cumulative skill in interpreting the unfolding human record, provides a real grasp of how the world works.

Careers for History Majors

Through clear graphs and informal prose, readers will find hard data, practical advice, and answers to common questions about the study of history and the value it affords to individuals, their workplaces, and their communities in Careers for History Majors . You can purchase this pamphlet online at Oxford University Press. For questions about the pamphlet, please contact Karen Lou ( [email protected] ). For bulk orders contact OUP directly .

What You'll Learn with a History Degree

What do history students learn? With the help of the AHA, faculty from around the United States have collaborated to create a list of skills students develop in their history coursework. This list, called the "History Discipline Core," is meant to help students understand the skills they are acquiring so that they can explain the value of their education to parents, friends, and employers, as well as take pride in their decision to study history.

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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34 Citizenship

Richard Bellamy is Professor of Political Science at University College London (UCL), University of London.

Published: 02 September 2011
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Normative theorizing about citizenship has been dominated by three different models—the republican, the legal, and the liberal democratic—reflecting respectively the civic experiences of city republics, empires, and nation-states. The first two originated in ancient Greece and Rome. These provided the classical models of citizenship not only by belonging to the “classical” period of history but also in setting the terms of much later debate. The key contemporary debate surrounds whether we are witnessing the emergence of a fourth, cosmopolitan, model of citizenship appropriate to a global age, and how far it departs from these earlier three. Aristotle's Politics provides the canonical text of the Greek version of republican citizenship, with ancient Athens as the model. Legal citizenship has private interests and their protection at its heart. The sociologists T. H. Marshall and Stein Rokkan established what has become the standard narrative of the evolution of modern democratic citizenship. This article also discusses liberal democratic citizenship and cosmopolitan citizenship.

Normative theorizing about citizenship has been dominated by three different models—the republican, the legal, and the liberal democratic—reflecting respectively the civic experiences of city republics, empires, and nation states (Bellamy 2008 a : ch. 2). The first two originated in ancient Greece and Rome. As Pocock ( 1995 ) and Walzer ( 1989 ) have observed, these provided the classical models of citizenship not only by belonging to the ‘classical’ period of history but also in setting the terms of much later debate. However, from the seventeenth century onwards, these two models were gradually adapted and, to some degree, combined, to form a third model suited to the new socio-political reality of commercial and industrial nation states. The key contemporary debate surrounds whether we are witnessing the emergence of a fourth, cosmopolitan, model of citizenship appropriate to a global age, and how far it departs from these earlier three.

Republican Citizenship

Republican citizenship developed in the context of the ancient city states of Greece and Rome, with later republican writers tailoring these ideas to the commercial civic republics of the Renaissance and the republican states that emerged following the English, American, and French revolutions. Republican writers see liberty as a civic achievement that results from all citizens having an equal say in ruling the polity. However, they differ greatly over why and how such participation might be brought about and what the resulting liberty consists in.

Aristotle's Politics (335–323 bc ) provides the canonical text of the Greek version of republican citizenship, with ancient Athens the model. Aristotle regarded human beings as ‘political animals’ because it is in our nature to live in political communities—indeed, he contended only within a polis or city state could human potential be fully realized. However, he believed people played the roles appropriate to their natural station in life, with only some qualifying as politai or citizens. Though neither the qualifications Aristotle deemed appropriate for membership of this select group nor the duties he expected of them are regarded as entirely suitable today, they have cast a long shadow over the history of citizenship and their inner rationale still underlies much contemporary thinking.

To be a citizen of Athens it was necessary to be a male aged 20 or over, of known genealogy as being born to an Athenian citizen family, and to be a patriarch of a household, a warrior—possessing the arms and ability to fight, and a master of the labour of others—notably slaves. 1 So gender, race, and class defined citizenship, and many of the main later debates have turned on how far they continue to do so. As a result, large numbers were excluded: women, though married Athenian women were citizens for genealogical purposes; children; immigrants or ‘metics’—including those whose families had been settled in Athens for several generations, although they were legally free, liable to taxation, and had military duties; and above all slaves. It is reckoned that the number of citizens in Athens fluctuated between 30,000 and 50,000, while the number of slaves was of the order of 80,000–100,000. Therefore, citizenship was enjoyed by a minority, though a substantial one. Yet, this was inevitable, given the high expectations of citizens. For their capacity to perform their not inconsiderable citizenly duties rested on their everyday needs being looked after by the majority of the population, particularly women and slaves.

Aristotle described as citizens those who ‘rule and are ruled by turns’ (Aristotle, Pol. 1259 b 1). Though the duties involved differed between polities and even different categories of citizen within the same polity, at some level citizenship involved ‘the power to take part in the deliberative or judicial administration’ (Aristotle Pol. 1275 b 1). In Athens this meant at a minimum participating in the assembly, which met at least 40 times a year and required a quorum of 6,000 citizens for plenary sessions, and, for citizens aged over 30, doing jury service—again, a frequent responsibility given that juries required 201 or more members and on some occasions over 501. Though jury service was paid, jurors were chosen by lot from among those who presented themselves, to discourage both its becoming a regular income and jury packing. In addition, there were some 140 local territorial units of government, or demes , with their own agorai or assembly points for public discussion of local affairs and passing local decrees.

Meanwhile, many citizens could not avoid holding public office at some point. Apart from generals, who were elected by the assembly and could serve multiple terms if successful, public officers were chosen by lot, served for one or two years maximum, with key roles often rotated between office-holders. These devices aimed to increase the likelihood that all had an equal chance of exercising political power, with the short terms of office and the checks operated by the different bodies on each other ensuring this power was severely circumscribed. Yet, though there were no career politicians, citizenship itself, if one adds military service and participation in local affairs, was a fairly full occupation.

Athens was unusual among Greek city states in being so democratic. Indeed, Aristotle, who periodically resided in Athens but was not born there and so not an Athenian citizen, expressed a personal preference for systems that mixed democracy with aristocratic and monarchical elements. However, even in those systems that did so, citizenship remained fairly onerous. Like Plato, Aristotle esteemed the austere citizenship code of Sparta. By contrast to Athens, where the arts, philosophy, and leisure were much admired, Sparta emphasized military service above all else. Children were separated from their families aged 7, subjected to a rigorous training, and thereafter attached to a ‘mess’. Given they still had to attend the Assembly, Spartan citizens became even more permanent public servants than their Athenian counterparts. In fact, it was precisely their limited opportunities to develop private interests that Plato in particular so admired.

Aristotle acknowledged that such forms of citizenship were possible only in small states. That was important not just so everyone could have a turn at ruling and to keep the tasks of government sufficiently simple as to be manageable without a professional bureaucracy or political class, but also because it was only in smaller settings that the requisite civic virtues were likely to be fostered. Although the Athenians probably invented the idea of taking a vote to settle disagreements, unanimity was the ideal and most issues were settled by consensus—if need be following extended debate. Aristotle surmised that such concord or homonoia depended on a form of civic friendship among citizens that was likely only in tightly knit communities. Citizens must know each other, share values, and have common interests. Only then will they be able to agree on what qualities are best for given offices and select the right people for them, harmoniously resolve disputed rights, and adopt collective policies unanimously. Even so, agreement rested on citizens possessing a sense of justice, being temperate by exercising self-control and avoiding extremes, having a capacity for prudent judgement, being motivated by patriotism, so they put the public good above private advantage, and being courageous before danger, especially military threats. In sum, a citizen must belong not ‘just to himself’ but also to ‘the polis ’.

Though the Greek model of citizenship was the privilege of a minority, it provided a considerable degree of popular control over government. True, the Assembly and Council tended to be dominated by the high born and wealthy, while Aristotle's ideal of concord was often far from the reality, at least in Athens. There were persistent tensions between different classes and factions, with disagreements often bitter and personal, ending with the physical removal of opponents through ostracism and even their execution on trumped-up charges of treason. Nonetheless, in a very real sense those people who qualified as citizens did rule, thereby giving us the word democracy from the Greek dêmokratia or people ( dêmos ) rule ( kratos ). Unsurprisingly, Greek citizenship has appeared to many later thinkers as the epitome of a true condition of political equality, in which citizens have equal political powers and so must treat each other with equal concern and respect. They have viewed the trend towards delegating political tasks to a professional class of politicians and public administrators with foreboding, as presaging a loss of political freedom and equality, and lamented the—in their opinion—short-sighted tendency for ever more citizens to desert public service to pursue personal concerns. By contrast, critics of this model of citizenship argue that it was not so much an ideal as hopelessly idealized. In reality, it was doubly oppressive. On the one hand, it rested on the oppression of slaves, women, and other non-citizens. On the other hand, it was oppressive of citizens in demanding they sacrifice their private interests to service of the state. As we saw, the two forms of oppression were linked: citizens could dedicate themselves to public life only because their private lives were serviced by others.

Liberal thinkers have condemned these last features of Greek republican citizenship as potentially despotic (Constant 1819; Berlin 1969 ). They criticize not just the way non-citizens got treated as less than fully human, but also the demand for the total identification of citizens with the state, with all dissent seen as indicative of self-interest rather than an alternative point of view or valid concern. They castigate such regimes as both repressive and corrupt—not least in diverting all talent away from the private sphere of the economy on which the wealth of a society rests. Ironically, making the public sphere the main avenue of personal advancement did not prevent, but promoted, the abuse of power for private gain. They trace these problems to a flawed view of liberty that falsely links freedom with civic participation. Aristotle's defence of this linkage rested on a perfectionist account of human flourishing, with civic involvement a means to human self-realization, whereby individual and collective autonomy can be reconciled by subsuming private interests under the public interest. Many liberals reject such ‘positive’ conceptions of liberty as suggesting that human freedom lies in the pursuit of particular ends rather than in being free from interference to pursue one's personal good in one's own way. They claim freedom of this latter sort merely requires a just constitutional regime that limits the power of government to maximizing freedom from mutual interference and has no intrinsic link with democracy.

Both republican and imperial Rome offer important contrasts in these respects. The Roman republican model of citizenship is sometimes collapsed into the Greek model. But, while there are some similarities, there are also striking differences. Though classes existed in Greek society, including among those who qualified as citizens, the ideal of citizenship became classless with the aspiration to ‘concord’ a product of putting class and other private interests to one side. By contrast, the Roman republic was born of class discord and the struggle of the plebeians to obtain rights against the patricians. For the theorists of the Roman model—Cicero (44 bc ), the historians of the Roman republic and, drawing on them, Machiavelli (1513–17)—this ongoing class conflict gave politics and citizenship a much more instrumental character than the Greek model theorized by Aristotle. Roman citizens never possessed anything like the political influence of their Athenian counterparts. Despite the creation of Tribunes of the People, elected by a Plebeian Council, true power rested with the Senate. While entry to the Senate ceased to depend on rank around 400 bc , since it was composed instead of the popularly elected magistrates, it was dominated by the patricians—especially among the higher magistracy, particularly the Consuls who formed the executive. The slogan Senatus Populusque Romanus (‘The Senate and the Roman People’, frequently abbreviated to SPQR) suggested a partnership between the Senate and the people within the popular assemblies. In reality, Senate and people were always in tension, with the influence of the plebeians waxing and waning depending on their importance as support for different factions among the patricians.

Applying these ideas to Renaissance Florence, Machiavelli argued the Roman experience showed how the selfish interests of the aristocracy and the people could be restrained only if each could counter the other. The republic institutionalized such mutual restraint by ensuring no person or institution could exercise power except in combination with at least one other person or institution, so both could check and balance each other. The need to divide power in this way was elaborated by later republican theorists. It was a key feature of the city states of Renaissance Italy, especially Florence and Venice, which inspired Machiavelli's writings on the subject, and informed the constitutional debates of the English Civil War of the seventeenth century and the political arrangements of the Dutch republic into the eighteenth century. In the work of the American Federalists , especially Madison, the division of powers became a central element of the US Constitution (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay 1787–8).

Underlying this account was a distinctively realist view of citizenship, which would be more easily adaptable to modern democratic politics than the Greek view. Instead of viewing the private interest and the public interest as diametrically opposed, so that all elements of the first had to be removed from politics, the public interest emerged from the clash and balancing of private interests. Consequently, citizens had self-interested reasons to participate because they could ensure only that their concerns figured in any collective decisions so long as they took part and were counted. Philip Pettit ( 1997 ) and Quentin Skinner ( 1998 ) have argued that the neo-Roman version of republicanism rejects the ‘positive’, Aristotelian view of liberty as self-mastery for a ‘negative’ account of freedom as the absence of domination or mastery by another. Citizens need not identify their will with that of the polity; merely seek to ensure that government and the laws address the interests of all in an equitable manner through being obliged to ‘hear the other side’. This argument also differs from the liberal notion of liberty as freedom from interference in suggesting both that it is the capacity for arbitrary interference rather than interference per se that limits freedom, and in stressing that freedom is a civic rather than a natural condition. Liberty results from a political system where none is the master of others because all have an equal influence over how public policies are framed and implemented.

Legal Citizenship

As the Roman Republic became overlaid by the Empire, the link between citizenship and private interests underwent a dramatic change. Eligibility for Roman citizenship was at first similar to the criteria for Greek citizenship—citizens had to be native free men who were the legitimate sons of other native free men. As Rome expanded—initially within Italy, then over the rest of Europe and finally into Africa and Asia—two important innovations came about. First, the populations of conquered territories were given a version of Roman citizenship while being allowed to retain their own forms of government, including whatever citizenship status they offered. Second, the version of Roman citizenship given was of a legal rather than a political kind— civitas sine suffragio or ‘citizenship without the vote’. So, the Empire allowed dual citizenship, though it reduced Roman citizenship to a legal status. As a result, the legal and political communities pulled apart. The scope of law went beyond political borders and did not need to be co-extensive with a given territorial unit. To cite the famous case of St Paul—on arrest in Palestine, he proudly declared himself ‘a Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city’. But, not being in Tarsus, it was his additional status as a Roman citizen that allowed him to claim rights against arbitrary punishment, thereby escaping a whipping, and to ask for trial in Rome.

According to the Aristotelian ideal, political citizenship had depended on being freed from the burdens of economic and social life—in order both to participate and to ensure that public rather than private interests were the object of concern. By contrast, legal citizenship has private interests and their protection at its heart. Within Roman law, legal status belonged to the owners of property and, by extension, their possessions. Since these included slaves, a free person was one who owned himself. So conceived, as in many respects it remains to this day, law was about how we could use ourselves and our things and those of others, and the use they may make of us and our things. As the example of St Paul shows, the resulting privileges and immunities, including the right to sue and be sued in given courts, were far from trivial. However, that the rule of law can be detached from the rule of persons, in that those subject to it do not have to be involved in either its making or its administration, creates disadvantages as well as advantages. The advantage is that the legal community can, as we saw, encompass a number of political communities and hold their rulers and officers to account, thereby limiting their discretion to act against the law. Law can be universal in scope and extent, enabling millions of dispersed individuals to pursue their private interests by engaging and exchanging with each other across space and, through such legal acts as bequests, through time, without any direct contact. The disadvantage lies in these same citizens becoming the imperial subjects of the law's empire, who are ruled by it rather than ruling themselves. Yet the rule of law is only ever rule through law by some person or persons. Law can have many sources and enforcers, and different laws and legal systems will apply to different groups of persons and have differing costs and benefits for each of them. If law's empire depends on an emperor, then the danger is that law becomes a means for imperial rule rather than rule of and for the public.

