Citizenship Matters

In 1991 after the Rodney King assault in Los Angeles, I was living in Boston and wanted to do something to support the dismantling of systemic racism. So I volunteered to be an adult literacy volunteer at a non-profit then known as Harriet Tubman House. After the teacher training course, I was matched with a middle-aged Jamaican man named Devon. We met regularly at the Dudley Square library for his reading lessons because he had a job nearby. Shortly after we started working together he told me he was applying for U.S. citizenship and he asked me to help him study for the test. This was my first exposure to the citizenship process.

Devon brought his citizenship application paperwork and the citizenship test study guide to his reading lessons and I began my own learning journey about how our government constitutes citizenship. To write this piece today I went online (USCIS.gov) and downloaded a 52-megabyte, 85-page PDF file called “The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Civics Test Textbook.” Civics is the social science of the rights and duties of citizens. There are 100 questions on the U.S. Civics Test, which has been updated since I last read it many years ago. And even though I consider myself a citizen activist, I did not know the correct answer to every question. For example, I forgot that Pennsylvania is one of the states along the border with Canada and I also forgot that serving on a jury is one of the responsibilities of citizenship.

People like Devon who were not born in the U.S. and apply for naturalized citizenship are expected to know U.S. history and geography, our branches of government, the Amendments to the Constitution, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens. I suspect most U.S. citizens don’t know all that. I had four years of American History in my public school education in Illinois, but it has been decades since I delved into this stuff. Today many public school students don’t learn American History or civics. Many of us, but particularly our youngest generations are ignorant of our rights and duties as citizens of the United States. And yet millions of people from other countries want to live here and work here and therefore study our civics to achieve U.S. citizenship. 

In trying to teach Devon to read, I discovered he was severely dyslexic. He had a stutter when he was nervous, and a speech impediment that combined with his Jamaican accent could make him difficult to understand. But he had a mischievous sense of humor, he told very funny jokes and regaled me with stories of his boyhood in Jamaica, the medicinal powers of Guinness, and the grandmother who raised him. As a green card holder, he was employed at a local convenience store stocking shelves. He memorized retail inventory by how items looked, not by reading the label. Then he got a job as a janitor at Roxbury Community College. He knew his way around the campus by memorizing signs as pictures, not reading them as words. 

The citizenship application process requires an in-person interview at a government office and a written test. I went with him to the interview appointment and explained his dyslexia issues to the man behind the desk whose first question to Devon was, “Who was the first president of the United States?” Devon smiled and said, “George Washington.” The next couple questions were about Amendments to the Constitution and Devon couldn’t remember the precise answers, although he remembered we had talked about them. The interviewer paused for a moment and looked at us. Then he asked, “Why do you want to become an American citizen?”

Without missing a beat Devon said, “Because America is the greatest country in the world. Look at me. I come here a poor boy and I can get a job. I have my own apartment. And I’m not on welfare. Now this is my home. America is my country.” I was so shocked by his passionate stream of words that I got tears in my eyes. The interviewer smiled at me. Devon passed the test and made the list for a Naturalization Ceremony where along with a large group of new citizens, he swore this Oath of Allegiance to the United States:

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”

That Oath of Allegiance is why citizenship matters. Citizenship is the system of shared responsibility that makes us a nation. It’s a commitment to steward the public good for the good of the nation. As citizens we are co-owners of our sovereignty. Citizenship is our strength. Conscious citizenship requires education, mutual aid, and thoughtful consideration of our collective destiny. That’s why we need to teach civics. The resilience of our democracy depends upon a citizenry schooled in participation, self-governance, and duty. Citizenship is our duty to ourselves.

Now we are under attack by those who would dismantle public education and remove civics from the curriculum to weaken our opposition to authoritarianism. Some people want to keep us ignorant of civics because our apathy enables their power grab. Some people want to keep millions of immigrants undocumented because they are cheap labor and convenient scapegoats for our social problems. Millions of workers without a path to citizenship have fewer ways to protect themselves from abuse, and yet we depend on them to power our economy.

What is the path to citizenship? I had to look it up (immigrationforum.org). I’m a citizen and I didn’t know the path to citizenship because my family came to this country as immigrants on a boat more than a hundred years ago and I was born here. To become a citizen, a person who is not born in the U.S. must have family here already, or employment, or refugee status. The family and employment paths have annual caps. Mexican siblings of U.S. citizens must wait at least 20 years to come here legally. The refugee path is blocked by a conspicuous lack of government resources to process applications. 

Our government allows millions of people into the country without family or employment or refugee status. Then those undocumented people are considered illegal. But they get hired for jobs anyway. It’s not illegal to hire an illegal immigrant. Law enforcement goes to their workplace to round them up to deport them. But they don’t round up their employers. 

For illegal immigrants, the process of becoming a legal immigrant requires leaving the U.S., but immigration laws bar anyone who has been undocumented for more than a year from re-entering the U.S. for 10 years. So millions of immigrants are stuck in a Catch 22: the only way they are allowed in the country is undocumented, and if they then try to become documented, they get kicked out. It’s a trap that enables a captive supply of cheap labor. We have an economy that needs millions of immigrants to do low wage jobs, and we obviously have the technology to track millions of people wherever they are, but we don’t have a reasonable path to citizenship. Who benefits from that?