Of course, a tradition quickly emerged that identified the source of law beyond the will of any human agent or agency, seeking it instead in nature, God's will, or reason. These arguments offer different intellectual constructions of what they claim to be the fundamental law of all human associations. Such law supposedly operates as a superior or higher law, which binds all political rulers—whether an absolute monarch or the people themselves—and trumps whatever laws they may pass. These depictions of fundamental law proved tremendously influential in international law, especially human rights law, and fed into cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, as we shall see. A natural affinity also exists between this account and the liberal view of liberty as non-interference and its deployment in defence of market institutions. These liberal versions developed out of attempts to square the circle by bringing together the rule of law and the rule of citizens within the ideal of a social contract. Emerging in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an account of the justification and limits of the powers of the monarch within a state, it takes as its starting point the equal status of human beings as proprietors of themselves and co-possessors of the world. The underlying intuition is that a just political and legal sovereign power would be one that free and equal individuals could be expected unanimously to consent to. Such consent, the theory goes, would only be given to a power that offers fair and equitable mechanisms, and rules for securing their common interest to be able to pursue their own good in their own way, freeing them from the uncertainties of mutual harm without itself becoming a source of harm to them. In other words, it tries to unite the political ideal of the equality of virtuous citizens, who rule and are ruled in turn so as to uphold the public interest, with the legal ideal of individuals as rights bearers, who pursue their private interests protected by the rule of law. This argument does not necessarily rest on any actual consent by citizens to generate their obligation to obey a just sovereign. For many theorists in this tradition, it is sufficient that the political and legal system is so organized that we could imagine all citizens ought hypothetically to consent to it—or, at least, have no compelling reason not to do so. The idea of a contract is simply a device for thinking about which political and legal arrangements and principles treat people equitably and justly.

As with theories of God-given or natural law, the terms of the contract are likely to be viewed differently by different theorists, according to the moral and empirical presuppositions they bring to bear in their characterizations of human nature and the causal structure of social relations. For example, the social-contract theories of the seventeenth-century English philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1651) and John Locke (1690) portray quite different accounts of human nature and social relations, producing divergent views of what we would consent to. For Hobbes, human beings were apt to pursue their self-interest aggressively and distrust others. Consequently, they were inclined to consent to any sovereign power capable of offering them security against the risks individuals posed to each other. By contrast, Locke had a much more benign view of human nature and thought Hobbes underestimated the degree to which state power might be an even greater danger to individual liberty than other individuals. He hypothesized that people need consent only to a limited form of government. Such differences as those between Hobbes and Locke indicate that there are liable to be as many views of ‘higher law’ as there are theorists of it. The disagreements among theorists mirror those between citizens and return us once more to the dilemma that the source of the rule of law will always lie within the rule of persons: what the rule of law is thought to mean and how that law is interpreted and applied always lies with people. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), in what many see as an elegy for republican citizenship, this circumstance meant a social contract had to be permanently enacted among the citizens of a polis . Yet, like his ancient Roman and Greek predecessors, Rousseau found it hard to conceive how such a system could be possible outside a polis and, here closer to the Greek than the Roman view, a renunciation of private interests unlikely in commercial societies.

Liberal Democratic Citizenship: Uniting Republican and Legal Citizenship?

The problem of creating a modern republic confronted the two great revolutions that inaugurated the modern democratic era—the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. Both attempted to resolve it by seeing their constitutional settlements as instances of an actual contract between citizens. So, the putative authors of the American Constitution are ‘We the People of the United States’, while the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen declares ‘the source of all sovereignty lies essentially in the Nation’. However, these formulas preserve a dualism between the ‘public’ political citizen, who acts as a collective agent—the ‘people’ or the ‘nation’—and the private, ‘legal’ citizen, who is the subject of the law and the possessor of ‘natural’ rights to liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Civic virtue gets assigned to a single constitutional moment and enshrined in the institutions that popular act creates, leaving selfish citizens to pursue their personal interests under the law. Meanwhile, a tension between the two models remains. It is doubtful that even the most well-designed institutions and laws can economize too much on the virtues of citizens, or that citizens feel they are ‘theirs’, if—the founding moment apart—they cannot actively participate in shaping them.

The liberal democratic regimes that emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries struggled with this tension, mixing in their different ways elements of both the republican and the legal forms of citizenship. Lying midway between a city state and an empire, the nation state emerged as their most viable alternative—able to combine certain key advantages while avoiding their disadvantages. If the polis was too small to survive the military encroachments of empires, the empire was too large to allow for meaningful political participation. The nation state had sufficient size to sustain both a complex economic infrastructure and an army, while being not so large to make a credible—if less participatory—form of democracy impossible. As a result, it became subject to pressures to create a form of citizenship that could successfully integrate popular and legal rule by linking political participation and rights with membership of a national democratic political community.

The sociologists T. H. Marshall ( 1950 ) and Stein Rokkan ( 1974 ) established what has become the standard narrative of the evolution of modern democratic citizenship. They saw citizenship as the product of the interrelated processes of state building, the emergence of commercial and industrial society, and the construction of a national consciousness, with all three driven forward in various ways by class struggle and war. The net effect of these three processes was to create a ‘people’, who were entitled to be treated as equals before the law and possessed equal rights to buy and sell goods, services, and labour; whose interests were overseen by a sovereign political authority; and who shared a national identity that shaped their allegiance to each other and to their state. In a brilliant essay, Marshall argued there had been three periods in the historical evolution of citizenship as a given group fought to attain equal status as a full member of the community. The first period, from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, saw the consolidation of the civil rights needed to engage in a range of social and economic activities, from the freedoms to own property and exchange goods, to liberty of thought and conscience. The second period, from the end of the eighteenth century to the start of the twentieth, coincided with the gaining of political rights to vote and stand for election. The third period, from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, involved the creation of social rights that gave citizens ‘the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in society’.

Though modelled on Britain, Marshall's account reflects not just the new liberal and social-democratic consensus behind a welfare state fashioned by such British thinkers as T. H. Green, L. T. Hobhouse, and W. H. Beveridge, but also similar intellectual and political movements elsewhere, like the Solidarists in France and progressives in the United States (Kloppenberg 1986 ; Bellamy 1992 ). Nevertheless, his argument has attracted considerable criticism. He is said to overlook the role external pressures played in promoting rights (Mann 1987 ), while the three sets of rights neither arose in quite the order or periods that he mentions, nor proved quite as complementary as he assumed. Thus, social rights emerged in most countries before rather than after political rights—often being offered by the politically dominant class in the hope of damping down demands for political rights. Social and civil rights can also clash, as with the right to property (Bellamy, Castiglione, and Santoro 2004 ). However, these corrections to the details of his argument are perfectly compatible with its underlying logic, whereby the development of legal rights stems from a subordinate group employing formal and informal political strategies to win concessions from those with power in their fight to be treated with equal concern and respect.

Writing in the 1950s, when the economies of West European countries were in the ascendant and welfare spending expanding, it was natural for Marshall to view social rights as the culmination of the struggle for an ever more inclusive and egalitarian form of citizenship. Needless to say, subsequent events have tended to challenge that optimistic conclusion. It is not just that many aspects of the post-war welfare settlements Marshall celebrated got eroded during the economic downturn and restructuring of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Many of the economic and social assumptions on which this settlement rested have also been criticized by those seeking further to expand rather than to curtail citizenship (King and Waldron 1988 ). Environmentalists have attacked the emphasis on increasing economic production (Dobson 2003 ), feminists its continued overlooking of the subordinate role of women in the labour market (Lister 2003 ), multiculturalists the failure even to mention issues of ethnicity (Kymlicka 1995 ), cosmopolitans its focus on the nation state (Benhabib 2004 ), and so on. Again, these observations do not necessarily contradict the main thrust of his argument. They merely indicate how each attempt to realize a form of equal citizenship generates its own unanticipated shortcomings and problems—producing new struggles over the way the political community, rights, and participation are defined.

Cosmopolitan Citizenship?

In different ways, the proliferation of new forms of citizenship—Green, feminist, multicultural—reflect the various challenges confronting nation states at the start of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, globalization has weakened the capacity of states to provide citizens with the basic goods of economic well-being and security from a range of military, health, environmental, and other threats. It has also heightened inter-state mobility, creating unprecedented levels of migration, and intensified the sense of responsibility for the impacts states have on each other—particularly of the rich on the poor. On the other hand, within states the discriminatory character of the standard criteria for citizenship have been criticized not just by feminists, the disabled, and ethnic minorities, but also by minority nations, indigenous peoples, and religious and cultural minorities seeking various forms of group rights and self-government.

The first challenge has led to calls for cosmopolitan citizenship. According to a doctrine going back to the ancient world and associated particularly with the Roman stoics, a cosmopolitan is literally a ‘citizen of the world’ or kosmopolitês . The Greek derivation of this term suggests that world citizenship implies a world polity. However, few cosmopolitans believe such a concentration of power would be desirable. Instead, following Kant (1795), they see cosmopolitan norms as operating in the context of a federation of free states. They advocate a form of legal citizenship governed by international rights norms, as have developed since the Second World War. Yet, theorists differ greatly as to whether such norms are relatively ‘thin’, enjoining humanitarian assistance to asylum seekers and aid in the event of natural disasters, the prosecution of crimes against humanity, such as genocide, and respect for each state's right to self-determination, but no significant transfers of resources between states, let alone between individuals across the globe (Miller 2000 ), or are ‘thick’, involving treating all borders as morally arbitrary and justifying a weakening and even transcendence of national citizenship so that peoples may move freely and wealth may be redistributed on a global scale (Nussbaum 1996 ). These disagreements reveal how even a ‘thin’ legal cosmopolitan citizenship confronts the dilemma of how such laws are to be framed and implemented, and their administrators held accountable without a similarly extensive political power, raising the republican worry that the empire of cosmopolitan law will be but a cover for the imperial rule of certain persons.

Some advocate a federal scheme of global democracy to meet this difficulty (Held 1995 ). However, these proposals fly in the face of the second challenge. As the European Union—the most developed supranational legal and political system—illustrates, creating a workable public sphere on such a scale faces formidable problems. Linguistic and cultural diversity means that the European peoples have little sense of forming a demos, while the size of the Union means that their votes count for less and provoke complaints that its decision-makers are remote and unaccountable (Bellamy, Castiglione, and Shaw 2006 ). Indeed, most of the member states confront increasing claims to devolve power to cultural and national minorities. Rather than seeing cosmopolitanism as involving supra- or post-national citizenship and institutions, therefore, it might be better to see it as a means whereby states offer reciprocal rights of recognition to each other and their citizens, collaborate to tackle global problems, and foster the global extension of liberal democratic citizenship rather than making us global citizens. Indeed, in many respects this offers the most appropriate characterization of European citizenship within the EU, which has cemented democratization in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and the former Soviet bloc, and allowed the free movement of citizens between the member states (Bellamy 2008 b ; Kymlicka 2008 ). In this way, states remain the context for our exercising republican citizenship and accessing legal citizenship, but we do so in ways that are compatible with the similar exercise of such rights by others across the world (Bellamy 2008 a : ch. 4).

Primary Sources

Aristotle ( 1988 [335–323 bc]). The Politics , ed. S. Everson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Cicero ( 1991 [44 bc]). On Duties , eds. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Constant, B. ( 1988 [1819]). ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’, in Political Writings , ed. B. Fontana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 308–28.

Hamilton, A. , Madison, J., and Jay, J. ( 2003 [1787–8]). The Federalist , ed. T. Ball. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hobbes, T. ( 1991 [1651]). Leviathan , ed. R. Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kant, I. ( 1970 [1795]). ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Political Writings , ed. H. Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 93–130.

Locke, J. ( 1988 [1690]). Two Treatises of Government , ed. P. Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Machiavelli, N. ( 1970 [1513–17]). The Discourses , ed. B Crick. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marshall, T. H. ( 1950 ). Citizenship and Social Class . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rokkan, S. ( 1974 ). ‘Dimensions of State Formation and Nation Building’, in C. Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 562–600.

Rousseau, J.‐J. ( 1968 [1762]). The Social Contract , ed. M. Cranston . Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Secondary Sources

Bellamy, R. ( 1992 ). Liberalism and Modern Society . Cambridge: Polity.

Bellamy, R. ( 2008 a ). Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bellamy, R. ( 2008 b ). ‘ Evaluating Union Citizenship: Belonging, Rights and Participation within the EU ’, Citizenship Studies , 12: 597–61. 10.1080/13621020802450676

Bellamy, R. , Castiglione, D. , and Santoro, E. ( 2004 ) (eds). Lineages of European Citizenship: Rights, Belonging and Citizenship in Eleven Nation-States . Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Bellamy, R. , Castiglione, D. , and Shaw, J. ( 2006 ) (eds). Making European Citizens: Civic Inclusion in a Transnational Context . Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Benhabib, S. ( 2004 ). The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10.1017/CBO9780511790799

Berlin, I. ( 1969 ). Four Essays on Liberty . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dobson, A. ( 2003 ). Citizenship and the Environment . Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10.1093/0199258449.001.0001

Finley, M. ( 1983 ). Politics in the Ancient World . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Held, D. ( 1995 ). Democracy and the Global Order . Cambridge: Polity.

King, D. , and Waldron, J. ( 1988 ). ‘ Citizenship, Social Citizenship and the Defence of Welfare Provision ’, British Journal of Political Science , 18: 415–43. 10.1017/S0007123400005202

Kloppenberg, J. T. ( 1986 ). Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought 1870–1920 . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kymlicka, W. ( 1995 ). Multicultural Citizenship . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kymlicka, W. ( 2008 ). ‘Liberal Nationalism and Cosmopolitan Justice’, in S. Benhabib , Another Cosmopolitanism , (ed.) R Post. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 128–44.

Lister, R. ( 2003 ). Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives , 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Mann, M. ( 1987 ). ‘ Ruling Strategies and Citizenship ’, Sociology , 21: 339–54. 10.1177/0038038587021003003

Miller, D. ( 2000 ). Citizenship and National Identity . Cambridge: Polity.

Nussbaum, M. ( 1996 ). ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, in J. Cohen (ed.), For Love of Country . Boston: Beacon Press, 3–17.

Pettit, P. ( 1997 ). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Pocock, J. G. A. ( 1995 ). ‘The Ideal of Citizenship since Classical Times’, in R. Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Citizenship . New York: SUNY, 29–52.

Skinner, Q. ( 1998 ). Liberty before Liberalism . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Walzer, M. ( 1989 ). ‘Citizenship’, in T. Ball , J. Farr , and R. L. Hanson , Political Innovation and Conceptual Change . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 211–19.

For details of Athenian and Roman politics, see Finley ( 1983 ).

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BackStory: To Be a Citizen? The History of Becoming American

Stereo card depicting a woman in an apron and skirt preparing a meal. The original caption reads, "Citizenship Lessons: no. 17 - Mother Packing Father's Lunch."

Stereo cards, like this one from Keystone View Company, were marketed to schools and teachers as a way to introduce more visual content into the classroom. Not much is known about this card, but its label reads "Citizenship Lessons: no. 17 - Mother Packing Father's Lunch."

Library of Congress

The meaning of U.S. citizenship, as symbol and lived experience, has changed over time. Consider the picture on this page, which is part of a stereo card produced by the Keystone View Company around 1929. We don't know much about this card other than its caption and catalog information. The caption reads, “Citizenship Lessons: no. 17 - Mother Packing Father's Lunch.” The old caption card for the image says, “Photog. I.; Aliens; Adult education; Citizenship; Shelf.” Based on this information, what might you infer about this card and how it was used? What ideals of and assumptions about citizenship does it communicate?

In " To Be a Citizen? The History of Becoming American ," listeners will learn more about how citizenship has been expanded, limited, challenged, and revoked in the United States. You'll hear about what happens when borders cross bodies, drawing new territory and people into the United States in what was often a violent and contested process; how Chinese immigrants and their American-born children challenged the boundaries of whiteness and citizenship in the late 19th century; how women have been stripped of their citizenship after marrying a non-citizen; and how African Americans after World War I fought for the unfulfilled promises of citizenship.

A full transcript of this episode can be found at the BackStory website .

Comprehension Questions

What impact did the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo have for people living in Texas?
How did white Americans rationalize the violence they committed against cart men?
Why did the killing of Antonio Delgado draw greater attention to the attacks on cart men?
According to Larry Knight, how does the definition of citizenship change in San Antonio, Texas between 1848-1861?
What was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882?
How does Mary Lui contextualize debates about the exclusion of Chinese people from U.S. citizenship?
What was the significance of Ah Yup's unsuccessful attempt to obtain citizenship?
How did the experience of the Tape family foreshadow the "separate but equal" doctrine established in 1896?
What role did the federal government play in the acts of violence committed against Chinese workers? How did the exclusion of Chinese people from citizenship contribute to this violence?
Why do historians continue to debate about the nature of the citizenship accessible to American-born children of Chinese immigrant parents?
According to Lui, what do the battles about the meaning and extent of citizenship indicate about race and citizenship in the United States?

EDSITEment Resources

Learn more about immigration history and the laws that have shaped the legal inclusion and exclusion of immigrants with the Closer Readings Commentary Everything Your Students Need to Know About Immigration History . The lesson plan Asian American & Pacific Islander Perspectives within Humanities Education (grades 6-12) addresses the exclusion of Asian immigrants from citizenship and the experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islander individuals as expressed in literature and art.

Why was the Expatriation Act created in 1907, according to Linda Kerber?
How did the 19th amendment change the way women were able to challenge the Expatriation Act?
What legacies of the Expatriation Act does Kerber see?

At the time the Expatriation Act was passed, women did not have the right to vote at the federal level (some states had passed laws extending the right to vote to women). As this episode highlights, disenfranchisement was just one way that women's legal status in the United States was less secure than that of men. Learn more about the women's suffrage and equality movements with the following EDSITEment resources:

Lesson Plan: Chronicling and Mapping the Women's Suffrage Movement (grades 9-12)
Lesson Plan: Women's Suffrage: Why the West First? (grades 6-12)
Lesson Plan: Voting Rights for Women: Pro- and Anti-Suffrage (grades 9-12)
Lesson Plan: Who Were the Foremothers of the Women's Suffrage and Equality Movements? (grades 6-12)
Lesson Plan: Women's Equality: Changing Attitudes and Beliefs (grades 9-12)
Teacher's Guide: Women’s History in the United States
What opportunity did many African Americans see in World War I?
How did Jim Crow's reach extend beyond U.S. borders?
How did African Americans' experiences during the war affect the civil rights movement? How did they affect the Red Summer in 1919?
Why did Johnson run for Congress in 1940?
How did moments like independence and Reconstruction cause shifts in the ways people thought about and legislated citizenship?
How has citizenship for some people and groups been conditional, partial, or insecure?

Learn more about the ways African Americans interfaced with the state, as well as the early civil rights movement, with the following resources:

Lesson Plan: African-American Soldiers in World War I: The 92nd and 93rd Divisions (grades 9-12)
Lesson Plan: African-American Soldiers After World War I: Had Race Relations Changed? (grades 9-12)
Lesson Plan: Lesson 3: African-Americans and the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps (grades 9-12)
Lesson Plan: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series: Removing the Mask (grades 6-8)
Curriculum: NAACP's Anti-Lynching Campaigns: The Quest for Social Justice in the Interwar Years (grades 9-12)

Founded in 2008, BackStory is a weekly podcast that explores the historical roots of current events. Hosted by a team of historians of the United States, the show features interviews with other scholars and public historians, seeking to bring U.S. history to life.Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the show do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Learn more at the BackStory website .

Related on EDSITEment

Everything your students need to know about immigration history, african-american soldiers in world war i: the 92nd and 93rd divisions, african-american soldiers after world war i: had race relations changed, voting rights for women: pro- and anti-suffrage, jacob lawrence's migration series: removing the mask, “the great migration” by minnie bruce pratt, “every day we get more illegal” by juan felipe herrera, naacp's anti-lynching campaigns: the quest for social justice in the interwar years.

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14th Amendment

By: History.com Editors

Updated: December 20, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

Fourteenth Amendment, historic Little Rock school

The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States—including formerly enslaved people—and guaranteed all citizens “equal protection of the laws.” One of three amendments passed during the Reconstruction era to abolish slavery and establish civil and legal rights for Black Americans, it became the basis for many landmark Supreme Court decisions over the years.

In its later sections, the 14th Amendment authorized the federal government to punish states that violated or abridged their citizens’ right to vote by proportionally reducing the states’ representation in Congress, and mandated that anyone who “engaged in insurrection” against the United States could not hold civil, military or elected office (without the approval of two-thirds of the House and Senate).

It also upheld the national debt, but exempted federal and state governments from paying any debts incurred by the former Confederate states.

Reconstruction

Abraham Lincoln ’s assassination in April 1865 left his successor, President Andrew Johnson , to preside over the complex process of incorporating former Confederate states back into the Union after the Civil War and establishing former enslaved people as free and equal citizens.

Johnson, a Democrat (and former slaveholder) from Tennessee , supported emancipation, but he differed greatly from the Republican-controlled Congress in his view of how Reconstruction should proceed. Johnson showed relative leniency toward the former Confederate states as they were reintroduced into the Union.

But many northerners were outraged when the newly elected southern state legislatures—largely dominated by former Confederate leaders—enacted black codes , which were repressive laws that strictly regulated the behavior of Black citizens and effectively kept them dependent on white planters.

Civil Rights Act of 1866

In creating the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Congress was using the authority given it to enforce the newly ratified 13th Amendment , which abolished slavery, and protect the rights of Black Americans.

Johnson vetoed the bill, and though Congress successfully overrode his veto and made it into law in April 1866—the first time in history that Congress overrode a presidential veto of a major bill—even some Republicans thought another amendment was necessary to provide firm constitutional grounds for the new legislation.

Thaddeus Stevens

In late April, Representative Thaddeus Stevens introduced a plan that combined several different legislative proposals (civil rights for Black people, how to apportion representatives in Congress, punitive measures against the former Confederate States of America and repudiation of Confederate war debt), into a single constitutional amendment. After the House and Senate both voted on the amendment by June 1866, it was submitted to the states for ratification.

President Johnson made clear his opposition to the 14th Amendment as it made its way through the ratification process, but Congressional elections in late 1866 gave Republicans veto-proof majorities in both the House and Senate.

Southern states also resisted, but Congress required them to ratify the 13th and 14th Amendments as a condition of regaining representation in Congress, and the ongoing presence of the Union Army in the former Confederate states ensured their compliance.

On July 9, 1868, Louisiana and South Carolina voted to ratify the 14th Amendment, making up the necessary three-fourths majority .

Section One: 14th Amendment

The opening sentence of Section One of the 14th Amendment defined U.S. citizenship: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

This clearly repudiated the Supreme Court’s notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision , in which Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that a Black man, even if born free, could not claim rights of citizenship under the federal constitution.

Section One's next clause was: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” This greatly expanded the civil and legal rights of all American citizens by protecting them from infringement by the states as well as by the federal government.

The third clause, “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law,” expanded the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment to apply to the states as well as the federal government.

Over time, the Supreme Court has interpreted this clause to guarantee a wide array of rights against infringement by the states, including those enumerated in the Bill of Rights (freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, right to bear arms, etc.) as well as the right to privacy and other fundamental rights not mentioned elsewhere in the Constitution .

Finally, the “equal protection clause” (“nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”) was clearly intended to stop state governments from discriminating against Black Americans, and over the years would play a key role in many landmark civil rights cases.

Section Two: 14th Amendment

Section Two of the 14th Amendment repealed the three-fifths clause (Article I, Section 2, Clause 3) of the original Constitution, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning congressional representation. With slavery outlawed by the 13th Amendment, this clarified that all residents, regardless of race, should be counted as one whole person. This section also guaranteed that all male citizens over age 21, no matter their race, had a right to vote.

Southern states continued to deny Black men the right to vote using a collection of state and local statutes during the Jim Crow era. Subsequent amendments to the Constitution granted women the right to vote and lowered the legal voting age to 18.

Section Three: 14th Amendment

Section Three of the amendment, gave Congress the authority to bar public officials, who took an oath of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, from holding office if they "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the Constitution. The intent was to prevent the president from allowing former leaders of the Confederacy to regain power within the U.S. government after securing a presidential pardon. It states that a two-thirds majority vote in Congress is required to allow public officials who had engaged in rebellion to regain the rights of American citizenship and hold government or military office.

It states that: "No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof."

Section Four: 14th Amendment

Section Four of the 14th Amendment states that the "validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." Historians believe the clause was intended to ensure the federal government would not repudiate its debts, as some former Confederate states had done.

It also prohibited payment of any debt owed to the defunct Confederate States of America and banned any payments to former enslavers as compensation for the loss of human "property" (enslaved people).

Section Five: 14th Amendment

The fifth and final section of the 14th Amendment (“Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article”) echoed a similar enforcement clause in the 13th Amendment.

In giving Congress power to pass laws to safeguard the sweeping provisions of Section One, in particular, the 14th Amendment effectively altered the balance of power between the federal and state governments in the United States.

Nearly a century later, Congress used this authority to pass landmark civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 .

Impact of the 14th Amendment

In its early decisions involving the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court often limited the application of its protections on a state and local level.

In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court ruled that racially segregated public facilities did not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, a decision that would help establish infamous Jim Crow laws throughout the South for decades to come.

But beginning in the 1920s, the Supreme Court increasingly applied the protections of the 14th Amendment on the state and local level. Ruling on appeal in the 1925 case Gitlow v. New York , the Court stated that the due process clause of the 14th Amendment protected the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech from infringement by the state as well as the federal government.

And in its famous 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education , the Supreme Court overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson , ruling that segregated public schools did in fact violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

In other landmark rulings, the Supreme Court has cited the 14th Amendment in cases involving the use of contraception (1965’s Griswold v. Connecticut ), interracial marriage (1967’s Loving v. Virginia ), abortion (1973’s Roe v. Wade ), a highly contested presidential election (2000’s Bush v. Gore ), gun rights (2010’s McDonald v. Chicago ) and same-sex marriage (2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges ).

HISTORY Vault: Black History

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Amendment XIV, Constitution Center . Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography ( New York : Random House, 2005). Fourteenth Amendment, HarpWeek . 10 Huge Supreme Court Cases About the 14th Amendment, Constitution Center .

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Handout A: Background Essay – The History of Immigration Law in the United States

Background Essay—The History of Immigration Law in the United States

Directions: Read the background essay and answer the critical thinking questions at the end. In addition, formulate your own questions about the content discussed.

In the modern era, nation-states are defined as much by their borders as by their unique laws, forms of government, and distinct national cultures. Since the early years of the United States’ history, the federal government has sought, with varying degrees of success, to limit and define the nature and scale of immigration into the country. In the first seventy years of the nation’s history, immigration was left largely unchecked; Congress focused its attention on defining the terms by which immigrants could gain the full legal rights of citizenship. Beginning in the 1880s, however, Congress began to legislate on the national and ethnic makeup of immigrants. Lawmakers passed laws forbidding certain groups from entering the country, and restricted the number of people who could enter from particular nations. In the 1920s, Congress enacted quotas based upon immigrants’ national origin, limiting the number of immigrants who could enter from non-Western European countries. In the 1960s, immigration policy was radically transformed and the policies of the preceding generations were abolished. Through these reforms, which still determine the United States’ immigration policy today, greater numbers of Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans are permitted to enter the country than immigrants of European background, giving preferred status to these immigrant groups.

Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution empowers the Congress to “Establish a Uniform Rule of Naturalization.” The first national law concerning immigration was the Naturalization Act of 1790, which stated that any free white person who had resided in the U.S. for at least two years could apply for full citizenship. Congress also required applicants to demonstrate “good character” and swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. Blacks were ineligible for citizenship.

In 1795, naturalization standards were changed to require five years’ prior residence in the U.S., and again in 1798 to require 14 years’ residence. The 1798 revision was passed amidst the anti-French fervor of the Quasi-War and sought to limit the influence of foreign-born citizens in federal elections. During Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the 1798 standards were repealed to require five years’ residence once more. As immigration patterns changed over time, especially in the late 1840s and early 1850s as Irish and Germans replaced the British as the primary immigrant groups, federal immigration law remained largely unchanged. Despite anti-immigrant agitation in the 1850s and the rise of nativist political groups, no limits or quotas were imposed on immigration.

Questions still lingered about the nature of citizenship for black Americans. In December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, abolishing slavery in all of the states. Were emancipated slaves citizens, or not? Through the end of the Civil War, slaves had not been considered citizens and possessed none of the rights of their white countrymen. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 established that freedmen were indeed citizens. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution confirmed the position set forth in the Civil Rights Act. The amendment stated that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The amendment prohibited the states from curtailing the privileges of federal citizenship. The construction of the citizenship clause indicates that anyone born in the U.S. is automatically a citizen, and this is what federal law has maintained ever since. However, there is disagreement as to the meaning of the citizenship clause, and whether it was intended to clarify the status of emancipated slaves, or whether it was written to apply to all peoples regardless of context.

During the congressional ratification debates, members made clear the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment. Senator and Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens argued in 1866 that the Fourteenth Amendment was the final fulfillment of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, a law designed to ensure equal rights for all Americans no matter their race or prior status under the law. Senator Jacob Howard, one of the chief authors of the citizenship clause, reassured Congress by saying the amendment “will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens” or had been born to foreign diplomats. Senator John Bingham echoed his colleague’s remarks and said the citizenship clause reasserts “that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of our Constitution itself, a natural-born citizen.”

The question remains whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause should be interpreted as a protection of the rights of citizenship of former slaves, or if it is a blanket protection for all persons born in the United States no matter their parents’ national allegiance or legal status. Current law favors the latter interpretation, and there is ongoing controversy whether children born of unnaturalized or illegal immigrants should be granted automatic citizenship.

After the Civil War, the American economy boomed as industry grew and the American West was settled and organized into new states. On the Pacific coast, the high demand for labor drew thousands of Chinese immigrants into the country to work in a variety of capacities. Most often, they worked building railroads or in mines. Others farmed or ran businesses in California’s growing cities. By the late 1870s, opposition to Chinese laborers had grown substantially, stemming from a combination of racism and the belief that Chinese laborers unfairly competed with white American laborers and stole economic opportunities from workers more deserving. Eventually, Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barring virtually all new immigration from China. The act was extended in 1892 and on a permanent basis beginning in 1902. Other laws further restricted the rights and privileges of Chinese immigrants already in the United States. The Scott Act of 1888, for example, forbade Chinese immigrants who left the United States from returning. It was not until World War II, when China was a military ally of the United States, that the ban on Chinese immigration was lifted.

For most of the 1800s, the main sources of immigrants to the United States were British, Irish, German, Scandinavian, and Central European peoples. By the 1880s, immigration patterns shifted toward Eastern and Southern European groups, especially Italians, Poles, Russians, and other Slavic peoples. Most were pulled to the United States by the promise of better opportunities and improved quality of life. The dramatic change in the ethnic makeup of this “new wave” of immigrants caused alarm among nativists, racialists, and pro-Protestant interests. One legislative response to this was the Immigration Act of 1917 which created the Asiatic Barred Zone, a vast area of Asia from which no person could immigrate to the U.S. The prohibited areas included most of the Middle East, South Asian countries like Persia and British-ruled India, as well as central Asia and Southeastern Asia.

In another response to the growing number of immigrants arriving from Eastern and Southern European countries, Congress passed the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, which placed limits on the number of people entering the country based upon prescribed quotas. The law used the 1910 Federal Census to determine existing numbers of foreign-born citizens already living in the U.S. It then required that a number equivalent to only 3% of the already resident population from a certain country could be admitted. Therefore, for example, if 100,000 Bulgarians already lived in the U.S., only 3,000 Bulgarian immigrants could enter annually thereafter. This scheme became known as the National Origins Formula. The goal of federal policy sought to ensure that new waves of immigrants from outside western and central Europe could slowly integrate into American society and so could better embrace American notions of civic virtue, self-government, and productivity.

This law was followed a few years later by the Immigration Act of 1924 which decreased the quota from 3% to 2% and used the 1890 census instead of the 1910 census as the reference point for its quotas. Because Congress chose to utilize the 1890 census, which showed a higher proportion of residents from more desirable European countries like Germany and Great Britain, the law created artificially low quotas for the new immigrants. Furthermore, it placed low caps on arrivals from majority non-white nations, like those in Africa and the Middle East. In the first year of its enactment, the law permitted 51,000 German immigrants, for example, but only 100 from the Arabian Peninsula.

Latent anti-immigrant hostility erupted during both World Wars. Anti-immigrant antagonism has not always been racially motivated. In World War I, German-Americans (even those born in the United States) were subjected to discrimination and harassment for their national background. In some communities, German-Americans were lynched by mobs while others had their businesses boycotted or closed. Americans born in Germany were forced to register with the government as “enemy aliens,” and some states prohibited the use of the German language in school instruction. Most Lutheran churches ceased conducting services in the German language and adopted English instead. During World War II, Japanese-Americans were subjected to even worse treatment and were forced into internment camps for the duration of the war. In February 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 requiring Japanese-Americans to report for forced relocation to prisoner camps away from the Pacific coast. Fred Korematsu challenged the legality of Roosevelt’s directive, but in Korematsu v. U.S. (1944) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the internment of Japanese-Americans was constitutional.

The quotas and restrictions of the 1920s remained largely in place until the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, who undertook a sweeping reform project of many of the most important public policy sectors. As part of his reform agenda, Johnson signed into law the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended use of the National Origins Formula. Under the new law, 120,000 immigrants were to be admitted annually from Western Hemisphere nations in Latin and South America. 170,000 people per year would be admitted from Asia, Africa, and Europe combined. The reforms of 1965 initiated a substantial change in the ethnic and national origin of immigrants and this accounts for the rapid growth of the non-European population seen today. Instead of a movement of people almost solely from Europe, immigration today is dominated by non-European peoples from all parts of the world. Further, the 1965 reform provided an avenue for immigrants’ families to come to the United States after them, as family immigration is usually not counted in the overall quota. With minor revisions, the standards set forth in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 remain in effect today and still determines from which countries the United States draws its new citizens.

CRITICAL THINKING OR HOMEWORK QUESTIONS

Describe the Naturalization Act of 1790. According to this law, who could become citizens of the United States? What racial boundaries to citizenship did the law define? What were the conditions of gaining full citizenship?
What is naturalization and why were law makers in the years around 1800 concerned with defining how long citizens must be in the country to become naturalized?
Describe the debate over the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. How do most Americans in the present day interpret the law? How did its framers explain the law at the time?
What were some of the reasons that the Chinese were forbidden to immigrate? When were these immigration restrictions lifted?
Describe the challenges faced by immigrants and the descendants of recent immigrants during World War I and World War II. What did the Supreme Court rule in Korematsu v. U.S. ?
What were the primary changes brought about in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965? How was this law different from the laws enacted in 1921 and 1924?

Citizenship History and Development Research Paper

History of citizenship, united states citizenship, mexican immigrants, kurds in syria, united arab emirates citizenship, bidoun in kuwait.

Citizenship is the ability of a person to be considered a citizen of a given political and social community. Social contract theory states that when a person has a citizenship status, he is given rights and responsibilities. Active citizenship, therefore, means that all citizens are supposed to strive toward making their community better.

This can be done through activities such as active participation in economic activities, volunteer duties, and also engaging in other public duties. A person normally acquires citizenship if he or she satisfies the legal principles in a certain state or country. A citizen is expected to adhere to the laws that are practiced in his or her country and he should also defend his country against its enemies.

Citizenship generally defines how citizens should relate with their government. The concept of citizenship is treated differently in various nations. “In some countries, citizenship can mean a citizen has the right to vote, the right to hold government offices, and the right to receive certain protection from the community, as well as obligation” (Schama, 1990).

For instance, “Australia citizens are allowed to participate in voting, they can contest for public office, and they can also join the military if they are willing” (Akramov, 2009). The fact that a person is residing in a given country does not make him to be considered a citizen of that country. An individual that has migrated to another country is always considered to be an alien.

The rights and obligations of aliens are normally defined by the laws of the country where they live. For example, if an individual moves to U.S.A, he will be expected to behave like other normal U.S citizens. In this case, he will have to pay taxes, also adhere to the laws. Legal aliens may be protected by the law, and they can also acquire property and carry out business activities. However, aliens are not allowed to participate in political processes such as voting.

Citizenry refers to all categories of citizens. “In modern times, citizenship is divided between right of blood and right of soil nations” (Romero, 2005). Right of blood in this case means that a person is given citizenship on the basis of nation state concept and this is common in Europe.

For example, an individual may be considered a citizen due to his ancestral or ethnic background in that country. On the other hand, the right of soil refers to a situation in which an individual acquires citizenship by virtue of having been born in a given territory or nation.

Marriage is one of the ways through which an individual can acquire citizenship. Naturalization is also another process that can be used to get citizenship in some nations. “In recent years, some intergovernmental organizations have extended the concept and terminology associated with citizenship to the international level, where it is applied to the totality of the citizens in their constituent countries” (Akramov, 2009).

Citizenship education is today taught in many countries as part of the school syllabus. This is always meant to make citizens know what is expected of them as citizens. It also enables students to learn more about their rights and obligations. Citizenship curriculum gives students conviction and confidence in order for them to relate with others properly, and bring positive changes in their communities. Last but more importantly, it teaches students to be responsible both morally and socially.

Even though historical development indicates that democracy has developed to be a fundamental spect of modern social organization, the concept of democratic citizenship has always been suppressed, in the process of developing democratic processes. Citizenship is believed to have started in ancient Greece when a constitutional government was introduced in the city states.

The concept of democratic citizenship or classic model of democracy started in Greece. It enabled citizens to participate in governing their states. “This means that governance was citizenship and citizenship was governance” (Manville, 1990). Citizenship was also seen as part of achieving maturity. It was only citizens that could be regarded as adult members of society, and people could only become adults through citizenship. Rosenberg contends that Solan is the one who introduced citizenship.

Solon stressed on equality of all members of society. He noted that the rich individuals always used their wealth to influence and dominate people. He saw democracy as the only viable means of reversing inequality. Pesistrator is another individual who improved the rights that were accorded to the ordinary man. Apart from this, he also introduced nobility which was practiced with reference to the law.

In the fourth century, Cleisthenes developed classical democracy. He achieved this by raising the number of Athenian tribes from four to ten. In this case, each tribe appointed its leader. People were also clustered into units, and this facilitated the formation of new tribes. During the practice of classic democracy, the idea of citizenship was exercised both at family and neighborhood levels. As civic institutions became prominent, citizenship became increasingly necessary.

A citizen had to be an Athenian or if an individual was an Athenian he was regarded as a citizen. The behavior of an individual also became apparent in private and public spheres. Being part of a family determined ones citizenship. Non Athenians could only be citizens if they joined a given family or tribe. Aristotle defined a citizen as a person who participated or contributed to the decisions and development of his city.

According to him, a citizen is one who has been born by two citizens. He also stated that a responsible citizen should be in a position to rule others, and he should also be ready to be ruled by other individuals. He considered this to be a virtue. A citizen should also engage in state politics. Democracy in Greece remained weak and incomplete until 1789.

Development of citizenship is normally classified into two phases. The first phase preceded the French Revolution, while the second one emerged after the French Revolution. In the first phase, a person was only a citizen if he participated in politics and development. In Sparta, land was not regarded as a prerequisite for acquiring citizenship. Moreover, only few people could be allowed to vote and occupy public office in Sparta.

Citizenship was also treated as a privilege in both Sparta, and Athens. The only difference was that there was a great struggle against democracy in Sparta. The Greeks also encouraged self government. Nonetheless, their democracy was not effective and it was partially practiced. Self government led to coexistence among subcultures. This form of ethnic allegiance is still manifested even today in those countries.

In 509 B.C., the people in Rome started constructing a new empire based on laws and citizenship was considered important. The introduction of the new empire brought the monarchy to an end. Despite the making of the Roman Empire a republic, they failed to practice democratic principles.

The Roman Empire was based on democratic universal citizenship of free men, and a stoic notion of the universal brother hood of mankind. “Greece provided participatory citizen democracy, while Rome provided universal citizenship” (West, 1979). This gave rise to two different concepts about citizenship, which were both adopted in U.S.A. The first set of democracy refers to citizens’ service as well as allegiance to the country.

The second one is about the rights and privileges that citizens are given. In this case, the citizens also have some obligations. For example, they can contribute in government decision making and implementation. In Rome, citizenship was not restricted to the people who were born within its territory.

However, this was not the case in Athens where citizenship was only granted to the people who were born there. The Romans allowed foreigners to acquire their citizenship. In Rome, individuals who had active citizenship were supposed to offer a service of twenty days to the government within a year.

The development and spread of Christianity in Rome also influenced citizenship. Christianity changed how the Romans perception of life, hence, it also affected their values. Christianity advocated for a different loyalty. It encouraged people to be loyal to themselves and the church rather than being loyal to the government. Civic virtue and the value of citizenship waned as the Christian values became more prminent. Nonetheless, citizenship was still able to thrive.

“The second concept of citizenship was encouraged by the writings of Montaigne, Bacon, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Locke, and Franklin” (Rousseau, 1968). Citizenship was also able to develop due to economic advancement of the people in Europe. The reformation period also partly contributed to the development of citizenship.

Althusius also reinforced the idea that a person is made a citizen through the service he offers to the society. He also introduced modern federalism. Aliens became protected by the laws of England from the seventeenth century. They were allowed to acquire land, but the king still had the power to use land. This sparked protests from citizens, but the protests were not very serious.

In France, the middle ages also experienced much focus on protection of citizens in exchange for taxes. This system continued even during renaissance. For example, Montesquieu described the obligations of a citizen and he also defined citizenship in terms of liberty and equality.

Rousseau also talked about the ideas of Montesquieu and he also came up with his thoughts about the virtuous citizen. Rousseau envisaged a new society that would have equality, and civism. He also emphasized on the need for education. He felt that liberty would only thrive if people were educated. Rousseau’s emphasis on education also led to the development of republicanism.

Hobbes and Locke analyzed citizenship in terms of civic virtue of the society. Hobbes stressed on the influence of a person in the society. On the hand, Locke stressed on a person’s role acquiring resources and also assisting the government. Montesquieu believed that a good citizen is one that bides to the rules, is loyal, and also productive.

Development of liberalism led to the practice of democracy by the people in America. “Liberal concepts such as individualism, republicanism, liberty, equality, and fairness were embraced” (Hobsbawm, 1996). Dietz highlighted the liberal concepts as follows.

Liberal thinking leads to economic advancement. Society should provide an opportunity to people so that they can realize their potential. Individuals are the ones that benefit from formal right and those rights are supposed to be accessed by everyone on an equal basis. People also have the capacity to think rationally hence they have intrinsic worth. “The shortcomings of liberalism can be identified in the legal concepts of rights, interests, contracts, individualism, and negative liberty” (Anderson, 2006).

After French Revolution there was a tremendous growth of democracy and citizenship in Europe. American democracy was developed from the classic ideas of citizenship. Democracy and citizenship have to day become part of Americans’ traditions. As western civilization advanced, democracy, and citizenship were also influenced. The struggle for dominance between the church and the state also jeopardized the development of democracy and citizenship.

The monarchy also tried to sustain its power and this also frustrated citizenship and democracy. As civilization and Christianity gained popularity, the citizenship thoughts and democracy that had been initially suppressed began to thrive. The monarchy was retained in England and it ruled through parliament.

However, the idea of allegiance emerged in America, and it led to the creation of self government and democracy. Democratic government was able to flourish through the citizenship values. Today the pioneer spirit is still continuing, and the Americans still strive for more democratic space as John Dewey envisaged.

In America, citizenship started during the period of colonialism. During this time, people came together to find solutions to the common challenges that they faced. Apart from this, they also actively engaged in decision making. For example, they could attend public debates where democratic issues were always discussed.

This kind of relationship was altered by some issues and one of them was the need to grow economically. Therefore, people stopped contributing toward decision making. Citizenship became more articulated in terms of rights and privileges and people no longer saw it in terms of political participation.

Citizenship in U.S enables the citizens to enjoy various opportunities which are provided to them through the rights and privileges. For example, they can get federal assistance and they also have access to services offered by the government. “Citizenship in the United States is a status given to individuals that entails specific rights, duties, privileges, and benefits between the United States and the individual” (Huntington, 2004).

The constitution has a citizenship clause that defines how a person can acquire citizen. Therefore, citizenship can be obtained through the following mechanisms. Birth right citizenship is normally offered when a child is born within the territory of U.S. This provision is found in the fourteenth amendment. This amendment states that a person an individual that is born or naturalized within the U.S is considered its citizen and he or she must respect the laws.

Children who have not attained the minimum age of eighteen years are normally not allowed to vote because they are minors. Eighteen years is the age at which children are given the right to have full citizenship. A person’s citizenship remains intact until he dies, unless it is revoked by the government through a legal procedure.

Citizenship is part of the high school course work, and it is meant prepare students to become responsible citizens. Maternity citizenship has been debated and some people consider it to be a loophole through which some people acquire citizenship. In this case, some people claim that some women normally move to U.S illegally so that they can have a chance to reproduce and claim citizenship. Illegal immigrants have increased because of maternity citizenship.

Naturalization is the second means of acquiring citizenship. In this case, a person who was born in another territory that is not part of U.S can be granted citizenship through successful application. An applicant for citizenship is supposed to meet the following conditions. First, he should be law abiding and also morally upright. Secondly, he must have stayed in the country for not less than five years. The applicant should be able to interpret the constitution.

In addition to these, he should know English. They are also supposed to do and pass a compulsory citizenship test. Immigrants who are willing to serve in the military can be allowed to be citizens. Citizens’ contribution to civic activities is not obligatory in U.S. For example, there is no need for a person to attend public gatherings. Even being a member of a certain political party is not important. Some scholars contend that such a trend is likely to affect the future of democracy.

Dual citizenship is a situation where a person legally belongs to many nations. American law enables people to acquire multiple citizenships.

In this case, if a person is a U.S citizen, he can still go to another country and acquire another citizenship. A citizen can renounce or restore his or her citizenship depending on an individual’s choice. A person who is naturalized in U.S is supposed to renounce the citizenship he had before. “However, this renunciation may not necessarily be considered effective by the country of prior citizenship” (Einstein, 2001).

Some people contend that dual citizenship affects patriotic assimilation of Americans and it may also undermine American sovereignty. Nonetheless, the effects of dual citizenship are perceived to be less pernicious by others. Dual citizenship also enables the people who have it own property and work.

Honorary citizenship can be granted in exceptional cases to specific individuals who have demonstrated outstanding services to the country. Seven citizenships of this kind have been warded. For example, Mother Teresa and Sir Winston Churchill are among the few individuals who got honorary citizenship. The relatives of non- citizen soldiers who have died fighting for U.S can be given some assistance.

American citizenship is really valued by many people especially the immigrants who really struggle to get. This is because citizens have access to so many privileges and rights that can enable them to live comfortably. Such rights may not be found in other countries and this indicates the varying nature of citizenship in different territories. Aliens normally do not benefit from some privileges. For example, they usually do not have access to better employment and government services.

Apart from U.S citizens, there are many individuals who work and live U.S illegally. Such individuals do not have proper reasons and documentations for being in that country. They are therefore treated as illegal immigrants. “Illegal immigration has numerous and complex causes, but in general, it consists of people from poor countries seeking a better life opportunities in more developed countries” (Romero, 2005).

Illegal migrations are not allowed because they normally lead to many challenges in the countries where they move to. In U.S illegal immigrants can face many charges including deportation if they are detected by the authorities.

Mexico is the largest source of immigrants in U.S. and one fifth of the total population of legal immigrants living America, are Mexicans. Their large number is attributed to the revision of immigration acts, which have made migration to U.S quite easy. Most of the illegal immigrants in U.S are also from Mexico.

The number of illegal immigrants from Mexico is also growing very fast compared to the ones that are having proper documents. “Migration from Mexico to the United States has accelerated rapidly to the point where about nine percent of the population born in Mexico is now living in the United States” (Huntington, 2004).

This trend is not likely to reduce any soon despite economic decline and the tight security measures that have been adopted to check on illegal migrations. Most of illegal immigrants are always trying to secure better financial opportunities by looking for jobs and good social services in U.S. This is because many people in Mexico do not have access to formal employment, and decent services.

Poverty is also prevalent in Mexico, and this encourages most of them to move out of the country. When some jobs are created in their country, they can never meet the ever growing demand for employment opportunities. The jobs in Mexico are also having low payments with poor incentives.

The distance between Mexico and United States is also short and it contributes to the high rate of immigrants from Mexico. At present, Mexicans form a substantial population in U.S and they have also developed an influential social group in U.S. “Mexican American culture will continue to shape U.S. life in language, politics, food, and daily living and will help define the nation’s identity for a new century” (Huntington, 2004).

Among the minority tribes in Syria, Kurds are the largest and they occupy approximately ten percent of the population in the country. Majority of Kurds is Sunni Muslims. In addition to this, there are also Yazidi and Yarsan Kurds. A few of them are Christians. The Kurds have always faced myriad challenges due to the fact that the Syrian government discriminate them.

Most of the Kurds originally migrated from Turkey to Syria in the 1920s. Kurds are also found in Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. The Syrian government for a very long time has refused to recognize the Kurds as legal citizens of Syria. Syria lacks proper census and this makes it difficult for one to determine the exact number of Kurds in the country.

Kurds mainly stay in the North Eastern part of Syria. In 1962, about twenty percent of Kurds’ citizenships in Syria were renounced by the government. This move was, however, criticized by many activists who saw it as inhuman treatment. According to the government, the Kurds gradually migrated to Syria and settled in various cities, and they finally formed a substantial population.

It was also noted that many Kurds could use dubious methods to acquire citizenship. Most of the Kurds migrated to Syria with an aim of getting better economic opportunities. This majorly happened after the government carried out agricultural reforms. In this regard, Kurds wanted to buy property and get employment opportunities.

For along time, many Kurds living in this country have been unable to access basic social and political rights, and this has barred them from advancing economically, and politically. Since many of them have not been allowed to become citizens, they have always engaged in demonstrations in order to compel the government to register them. Out of such protests, the government finally agreed to register some of them, but they were registered separately as immigrants.

This means they are still treated like second class individuals in Syria. “With the citizenship, they move from third-class inhabitants to second-class citizens with the rest of the Kurds in Syria who are already citizens” (Davis, 1997). Nonetheless, they can now benefit from the Syrian rights. For example, they can participate in political processes through voting, and they can also own property, and get jobs in the government offices.

The Syrians only recognize the Arabs as the only original citizens. This is meant to foster unity among the Arabs by eliminating other minority tribes. This clause is actually part of their national constitution. This means that Kurds cannot have similar rights with Arabs. It is therefore impossible to change their status.

This means that Kurds are not having a chance to be treated as Kurdish citizens in that country. They should therefore stop identifying themselves as Kurdish citizens. Despite the few reforms that have been made to make the Kurds have a better life in Syria, they still face some challenges.

For example, in Syria no education is offered in Kurdish language. Secondly, they are not supposed show the Kurdish identity by any means. There is no public media that uses Kurdish language. Foreigners are also not able to claim land ownership. “From this we may conclude that part of the rationale for the census was to deprive Kurds in the area from obtaining land” (Davis, 1997). These limitations have led to the undermining of Kurds and they are only left with the option of assimilating themselves into Arab culture.

“The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a federation of seven semi-autonomous emirates, with an estimated resident population of 4.5 million, of which only 21 percent are citizens” (Arthur, 1996). The federation is under the leadership of a supreme council that acts as the executive body.

Institutions are not elected through a democratic process. Elections do exist but citizens can inform their leaders about their concerns and opinions. Citizenship is offered in the United Arab Emirates based on the constitutional guidelines. In UAE, a person is granted a citizenship status by the following processes.

First, if a person is born within this territory he can be recognized as a citizen. However, this process may in some cases not lead to automatic citizenship. Marriage also enables women whose spouses are UAE citizens to acquire citizenship. In this case, such a woman must live for more than three years within UAE. She is also expected to renounce her former citizenship. Lastly, she should also seek from the authorities.

Naturalization is also applicable in UAE, and it granted to immigrants. The conditions for naturalization vary depending on ones nationality. For example, Arab immigrants take a shorter duration to meet the naturalization requirements that other immigrants. There is no opportunity for people to have dual citizenship.

An individual can willingly renounce his or her UAE citizen citizenship and the law permits this. This is called voluntary renunciation. Besides this, an individual’s citizenship may sometimes be renounced under the following cases. First, if a person got citizenship through illegal process.

Secondly, a naturalized citizen in UAE who violates the law by committing crime can be deported. Joining a foreign army is also not allowed, and can lead to renunciation of an individual’s citizenship. Citizens of UAE have rights and obligations which are part of their national constitution. Foreigners who are working within UAE are not allowed to acquire citizenship.

Immigration laws in UAE have been reinforced in order to control the problem of human trafficking, and illegal immigrants. The manner in which democracy is perceived in the United Arab Emirates is quite different from the West. This is because Islamic faith is seen as a guiding principle that shapes other spheres of life.

Since they value their religion, naturalized citizens are not expected to criticize it, and they are also expected to be assimilated into the Muslim culture. Non Muslims in UAE might find it challenging to cope with the culture and laws of this country since they are quite rigid and discriminatory against foreigners.

The Bidouns were stateless individuals who inhabited Kuwait since its independence. This people were initially considered legal citizens of Kuwait by the government. Their status differentiated them from immigrants and other stateles individuals. Their population was also included in the national statistics.

The Bidouin also had identification documents. “With the exception of voting rights they received the benefits of full citizens, including subsidized housing, education, and health services” (Akramov, 2009). However, in 1986, the government came up with restrictions on immigrants and this led the cancellation of Bidoun rights. This situation aggravated after the gulf crisis that took place in 1990.

During the gulf war, the Bidoun who went to Iraq for safety were not allowed back after the war. Most of the Bidoun who served in the government also lost their positions. From 1994, the Biduons were expected to pay for taxes and other services that were offered to the citizens freely. After some amendments on immigration laws they, can now become citizens of Kuwait through the naturalization process.

The idea of citizenship is believed to have started in ancient Greece when a constitutional government was introduced in various Greece city states. From Greece, citizenship was spread to other territories. Many factors also influenced how citizenship and democracy developed. For example, the development and spread of Christianity in Rome influenced citizenship.

Development of citizenship is normally classified into two phases. The first phase preceded the French Revolution, while the second one took place after the revolution. After French Revolution, there was a tremendous growth of democracy and citizenship in Europe.

Citizenship is today practiced in many countries and the only difference is how it is exercised. From this discussion the rights and obligations that are offered to citizens is what determines the quality of their citizenship. Citizenship in U.S.A is well defined compared to that of Syria and Kuwait. It is the high dignity given to the Americans that makes people to crave for U.S citizenship.

Akramov, E. (2009). Dual Nationality and the Concept of Citizenship in Politics: Comparative Analysis. London: Oxford University Press.

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso.

Arthur, G. (1996). From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates. New York: Longman.

Davis, U. (1997). Citizenship and the State: A Comparative Study of Citizenship Legislation in Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. New York: Prentice Hall.

Einstein, A. (2001). The World As I See It. New York: Citadel.

Hobsbawm, E. (1996). The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. London: Vintage.

Huntington, S. (2004). Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity. Washington. D.C: Simon and Schuster.

Manville, P. (1990). The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens. Berkley: Princeton University Press.

Romero, V. (2005). Alienated: Immigrant Rights, the Constitution, and Equality in America. New York: Wiley.

Rousseau, J.-J. (1968). The Social Contract. New York: Penguin Classics.

Schama, S. (1990). Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Vintage.

West, T. (1979). Plato’s Apology of Socrates: An Interpretation, With a New Translation. New York: Cornell University Press.

Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, March 23). Citizenship History and Development. https://ivypanda.com/essays/citizenship/

"Citizenship History and Development." IvyPanda , 23 Mar. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/citizenship/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Citizenship History and Development'. 23 March.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Citizenship History and Development." March 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/citizenship/.

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The Kurds in Modern Iraq
The Kurds Culture: An Ethnographic Study
Potential Kurdish State in Northern Iraq
How the Kurdish Question Affected the Foreign Policy and Relation
The Global Problem in Syria
Religious Ethnic Factions of Syrian Civil War
Manipulation of Ethnic Identity by Groups in Iraq
Jihad and War Justification
Refugee Crisis: Term Definition
Syrian Civil War and Need for Mediation
Paul Loeb's Soul of Citizen
Argument for Legalization of Gambling in Texas
Who is to blame for slow Katrina response?
The Reasons Why Marijuana Should be Made Legal
Does Political Participation Challenge Democracy or Enhance It?

Ending Citizenship for Service in the Forever Wars

abstract. Citizenship for service is a historic tradition in the United States dating back to the Revolutionary War in which noncitizens, through military service, earned citizenship and were able to naturalize. This Essay briefly describes the history of citizenship for service dating back to the Revolutionary War and argues that two recently enacted Department of Defense policies are erecting obstacles to, and effectively ending, this centuries-old pathway to citizenship. The Essay presents data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service demonstrating that the number of military naturalizations and military naturalization applications has plummeted since the two policies took effect. Further, it reflects on how these new restrictions may show that our polity is redefining what it means to be a U.S. citizen in a way that ultimately cheapens citizenship and weakens the nation.

Introduction

Despite the increased importance of formal citizenship in our current era, one historic pathway for noncitizens to join the polity by naturalization is quickly, and quietly, disappearing. 1 Citizenship for service, a centuries-old concept allowing military service to lead to naturalization, has recently faced several obstacles—obstacles that appear to be only the first of many. New regulations promulgated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Defense (DOD) make the statutory method of gaining citizenship for service, as codified in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), a near impossibility. More recent policies dating back to the beginning of the “War on Terror,” which granted a pathway to citizenship to those with no alternative ways to naturalize, have also been suspended or repealed. While tightening restrictions on immigration are by no means a new development, it is perhaps surprising that this particular pathway to citizenship is being curtailed in the context of the longest period of hostilities in U.S. history—a period that some have dubbed the “Forever Wars.” 2

The new restrictions on military naturalizations are significant. Citizenship as a concept and as a legal reality has taken on new urgency in the lives of millions of immigrants. 3 In a climate of fear—amid strict enforcement initiatives, decreased legal protections, and increasing social exclusion of immigrants—the protections of formal citizenship are ever more relevant. Once granted, formal citizenship offers numerous tangible benefits: protections from physical exclusion and exile, access to a larger social safety net, the ability to participate more fully in politics, and immediate relative sponsorship for immigrant visas. Moreover, citizenship offers the intangible, symbolic benefit of joining the polity—a political society linked by the single identity of “American.” Although the benefits of formal citizenship are great, citizenship comes also with duties to the country and to fellow citizens. Some of these duties—military service above all—impose heavy burdens that current U.S. citizens appear increasingly unwilling to bear themselves. The restrictions on military naturalizations for noncitizens who are willing to shoulder the heaviest of these burdens reflect a broader failure to appreciate the duties of citizenship in a way that ultimately weakens the nation and cheapens citizenship itself.

Part I of this Essay recounts the history of citizenship for service as it dates back to the Revolutionary War. Part II briefly explains modern immigration law as it relates to military naturalizations. Part III details some recent policy changes by DOD and DHS that have erected barriers to this historic pathway to citizenship. Part IV uses data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to demonstrate the effect these policies have had on military naturalizations. Part V concludes with a reflection on what these changes may mean for the security of the nation and for U.S. citizenship—including how these changes reflect a changing definition of what it means to “be an American.”

I. history of citizenship for service

From the earliest days of the republic, periods of hostility have created a need for military manpower. That need has led the U.S. government to offer noncitizens, in exchange for their service, a pathway to joining the polity as full citizens. 4

During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress and the early states initially filled their military ranks in the traditional way: by paying their soldiers. But as the war dragged on, coffers and recruits depleted, forcing some states to use noncitizen recruits in their armies with the promise of full citizenship at the end of the war. 5 The Civil War was no different, and when the first national draft law was created, foreign nationals who had declared an intent to naturalize were able to gain citizenship through military service. 6 In exchange for their service, these immigrant soldiers enjoyed the first codified expedited naturalization process. 7

The World Wars saw the greatest number of military naturalizations, with a total of 244,300 individuals naturalized through military service from 1918 to 1920; and 109,392 from 1943 to 1945. 8 Indeed, during the Second World War, in order to boost troop numbers in the Pacific, President Roosevelt conscripted the army of the Philippines in return for the full benefits that would come with military service in the U.S. Army, including the apparent promise of citizenship. 9

More recent wars have been no different, with spikes in military naturalizations during periods of hostility. The War on Terror, however, has been unique in one important respect: it is the longest-running “period of hostility” in U.S. history. 10 There does not appear to be an end in sight, and throughout the conflict, noncitizens have been an integral segment of the U.S. Armed Forces. Indeed, it is reported that 35,000 noncitizens currently serve as active-duty members of the Armed Forces, and that 8,000 more enlist each year. 11 Certain programs, such as the controversial Military Accessions Vital to National Interest (MAVNI) program, have allowed those who do not have legal status, including foreign nationals qualifying for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), to serve in the military during these “forever wars,” effectively granting a pathway to citizenship to those who would otherwise have none. 12 Under President Obama in 2016, this program was effectively suspended indefinitely. 13 Beyond the national security risks cited as the reason for the program’s ultimate suspension, one major criticism of the program was that those naturalized through MAVNI were subject to biannual security check-ins—a process that essentially created a second class of citizens until it was enjoined as unlawfully discriminatory in early 2019. 14 For a time though, MAVNI offered one of the very few ways “Dreamers” could escape their undocumented status and signaled that those willing to bear the heaviest burden of citizenship deserved to join the polity, regardless of formal immigration status.

II. modern military naturalization

Under the INA, 15 there are two routes that expedite the naturalization process for noncitizens serving in the military—one for peacetime (§ 328) and one for periods of hostility (§ 329). The peacetime provision, which has not been in effect since the United States entered the current period of hostilities on September 11, 2001, is best understood as a simple fast track to naturalization. Rather than the traditional requirements mandating five years of lawful permanent-resident status, a noncitizen need only have served in the Armed Forces for one year and have resided in the United States for five years. 16

The provision for periods of hostility provides even greater expediency and laxer requirements. 17 Individuals need not have lawful status, so long as they were present in the United States when they enlisted. There is no continuous-residence or physical-presence requirement. In theory then, a noncitizen soldier could naturalize immediately after completing basic training. Additionally, the requirement of demonstrating good moral character shrinks from five years to one. 18 So long as an individual can demonstrate honorable service, naturalization through military service during hostilities faces few statutory hurdles.

figure 1. military naturalizations (1952-2018) 19

Since the enactment of the INA, President-designated periods of hostility have included the Korean Conflict from June 25, 1950 to July 1, 1955; the Vietnam Hostilities from February 28, 1961 to October 15, 1978; the Persian Gulf Conflict from August 2, 1990 to April 11, 1991; and the War on Terror from September 11, 2001 to the present. 20 Spikes in military naturalizations occur, as expected, during each of these periods of hostilities. Corresponding drop-offs in military naturalizations often follow once hostilities have ended. However, there is a sharp drop from approximately 7,000 naturalizations in 2017 to approximately 4,000 in 2018, even though the present period of hostilities is ongoing. 21 While there is not yet enough data to identify a long-term trend, newly enacted policies suggest that future military naturalizations, even within the current period of hostilities, will decline further.

III. recent policy changes

The decline of citizenship for service is likely the result of a multitude of recently enacted policies that have either erected obstacles to the historic pathway to citizenship laid out in the INA or halted the ability of certain individuals to start down that path altogether. Locations where service members may be naturalized have been reduced from twenty-three to four; 22 the MAVNI programis no longer in use; 23 and the Basic Training Naturalization Initiative, which would, true to its name, allow noncitizen enlistees to naturalize as soon as they completed basic training, has been terminated. 24 In addition to these policies, two policy memoranda issued by DOD in late 2017 appear to be limiting military naturalizations by erecting two new and substantial hurdles to citizenship for service that are not required by either statute or regulation.

The first policy change is on its surface a simple procedural change. But in effect it renders naturalization impossible for the vast majority of new recruits. On October 13, 2017, DOD issued a policy memorandum changing the required manner in which noncitizens serving in the Armed Forces obtain the necessary Form N-426 Request for Certification of Military or Naval Service. 25 This form is the means through which an individual demonstrates to USCIS that he or she is serving or has served honorably in the Armed Forces, as required for military naturalization. 26

The policy memorandum changed the number of days an individual must be in active service before a Form N-426 can be issued from zero to 180, or to an entire year if serving in the Army Reserves, creating a delay that is not required by statute. 27 Further, the memorandum raised the minimum rank of the officer who is signing the document. Whereas prior to the memorandum the Form N-426 could be signed by an applicant’s commanding officer, the new policy memorandum places original authority to sign these forms with the Secretary of the military department in which the individual serves. The Secretary can delegate this authority, but only to someone at or above an O-6 rank commissioned officer, 28 which translates to a Colonel if in the Army, Marine Corps, or Air Force; and to a Captain if in the Navy or Coast Guard. 29

Not only must the form be completed by such a high-ranking officer, but the form submitted to USCIS must be the original . 30 No scans or copies will be accepted. Notably absent from this policy guidance, and still absent two years later, are procedures that applicants can follow to have their forms signed by a Colonel or Captain and returned to them. While some military bases have created the position of “naturalization representative” to help guide noncitizens through the process, outreach by these representatives has been minimal, and education about the process throughout the military has been negligible. 31

The rationale given by DOD is facially reasonable—one needs a certificate of honorable service in order to naturalize, and how can a superior officer attest to that after only a few days of training? 32 However, not only does this explanation ignore the fact that a military service member will lose her citizenship should she fail to serve honorably for at least five years, but more importantly, it fails to mention one of the greatest incentives for the military to naturalize service members—the ability for those members to work in positions that require high-level security clearance. 33 The given explanation is inadequate when recruitment numbers are down, the MAVNI program is inoperative, and the concerns raised are addressed by explicit statutory safeguards.

In practice, this policy requires an individual either to have some personal connection with one of the highest-ranking individuals in the Armed Forces or to submit their form through the chain of command in the hopes that it will reach an appropriate officer who will complete it properly and submit the original back to them—all while being subject to additional delays of 180 days or more before the entire process may even begin. As one expert in military naturalization law stated in testimony to the Immigration and Citizenship Subcommittee, “[n]ow we have chaos.” 34 The process has become so cumbersome and prolonged that naturalizing as a civilian is considered the faster and safer alternative—entirely contrary to congressional intent in creating an expedited pathway to citizenship for members of the Armed Forces. 35

On the day that DOD issued the N-426 policy memorandum, it also issued a second memorandum requiring heightened security screenings and background checks for noncitizens who wish to enter the military, including permanent residents. Whereas previously noncitizens could enter basic training so long as their background checks were underway, they must now wait to receive a favorable “Military Service Suitability Determination” before they may begin. 36 When this policy was first implemented, backlogs made the wait for the first issuance of such a security clearance, stretch up to a year. 37

These new security-clearance policies have not only delayed the entry of noncitizens to the military, but they also meant for a time that an entire branch of the military—the Army Reserve—refused to recruit permanent residents. 38 While the mantra of this new tightening of requirements for noncitizen military naturalizations has been “national security,” it is unclear to practitioners and scholars whether the policy is justified or simply pretextual—after all, lawful permanent residents undergo stringent background checks before they are even issued a green card. 39 It is also unclear whether the new background screens have prevented any more security risks than the previous policy had. What is clear is that the policy adds further delay to any individual attempting to naturalize through the military.

The combined effect of these policies is two new, significant delays for any noncitizen attempting to naturalize through the military. Neither is required by statute, and neither seems necessary.

IV. results of recent policies

It has not been long since these policies have been implemented, but the data already show large decreases in the number of applications received by USCIS for military naturalization, as well as a spike in denial rates. USCIS has published data that show military applications received, approved, and denied from fiscal years 2010 to 2019, with data prior to 2010 showing only the numbers approved. 40 However, the data for the past ten years still give insight into recent trends, as illustrated in Table 1.

table 1. military naturalization applications received, approved, and denied (2010-2019) 41

One notable observation from these data is the large decrease in military applications received—the average from 2010 to 2017 was 10,339, compared to only 3,233 in 2018. Denial rates also appear to be rising—the average from 2010 to 2017 was 8.28%, compared to 13.67% in 2018 and 17.14% in 2019.

Some may argue that these shifts in military naturalization numbers can be accounted for by forces beyond the recently implemented policies. For example, naturalization applications historically increase in the year leading up to a presidential election, then drop off. 42 The conflicts in the Middle East are increasingly unpopular, and plans to withdraw the United States from the various conflicts date back to the presidency of George W. Bush. 43 This may push certain applicants away from military service, or motivate noncitizen soldiers to leave the service before applying for citizenship. It is also unclear how aware military personnel are of the naturalization procedures. As seen by the widely reported “deported veterans,” many military service members assume or are told that they have already become citizens upon enlistment. 44 Given recent changes to the naturalization process, military personnel may not understand the new procedures, leading to fewer applications.

However, looking at quarterly rather than yearly data helps isolate the effects of recent policy changes. In the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2017, covering July through September, and prior to the October 2017 implementation of the new DOD memoranda discussed above, USCIS received 3,132 applications for military naturalization. 45 Of those it adjudicated, USCIS approved 2,123 and denied 214, or 9.2%. 46 In the subsequent quarter, following the implementation of the memoranda, USCIS received only 1,069 applications for military naturalization. 47 It approved 755 and denied 191, or 20.2%. 48 These numbers did not recover after the first anomalous quarter, with subsequent quarters still showing a noticeable drop in the number of applications received and a higher denial rate relative to pre-memoranda numbers. 49

In sum, while there may be other factors at play in the reduction of application numbers and the rising denial rate, the 2017 policy memoranda likely play a central role. These hurdles to military naturalization are still new, and many of their effects have yet to be felt. Nonetheless, it is crucial to understand their numeric and conceptual implications, especially in the context of complementary policies that are actively chipping away at the link between military service and citizenship. 50

V. implications for the meaning of citizenship

Military service is a uniquely burdensome pathway to citizenship that emphasizes the duties of citizenship over the benefits. To start down the historic pathway of citizenship for service, individuals must be willing to set aside their own lives in service of a country that has not yet accepted them as full members. For noncitizens on this path, citizenship consists of robust duties and commitments that the rest of the polity increasingly seems not to appreciate.

The duties of citizenship have come to play a peripheral role in the contemporary practice of citizenship. When it comes to the duty of voting in elections, for instance, voter turnout since the early 1900s has peaked at approximately 60% of the eligible population. 51 Jury duty is another oft-cited duty of citizenship, yet only approximately 67% of U.S. adults see it as part of good citizenship. 52 Indeed, although trial by jury is enshrined in the Constitution, jury trials are increasingly rare, giving citizens less opportunity to participate in the judicial process. 53 USCIS lists as a duty of citizens that they must “respect and obey federal, state, and local laws,” 54 yet nearly one in three Americans has some sort of criminal record. 55 Finally, a uniquely burdensome duty of citizenship is to defend one’s country in times of hostility, but the percentage of the population with military experience was only 8% in 2014, down from 18% in 1980. 56

For the country to function as designed, someone must bear the burdens and fulfill the duties of citizenship. One would therefore expect a pathway to citizenship that emphasizes duty to country and to the citizenry as a whole to be celebrated and protected by the polity. Instead, however, this pathway has become increasingly narrow. These restrictions may be the result of anti-immigrant sentiments in the age of President Obama, called the “Deporter-in-Chief,” and President Trump, whose draconian enforcement initiatives are widely reported. 57 Allowing anti-immigrant sentiments to restrict citizenship for service contributes to the hollowing out of our understanding and practice of citizenship. And it also compounds the practical problems of insufficient military recruits and unfilled high-level military positions. Even though national security is touted as the reason behind the new restrictions, the restrictions instead diminish national security. We, who are already members of the polity, bear ultimate responsibility for these changes and will shoulder their consequences.

Citizenship for service has been a central part of our nation’s history since its founding. Yet that institution is rapidly eroding today. Restrictions on citizenship for service through two 2017 DOD policy memoranda have already led to decreased naturalization numbers. Subsequent policies are likely to accelerate this trend.

Citizenship for service rewards those willing to sacrifice everything for their chosen country with the benefits of full citizenship. It supports our nation by incentivizing individuals to serve in the military, and by providing manpower when recruitment of citizens is insufficient. Furthermore, it strengthens the meaning of citizenship by offering membership to those who bear its heaviest burdens. By restricting the naturalization of those who are willing to carry the weightiest duties of citizenship, especially during its longest period of hostilities, the United States is redefining itself in a way that weakens what it means to be an American.

Zachary R. New is a graduate of the University of Colorado School of Law and an associate attorney at the Denver office of Joseph & Hall, P.C., where he focuses on corporate immigration and federal litigation of immigration claims. A special thank you to Yale Law Journal editors Lawrence J. Liu and Zach Lustbader for their thoughtful comments and contributions that elevated and refined this paper.

Announcing the Editors of Volume 134

Announcing the first-year editors of volume 133, announcing the seventh annual student essay competition, this essay is part of a collection, 2019 yale law journal student-essay competition.

The Essays that won the third annual Yale Law Journal Student-Essay Competition each raise concerns with recent developments in immigration law. They are Zachary New’s Ending Citizenship for Service in Forever Wars and Elizabeth Montano’s The Rise and Fall of Administrative Closure in Immigration Courts .

The Rise and Fall of Administrative Closure in Immigration Courts

This Essay uses the terms “foreign national” and “noncitizen” interchangeably, and in place of the term “alien,” to mean an individual born outside of the United States who does not possess formal U.S. citizenship. To be eligible for U.S. military service, one must have some form of lawful status, so the legal intricacies that surround the term “noncitizen” are largely inapplicable. A U.S. national would, for example, be counted within the term “noncitizen,” as such an individual is eligible for U.S. citizenship through military naturalizations in the same way in which a foreign national with a lawful status would be. Further, the statutory term “alien” has developed offensive connotations. “Lawful permanent resident” or permanent resident refers to foreign nationals who have immigrated on a permanent basis to the United States and received what is referred to as their “green card.”

See Jennifer Steinhauer, Two Veterans Groups, Left and Right, Join Forces Against the Forever Wars , N.Y. Times (Mar. 16, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/us/politics/vote -vets-concerned-veterans-america.html [https://perma.cc/FB3A-XWJV].

In the late 2000s, some scholars argued that formal citizenship was becoming increasingly anachronistic and little more than a formality. See, e.g. , Peter J. Spiro, Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization ( 2008). However, a new wave of nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment in the last decade casts serious doubts on this view.

For an excellent recounting of the history of noncitizens in the military, see Cara Wong & Grace Cho, Jus Meritum: Citizenship for Service , in Transforming Politics, Transforming America: The Political and Civic Incorporation of Immigrants in the United States 71 (Taeku Lee et al. eds., 2006).

Table 20. Petitions for Naturalized Filed, Persons Naturalized, and Petitions for Naturalization Denied: Fiscal Years 1907 to 2017 , U.S. Dep’t Homeland Security (Oct. 2, 2018), https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2017/table20 [https://perma.cc /B47W-955T].

Military Order: Organized Military Forces of the Government of the Commonwealth of the Philippines Called into Service of the Armed Forces of the United States, 6 Fed. Reg. 3825 (Aug. 1, 1941). Over 250,000 Filipinos fought as guerillas, scouts, or enlisted men in the Pacific theater under orders of the U.S. military, expecting the full benefits of joining the United States military, including U.S. citizenship, in exchange. In the end, this promise was left unfulfilled, and Filipino WWII veterans are, to this day, still fighting for the full benefits promised to them. See Dorian Merina, Their Last Fight: Filipino Veterans Make a Final Push for Recognition , Am. Homefront Project (July 30, 2018), https://americanhomefront .wunc.org/post/their-last-fight-filipino-veterans-make-final-push-recognition [https:// perma.cc/9HF5-M2LP] .

See 12 U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Servs. , Policy Manual ch. 3 (2019), https:// http://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-i-chapter-3 [https://perma.cc/MQ7H -GEAR].

See The U.S. Military Helps Naturalize Non-Citizens , Military (2019), https://www .military.com/join-armed-forces/eligibility-requirements/the-us-military-helps-naturlize -non-citizens.html [ https://perma.cc/WW37-WR3T ].

Military Accessions Vital to National Interest (MAVNI) Program Eligibility , U.S. Dep’t Def. (Nov. 1, 2014), https://www.aila.org/infonet/dod-fact-sheet-on-mavni-program-eligibility https://dod.defense.gov/news/mavni-fact-sheet.pdf [ https://perma.cc/ G96E-5TKW ]. This program was established in 2008 under President Bush to create a specialized pathway for noncitizens with special skills (including language and medical skills, which were in short supply in the military) to join the Armed Forces and thus have a pathway to naturalization. Due to alleged security risks, including reported use of false identities to attempt to join the MAVNI program, the program was suspended. See infra note 13.

In 2016, the Obama Administration created additional background-screening requirements for MAVNI recruits, which effectively ended the program. Indeed, one of the foremost experts on military naturalizations, Margaret Stock, has stated that no new MAVNI recruits have joined the Armed Services since the changes. See Tara Copp, Here’s the Bottom Line on the Future of MAVNI: Many Foreign-Born Recruits May Soon Be Out , Mil. Times (July 6, 2018), https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/07/06/heres-the-bottom-line -on-the-future-of-mavni-many-foreign-born-recruits-may-soon-be-out [ https://perma.cc /H9R6-FXT6 ].

Tiwari v. Mattis, 363 F. Supp. 3d 1154 (W.D. Wash. 2019).

See 8 U.S.C. §§ 1101-1537 (2018).

See id. § 1439; 8 C.F.R. § 328.2 (2019).

See 8 U.S.C. § 1440 (2018); 8 C.F.R. § 329.2 (2019).

See U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Servs., supra note 10.

Figure 1 displays data from 1952 to 2018 to correspond with the time that the INA has been in effect and because the numbers of military naturalizations in World War I and World War II are “off the charts.” The data used in the table are from Military Naturalization Statistics , U.S. Citizenship & Immigr. Servs. ( Dec . 6, 2018), https://www.uscis.gov/military/military -naturalization-statistics [https://perma.cc/4KZK-PB28].

See supra Figure 1.

Richard Sisk, The Naturalization Process Just Got Harder for Noncitizen Troops Stationed Overseas , Military (Sept. 30, 2019), https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/09/30 /naturalization-process-just-got-harder-noncitizen-troops-stationed-overseas.html [https://perma.cc/NQK4-DS8L].

See supra notes 12-13 and accompanying text.

See The Impact of Current Immigration Policies on Service Members and Veterans, and Their Families: Hearing Before H. Subcomm. on Immigration & Citizenship , 116th Cong. at 1:20:52 (2019) [hereinafter Immigration and Service Hearings ] (statement of Margaret Stock, Attorney, Cascadia Cross Border Law Group LLC) (describing the termination of basic training nationalization). Interestingly, these policy changes come at a time when military recruitment is becoming increasingly difficult: the U.S. Armed Forces failed to meet recruitment goals in 2018 for the first time since 2005 Matthew Cox, Army Scaling Back Recruiting Goals After Missing Target, Under Secretary Says , Military (Mar. 21, 2019), https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/03/21/army-scaling-back-recruiting-goals-after-missing-target-under-secretary-says.html [https://perma.cc/KT5B-UXC3]; Cory Dickstein, Army Misses 2018 Recruiting Goal, Which Hasn’t Happened Since 2005 , Stars & Stripes (Sept. 21, 2018), https://www.stripes.com/news/army/army-misses-2018-recruiting-goal-which-hasn-t -happened-since-2005-1.548580 [https://perma.cc/3DBS-ZGYT].

See Memorandum from A. M. Kurta, Acting Under Sec’y of Def. for Pers. & Readiness, U.S. Dep’t of Def., to Sec’ys of the Military Dep’ts & Commandant of the Coast Guard (Oct. 13, 2017) [hereinafter N-426 Memo], https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs /Naturalization-Honorable-Service-Certification.pdf [https://perma.cc/NKD8-SUYT].

See N-426, Request for Certification of Military or Naval Service , U.S. Citizenship & Immig. Servs . (July 10, 2019), https://www.uscis.gov/n-426 . This form is required to be submitted with any military naturalization application in order to certify to USCIS that the applicant served honorably in the Armed Forces.

N-426 Memo, supra note 25, at 2-3.

See U.S. Military Rank Insignia , U.S. Dep’t Def. , https://www.defense.gov/Our-Story /Insignias/#enlisted-insignias [https://perma.cc/36LE-A6JR].

See N-426 Memo, supra note 25, at 1.

Immigration and Service Hearings , supra note 24, at 6 (written testimony of Jennie Pasquarella, Director of Immigrants’ Rights and Senior Staff Attorney, American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California) (“Many deported veterans we interviewed never applied for naturalization during their service because they were led to believe that their service automatically made them citizens. In fact, many had been told just that by their recruiters or their military chain of command . . . .”).

See Jim Garamone, DoD Announces Policies Affecting Foreign Nationals Entering Military , U.S. Dep’t Def. (Oct. 13, 2017), https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/News/Article/Article /1342430/dod-announces-policies-affecting-foreign-nationals-entering-military [https:// perma.cc/2KWF-XR72].

See 8 U.S.C. § 1440(c) (2018); How to Get a Security Clearance , Military (2019), https://www.military.com/veteran-jobs/security-clearance-jobs/official-security-clearance -guidelines.html [https://perma.cc/A9Q8-VPJV].

See Immigration and Service Hearings, supra note 24 , at 1:32:28 (statement of Margaret Stock, Attorney, Cascadia Cross Border Law Group LLC).

See Practice Advisory: Changes to the Expedited Naturalization Process for Military Service Members , Immigrant Legal Resource Ctr. (Mar. 2018), https://www.ilrc.org/sites/default /files/resources/changes_expedited_natz_process_military-20180329.pdf [https://perma .cc/MT7G-3KGF].

Memorandum from A. M. Kurta, Acting Under Sec’y of Def. for Pers. & Readiness, U.S. Dep’t of Def., to Sec’ys of the Military Dep’ts et al. (Oct. 13, 2017), https://dod.defense.gov/Portals /1/Documents/pubs/Service-Suitability-Determinations-For-Foreign-Nationals.pdf [https://perma.cc/VR7N-JKFF].

Garamone, supra note 32.

Meghann Myers, Green Card Holders Can Join the Army Reserve Again—After a Wait , ArmyTimes (Dec. 27, 2017), https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2017/12/27 /green-card-holders-can-join-the-army-reserve-again-after-a-wait [https://perma.cc/T8EK -2P6N]; Emily C. Singer, Green Card Holders Cannot Enlist in the Army Reserve “for the Time Being,” Army Confirms , Mic (Oct. 18, 2017), https://www.mic.com/articles/185357/green -card-holders-cannot-enlist-in-the-army-reserve-for-the-time-being-army-confirms [https://perma.cc/JX7D-2YBE].

As part of the application process for permanent residence, an individual’s information is queried through the Interagency Border Inspection System (IBIS), which collects data from multiple agencies, including the sub-agencies within the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to identify any national security risks and prevent ineligible applicants from obtaining green cards. See U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Servs. , Adjudicator’s Field Manual ch. 10.3, https://www.uscis.gov/ilink/docView/AFM/HTML /AFM/0-0-0-1/0-0-0-1067/0-0-0-1166.html [https://perma.cc/F82U-T8N4].

See Immigration and Citizenship Data , U.S. Citizenship & Immigr. Servs., https:// http://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-studies/immigration-forms-data [https://perma.cc/8BAY-NXL7].

See Katherine Witsman, Annual Flow Report, U.S. Naturalizations: 2016 , U.S. Dep’t Homeland Security (Nov. 2017), https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications /Naturalizations_2016.pdf [https://perma.cc/7AWG-76BZ].

R. Chuck Mason, Cong. Research Serv., R40011, U.S.-Iraq Withdrawal/Status of Forces Agreement: Issues for Congressional Oversight (2009), https://fas.org /sgp/crs/natsec/R40011.pdf [https://perma.cc/DX7Z-FZBC].

A large, and growing controversy surrounds the so-called “deported veterans.” The term refers to noncitizens who have served in the Armed Forces but did not naturalize, and then committed a removable offense after returning to civilian life that resulted in deportation. Many of these individuals report that they thought they already were citizens, leading to the widespread criticism that there is insufficient education for noncitizen service members on how to naturalize. See, e.g. , Maria Ines Zamudio, Deported U.S. Veterans Feel Abandoned By the Country They Defended , NPR (June 21, 2019) https://www.npr.org/local/309/2019/06/21 /733371297/deported-u-s-veterans-feel-abandoned-by-the-country-they-defended [https:// perma.cc/ZMS7-RRBP] (“Velsaco said he was told by military personnel that he was a U.S. citizen. That was a lie.”).

Number of Form N-400 Applications for Naturalization, by Category of Naturalization, Case Status, and USCIS Field Office Location July 1-September 30, 2017 , U.S Citizenship & Immigr. Servs., https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports%20and%20Studies /Immigration%20Forms%20Data/Naturalization%20Data/N400_performancedata_fy2017 _qtr4.pdf [https://perma.cc/77M2-DU7W].

Number of Form N-400 Applications for Naturalization by Category of Naturalization, Case Status, and USCIS Field Office Location October 1-December 31, 2017 , U.S. Citizenship & Immigr. Servs., https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports%20and %20Studies/Immigration%20Forms%20Data/Naturalization%20Data/N400 _performancedata_fy2018_qtr1.pdf [https://perma.cc/SM59-QEGZ].

In the second quarter of Fiscal Year 2018, USCIS received only 661 applications for military naturalization, approved 420 applications, and denied 76, or 15.3%. Number of Form N-400, Application for Naturalization, by Category of Naturalization, Case Status, and USCIS Field Office Location January 1-March 31, 2018 , U.S. Citizenship & Immigr. Servs., https://www .uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports%20and%20Studies/Immigration %20Forms%20Data/Naturalization%20Data/N400_performancedata_fy2018_qtr2.pdf [https://perma.cc/R8NW-5838]. It is also noteworthy that the Basic Training Naturalization Initiative was terminated at the beginning of the second quarter of Fiscal Year 2018. While this may partially explain later application numbers and denial rates, it cannot explain the sharp drop in the immediately preceding quarter.

This drop in quarterly numbers has persisted. In the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2019, USCIS received only 705 applications for military naturalization, approved 1,053 applications, and denied 175, or 14.25%. Number of Form N-400 Applications for Naturalization, by Category of Naturalization, Case Status, and USCIS Field Office Location July 1 1-September 30, 2019 , U.S. Citizenship & Immigr. Servs., https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources /Reports%20and%20Studies/Immigration%20Forms%20Data/Naturalization%20Data /N400_performancedata_fy2019_qtr4.pdf [https://perma.cc/9763-V4YL].

Further policies restricting citizenship in the military context are still being issued. For example, in late August 2019, USCIS published new rules restricting citizenship for children of troops abroad, the reach and implications of which have yet to be seen. See U.S. Citizenship & Immigr. Servs ., PA-2019-05, Defining ‘Residence’ in Statutory Provisions Related to Citizenship (Aug. 28, 2019), https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/policymanual /updates/20190828-ResidenceForCitizenship.pdf [https://perma.cc/V9CF-HWXR].

Voter Turnout , FairVote (2019) , https://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout _101 [https://perma.cc/C75K-QTVV].

John Gramlich, Jury Duty Is Rare, but Most Americans See It as Part of Good Citizenship , Pew Res. Ctr. (Aug. 24, 2017), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/24/jury-duty -is-rare-but-most-americans-see-it-as-part-of-good-citizenship [https://perma.cc/A3J3 -UMFP].

See Trends in State Courts: Special Focus on Family Law and Court Communications , Nat’l Ctr. for St. Cts. 98-99 (2016), https://www.ncsc.org/~/media/Microsites/Files/Trends %202016/Revitalizing-the-Jury.ashx [https://perma.cc/5VZ8-PFAE].

Citizenship Rights and Responsibilities , U.S. Citizenship & Immigr. Servs ., https://www .uscis.gov/citizenship/learners/citizenship-rights-and-responsibilities [https://perma.cc /E983-M7TW].

Matthew Friedman, Just Facts: As Many Americans Have Criminal Records As College Diplomas , Brennan Ctr. for Just. (Nov. 17, 2015), https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/just-facts -many-americans-have-criminal-records-college-diplomas [https://perma.cc/J64W-4KEP].

Gretchen Livingston, Profile of U.S. Veterans Is Changing Dramatically as Their Ranks Decline , Pew Res. Ctr. (Nov. 11, 2016), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/11/profile -of-u-s-veterans-is-changing-dramatically-as-their-ranks-decline [https://perma.cc/S58B-JW58].

See Bill Ong Hing, Deporter-in-Chief: Obama v. Trump (Univ. of S.F. Law Research Paper No. 2019-03, 2018), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3254680 [https://perma.cc/CFY7-4XLD] . Though popularly championed as an ally of immigrants after the advent of DACA, immigration advocates widely criticized President Obama as the “Deporter-in-Chief” due to his historically high numbers of formal removals. The bureaucratic machinery that allowed for this historic level of immigration enforcement has been used by President Trump to implement and enforce even broader and more draconian immigration measures—draconian measures he promised to enact from the campaign trail.

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Essay Samples on Citizenship

What is patriotism: exploring the essence of love for one's country.

Patriotism, a sentiment deeply ingrained in the human spirit, is often described as the love, loyalty, and devotion one feels towards their homeland. It is an emotion that transcends geographical boundaries, uniting individuals under the banner of shared identity and pride. Patriotism has been the...

Citizenship

Civic Literacy and Its Importance in the 21st Century

Introduction Today, in the 21st century, societies are dependent on the people’s ability to read, hear, write (literacy) and understand the issues of the day. It is a must for the citizens to understand economic issues, laws made by politicians and other problems in order...

Should Illegal Immigrants Become Legal Citizens

Have you ever imagined a world where everyone is treated equally? A world where there are no borders to separate countries, or where everyone is a citizen, living all together as humans with no inequality that could separate them depending on where they are coming...

Illegal Immigration

Becoming A Good Responsible Citizen In Democratic Society

In what way can leaners’ ability to become active citizens be enhanced? What knowledge, skills and values do they need to possess and flourish as active democratic citizens? The European Economic and Social Committee (2012) defines active citizenship as: the glue that keeps society together…....

Civil Rights

Values And Responsibilities Of An Active Citizen

Nelson and Kerr (2006) explains active citizenship as being “fundamentally about engagement and participation”. This type of engagement can be either “citizens engaging with the state” (electoral) or “citizens engaging with and among themselves” (civic) (GGLN, 2013, p.12; Annette, 2008). Active citizenship has become one...

Social Responsibility

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The Rights And Responsibilities Of A Citizen In America

In order to be eligible to vote for any government election, there are requirements that need to be met; being eighteen years old by election day, a citizen of the United States, meeting your state residency requirements, and being registered to vote by your state’s...

Individual Rights
Responsibility

Exploring Citizen's Engagement And Responsibilities Of A Citizen

This paper examines in a first place different forms of citizen’s engagement and his responsibilities toward society. In a second place, it discusses the background or the framework of these forms. What is the social role of a citizen? How valid morality could be the...

Ideal Good Citizen In A Totalitarian Government

Why would any person or government suppress its own people? Throughout history, different forms of government have been developed with varying intentions. The leaders in these governments adopt ideologies that may either promote an inclusive government where citizens are involved in the decision making or...

American Government

Pros And Cons Of Providing Us Citizenship To Central American Refugees

I am torn on what side to pick. I can see both, the positive and negative, on providing automatic U.S. citizenship to Central American children who come to the U.S. by themselves in order to escape violence in their home countries. The negative part about...

Cultural Identity

Corporate Citizenship in the U.K. and the U.S.

Corporate citizenship is the new social identity supposing an important role in a firm’s life in the U.S. and Europe today. It is not enough for companies to generate a profit. U.S. and European citizens expect them to generate a profit and conduct themselves in...

Birthright Citizenship as the Key Factor of Equality in USA

Birthright Citizenship refers to the law that resulted from the Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution that took place around 148 years ago. This declares all the children who are born on US soil as legal US citizens. This right is often referred as jus...

Black Opinion on Immigration, Citizenship & the Role of White Supremacy

In Niambi Michele Carter’s book American While Black, she analyzes black responses to immigration, developing a term “conflicted nativism” that she uses to describe black views on immigration and citizenship. This term is developed throughout the book through historical analysis and a case study approach...

African American History

Discussion of Citizenship Without Equality in Rankine's and Shakespear's Beliefs

At present, our society is facing various social inequalities. A significant problem is discrimination against minorities in the community and workplace. These minorities are neglected and concealed of these inequalities also by the media. Citizenship is crucial to this issue because it has always been...

Literature Review Of Living Conditions Of The Lower-Class Citizens In Hong Kong

Hong Kong is in Eastern Asia; they are southeast of China and southwest of Taiwan. It has a population of 7.4 million people and a size of 2755 km2. Hong Kong is an international financial hub that is extremely crowded so living space is limited....

Social Class

Best topics on Citizenship

1. What is Patriotism: Exploring the Essence of Love for One’s Country

2. Civic Literacy and Its Importance in the 21st Century

3. Should Illegal Immigrants Become Legal Citizens

4. Becoming A Good Responsible Citizen In Democratic Society

5. Values And Responsibilities Of An Active Citizen

6. The Rights And Responsibilities Of A Citizen In America

7. Exploring Citizen’s Engagement And Responsibilities Of A Citizen

8. Ideal Good Citizen In A Totalitarian Government

9. Pros And Cons Of Providing Us Citizenship To Central American Refugees

10. Corporate Citizenship in the U.K. and the U.S.

11. Birthright Citizenship as the Key Factor of Equality in USA

12. Black Opinion on Immigration, Citizenship & the Role of White Supremacy

13. Discussion of Citizenship Without Equality in Rankine’s and Shakespear’s Beliefs

14. Literature Review Of Living Conditions Of The Lower-Class Citizens In Hong Kong

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School Education /

Essay on CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act): History, New Rules, and More

Updated on
Mar 14, 2024

Essay on CAA: The Indian Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act on 11th December 2019 after long debates. CAA will provide Indian citizenship to the 6 minority communities of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, who have been living illegally in India. These 6 communities are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians. Opposition, on the other hand, has claimed that the CAA is unconstitutional and will deprive the rights of citizenship.

Essay on CAA is often asked in academic tests and competitive tests. You need to understand all the dimensions of this newly enacted law to secure better marks. This page will discuss the history of the Citizenship Amendment Act, the new rules added by the Indian Government, and other important details. Stay tuned!

Check out our 200+ Essay Topics for School Students in English

This Blog Includes:

Important points of the caa, history of the citizenship amendment act, caa new rules, is caa unconstitutional, why is caa controversial, what will be the outcomes of the caa.

The CAA will benefit thousands of Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Parsis, who have been living in India illegally or on long-term visas (LTV).
CAA is only applicable to people who entered India illegally before 31st December 2014.
Individuals with any criminal records will not be eligible for Indian citizenship under the Foreigners Act, of 1946 and the Passport Act, of 1920 .
These two acts specify punishments for entering or residing illegally in India or staying after the expiration of their visas.
The Muslim community has been excluded from the CAA since the above-mentioned countries are Muslim-majority countries.

The Citizenship Amendment Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha (House of Commons) in 2016 as an amendment to the Citizenship Act of 1955. The Joint Parliamentary Committee concluded its report on the CAA Bil on 7th January 2019. On 8th and 11th January 2019, the CAA Bill was passed by the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha and was sent for the President’s assent.

The Citizenship Amendment Act will provide Indian citizenship to 6 communities of India’s three neighboring countries; Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, who are minorities in their country. These 6 communities are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians.

Indian citizenship will be provided to only those individuals who have been residing in India before 21st December 2014.

On 11th March 2024, the Indin Government revised the rules of the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019. These new rules will help in the implementation of this much-awaited controversial law. According to the CAA’s new rules, individuals belonging to any of these 6 communities must have the following documents issued by their country of origin:

Birth or Educational Institution Certificate.
Identification Card (of any kind).
Any license or certificate.
Land or tenancy records or any other official documents where their name and age are mentioned.

These documents are necessary to prove that the individual was once a resident of that country. Moreover, it will provide a sense of belonging to their identity.

*The documents listed above are not required for children in the age group of 5 to 11 years. This act relaxed the resident requirement for the neutralization of these children.

Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

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Apply for Citizenship

Apply for U.S. citizenship by submitting Form N-400, Application for Naturalization . This form is available to file online . There are exceptions and modifications to the naturalization requirements that are available to those who qualify. USCIS also provides accommodations for individuals with disabilities.

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To help you prepare for the naturalization process, use this section of the Citizenship Resource Center to learn about free USCIS naturalization information session and find help in your community.

Free Naturalization Information Sessions Learn more about the naturalization process, eligibility requirements to become a citizen, and interview and test at a free naturalization information session in your area. USCIS sessions are open to the public.

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Rescue workers gather near a damaged building, standing amid rubble in the street.

Why Taiwan Was So Prepared for a Powerful Earthquake

Decades of learning from disasters, tightening building codes and increasing public awareness may have helped its people better weather strong quakes.

Search-and-rescue teams recover a body from a leaning building in Hualien, Taiwan. Thanks to improvements in building codes after past earthquakes, many structures withstood Wednesday’s quake. Credit...

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By Chris Buckley , Meaghan Tobin and Siyi Zhao

Photographs by Lam Yik Fei

Chris Buckley reported from the city of Hualien, Meaghan Tobin from Taipei, in Taiwan.

April 4, 2024

When the largest earthquake in Taiwan in half a century struck off its east coast, the buildings in the closest city, Hualien, swayed and rocked. As more than 300 aftershocks rocked the island over the next 24 hours to Thursday morning, the buildings shook again and again.

But for the most part, they stood.

Even the two buildings that suffered the most damage remained largely intact, allowing residents to climb to safety out the windows of upper stories. One of them, the rounded, red brick Uranus Building, which leaned precariously after its first floors collapsed, was mostly drawing curious onlookers.

The building is a reminder of how much Taiwan has prepared for disasters like the magnitude-7.4 earthquake that jolted the island on Wednesday. Perhaps because of improvements in building codes, greater public awareness and highly trained search-and-rescue operations — and, likely, a dose of good luck — the casualty figures were relatively low. By Thursday, 10 people had died and more than 1,000 others were injured. Several dozen were missing.

“Similar level earthquakes in other societies have killed far more people,” said Daniel Aldrich , a director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University. Of Taiwan, he added: “And most of these deaths, it seems, have come from rock slides and boulders, rather than building collapses.”

Across the island, rail traffic had resumed by Thursday, including trains to Hualien. Workers who had been stuck in a rock quarry were lifted out by helicopter. Roads were slowly being repaired. Hundreds of people were stranded at a hotel near a national park because of a blocked road, but they were visited by rescuers and medics.

A handful of men and women walks on a street between vehicles, some expressing shock at what they are seeing.

On Thursday in Hualien city, the area around the Uranus Building was sealed off, while construction workers tried to prevent the leaning structure from toppling completely. First they placed three-legged concrete blocks that resembled giant Lego pieces in front of the building, and then they piled dirt and rocks on top of those blocks with excavators.

“We came to see for ourselves how serious it was, why it has tilted,” said Chang Mei-chu, 66, a retiree who rode a scooter with her husband Lai Yung-chi, 72, to the building on Thursday. Mr. Lai said he was a retired builder who used to install power and water pipes in buildings, and so he knew about building standards. The couple’s apartment, near Hualien’s train station, had not been badly damaged, he said.

“I wasn’t worried about our building, because I know they paid attention to earthquake resistance when building it. I watched them pour the cement to make sure,” Mr. Lai said. “There have been improvements. After each earthquake, they raise the standards some more.”

It was possible to walk for city blocks without seeing clear signs of the powerful earthquake. Many buildings remained intact, some of them old and weather-worn; others modern, multistory concrete-and-glass structures. Shops were open, selling coffee, ice cream and betel nuts. Next to the Uranus Building, a popular night market with food stalls offering fried seafood, dumplings and sweets was up and running by Thursday evening.

Earthquakes are unavoidable in Taiwan, which sits on multiple active faults. Decades of work learning from other disasters, implementing strict building codes and increasing public awareness have gone into helping its people weather frequent strong quakes.

Not far from the Uranus Building, for example, officials had inspected a building with cracked pillars and concluded that it was dangerous to stay in. Residents were given 15 minutes to dash inside and retrieve as many belongings as they could. Some ran out with computers, while others threw bags of clothes out of windows onto the street, which was also still littered with broken glass and cement fragments from the quake.

One of its residents, Chen Ching-ming, a preacher at a church next door, said he thought the building might be torn down. He was able to salvage a TV and some bedding, which now sat on the sidewalk, and was preparing to go back in for more. “I’ll lose a lot of valuable things — a fridge, a microwave, a washing machine,” he said. “All gone.”

Requirements for earthquake resistance have been built into Taiwan’s building codes since 1974. In the decades since, the writers of Taiwan’s building code also applied lessons learned from other major earthquakes around the world, including in Mexico and Los Angeles, to strengthen Taiwan’s code.

After more than 2,400 people were killed and at least 10,000 others injured during the Chi-Chi quake of 1999, thousands of buildings built before the quake were reviewed and reinforced. After another strong quake in 2018 in Hualien, the government ordered a new round of building inspections. Since then, multiple updates to the building code have been released.

“We have retrofitted more than 10,000 school buildings in the last 20 years,” said Chung-Che Chou, the director general of the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering in Taipei.

The government had also helped reinforce private apartment buildings over the past six years by adding new steel braces and increasing column and beam sizes, Dr. Chou said. Not far from the buildings that partially collapsed in Hualien, some of the older buildings that had been retrofitted in this way survived Wednesday’s quake, he said.

The result of all this is that even Taiwan’s tallest skyscrapers can withstand regular seismic jolts. The capital city’s most iconic building, Taipei 101, once the tallest building in the world, was engineered to stand through typhoon winds and frequent quakes. Still, some experts say that more needs to be done to either strengthen or demolish structures that don’t meet standards, and such calls have grown louder in the wake of the latest earthquake.

Taiwan has another major reason to protect its infrastructure: It is home to the majority of production for the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest maker of advanced computer chips. The supply chain for electronics from smartphones to cars to fighter jets rests on the output of TSMC’s factories, which make these chips in facilities that cost billions of dollars to build.

The 1999 quake also prompted TSMC to take extra steps to insulate its factories from earthquake damage. The company made major structural adjustments and adopted new technologies like early warning systems. When another large quake struck the southern city of Kaohsiung in February 2016, TSMC’s two nearby factories survived without structural damage.

Taiwan has made strides in its response to disasters, experts say. In the first 24 hours after the quake, rescuers freed hundreds of people who were trapped in cars in between rockfalls on the highway and stranded on mountain ledges in rock quarries.

“After years of hard work on capacity building, the overall performance of the island has improved significantly,” said Bruce Wong, an emergency management consultant in Hong Kong. Taiwan’s rescue teams have come to specialize in complex efforts, he said, and it has also been able to tap the skills of trained volunteers.

Taiwan’s resilience also stems from a strong civil society that is involved in public preparedness for disasters.

Ou Chi-hu, a member of a group of Taiwanese military veterans, was helping distribute water and other supplies at a school that was serving as a shelter for displaced residents in Hualien. He said that people had learned from the 1999 earthquake how to be more prepared.

“They know to shelter in a corner of the room or somewhere else safer,” he said. Many residents also keep a bag of essentials next to their beds, and own fire extinguishers, he added.

Around him, a dozen or so other charities and groups were offering residents food, money, counseling and childcare. The Tzu Chi Foundation, a large Taiwanese Buddhist charity, provided tents for families to use inside the school hall so they could have more privacy. Huang Yu-chi, a disaster relief manager with the foundation, said nonprofits had learned from earlier disasters.

“Now we’re more systematic and have a better idea of disaster prevention,” Mr. Huang said.

Mike Ives contributed reporting from Seoul.

Chris Buckley , the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues. More about Chris Buckley

Meaghan Tobin is a technology correspondent for The Times based in Taipei, covering business and tech stories in Asia with a focus on China. More about Meaghan Tobin

Siyi Zhao is a reporter and researcher who covers news in mainland China for The Times in Seoul. More about Siyi Zhao

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Citizenship
The acquisition of citizenship by a woman through marriage to a citizen was the prevailing principle in modern times until after World War I.Under this system, the wife and children shared the nationality status of the husband and father as head of the family.From the 1920s, under the impact of women's suffrage and ideas about the equality of men and women, a new system developed in which a ...
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