Citizenship of the United States
Citizenship of the United States[2][3] is a legal status that entails Americans with specific rights, duties, protections, and benefits in the United States. It serves as a foundation of fundamental rights derived from and protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States, such as freedom of expression, due process, the rights to vote (however, not all citizens have the right to vote in all federal elections, for example, those living in Puerto Rico), live and work in the United States, and to receive federal assistance.[4][5]
"U.S. citizen" redirects here. For the people, see Americans. For the legal term, see United States person.
There are two primary sources of citizenship: birthright citizenship, in which persons born within the territorial limits of the United States are presumed to be a citizen, or—providing certain other requirements are met—born abroad to a United States citizen parent,[6][7] and naturalization, a process in which an eligible legal immigrant applies for citizenship and is accepted.[8] The first of these two pathways to citizenship is specified in the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution which reads:
The second is provided for in U.S. law. In Article One of the Constitution, the power to establish a "uniform rule of naturalization" is granted explicitly to Congress.
United States law permits multiple citizenship. Citizens of other countries who are naturalized as United States citizens may retain their previous citizenship, although they must renounce allegiance to the other country. A United States citizen retains United States citizenship when becoming the citizen of another country, should that country's laws allow it. United States citizenship can be renounced by Americans via a formal procedure at a United States embassy.[9][10]
National citizenship signifies membership in the country as a whole; state citizenship, in contrast, signifies a relation between a person and a particular state and has application generally limited to domestic matters. State citizenship may affect (1) tax decisions, (2) eligibility for some state-provided benefits such as higher education, and (3) eligibility for state political posts such as United States senator. At the time of the American Civil War, state citizenship was a source of significant contention between the Union and the seceding Southern states.
Civic participation[edit]
Civic participation is not required in the United States. There is no requirement to attend town meetings, belong to a political party, or vote in elections. However, a benefit of naturalization is the ability to "participate fully in the civic life of the country".[15] Moreover, to be a citizen means to be vitally important to politics and not ignored.[20] There is disagreement about whether popular lack of involvement in politics is helpful or harmful.
Vanderbilt professor Dana D. Nelson suggests that most Americans merely vote for president every four years, and sees this pattern as undemocratic. In her book Bad for Democracy, Nelson argues that declining citizen participation in politics is unhealthy for long term prospects for democracy.
However, writers such as Robert D. Kaplan in The Atlantic see benefits to non-involvement; he wrote "the very indifference of most people allows for a calm and healthy political climate".[21] Kaplan elaborated: "Apathy, after all, often means that the political situation is healthy enough to be ignored. The last thing America needs is more voters—particularly badly educated and alienated ones—with a passion for politics".[21] He argued that civic participation, in itself, is not always a sufficient condition to bring good outcomes, and pointed to authoritarian societies such as Singapore which prospered because it had "relative safety from corruption, from breach of contract, from property expropriation, and from bureaucratic inefficiency".[22]
Corporate citizenship[edit]
Since corporations are considered persons in the eyes of the law, some carry US citizenship. US citizenship's main advantage for a corporation is the protection and support of the United States government in legal or bureaucratic disputes. For example, the airline Virgin America asked the United States Department of Transportation to be treated as an American air carrier when jockeying with foreign governments for access to air routes and overseas airports.[78] Alaska Airlines, a competitor of Virgin America, asked for a review of the situation, suggesting that Virgin violated a provision of United States law requiring "foreign ownership in a United States air carrier [be] limited to 25% of the voting interest in the carrier".[78]
For the purposes of diversity jurisdiction in the United States civil procedure, corporate citizenship is determined by the principal place of business of the corporation. There is some degree of disagreement among legal authorities as to how exactly this may be determined.
Controversies[edit]
The issue of citizenship naturalization is a highly contentious matter in United States politics, particularly regarding illegal immigrants. Candidates in the 2008 presidential election, such as Rudy Giuliani, tried to "carve out a middle ground" on the issue of illegal immigration, but rivals such as John McCain advocated legislation requiring illegal immigrants to first leave the country before being eligible to apply as citizens.[90] Some measures to require proof of citizenship upon registering to vote have met with controversy.[91]
Controversy can arise when citizenship affects political issues. Whether to include questions about current citizenship status in the United States Census questions has been debated in the Senate.[60][92] Census data affects state electoral clout; it also affects budgetary allocations.[92] Including non-citizens in Census counts also shifts political power to states that have large numbers of non-citizens due to the fact that reapportionment of congressional seats is based on Census data, and including non-citizens in the census is mandated by the United States Constitution.[93]
There have been controversies based on speculation about which way newly naturalized citizens are likely to vote. Since immigrants from many countries have been presumed to vote Democratic if naturalized, there have been efforts by Democratic administrations to streamline citizenship applications before elections to increase turnout; Republicans, in contrast, have exerted pressure to slow down the process.[94] In 1997, there were efforts to strip the citizenship of 5,000 newly approved immigrants who, it was thought, had been "wrongly naturalized"; a legal effort to do this presented enormous challenges.[94] An examination by the Immigration and Naturalization Service of 1.1 million people who were granted citizenship from September 1995 to September 1996 found 4,946 cases in which a criminal arrest should have disqualified an applicant or in which an applicant lied about his or her criminal history.[94] Before the 2008 election, there was controversy about the speed of the USCIS in processing applications; one report suggested that the agency would complete 930,000 applications in time for the newly processed citizens to vote in the November 2008 election.[95] Foreign-born naturalized citizens tend to vote at the same rates as natives. For example, in the state of New Jersey in the 2008 election, the foreign born represented 20.1% of the state's population of 8,754,560; of these, 636,000 were eighteen or older and hence eligible to vote; of eligible voters, 396,000 actually voted, which was about 62%.[96] So foreign-born citizens vote in roughly the same proportion (62%) as native citizens (67%).[96]
There has been controversy about the agency in charge of citizenship. The USCIS has been criticized as being a "notoriously surly, inattentive bureaucracy" with long backlogs in which "would-be citizens spent years waiting for paperwork".[57] Rules made by Congress and the federal government regarding citizenship are highly technical and often confusing, and the agency is forced to cope with enforcement within a complex regulatory milieu. There have been instances in which applicants for citizenship have been deported on technicalities.[97] One Pennsylvania doctor and his wife, both from the Philippines, who applied for citizenship, and one Mr. Darnell from Canada who was married to an American with two children from this marriage, ran afoul of legal technicalities and faced deportation.[97] The New York Times reported that "Mr. Darnell discovered that a 10-year-old conviction for domestic violence involving a former girlfriend, even though it had been reduced to a misdemeanor and erased from his public record, made him ineligible to become a citizen — or even to continue living in the United States".[97] Overworked federal examiners under pressure to make "quick decisions" as well as "weed out security risks" have been described as preferring "to err on the side of rejection".[97] In 2000, 399,670 applications were denied (about 1⁄3 of all applications); in 2007, 89,683 applications for naturalization were denied, about 12% of those presented.[97]
Generally, eligibility for citizenship is denied for the millions of people living in the United States illegally, although from time to time, there have been amnesties. In 2006, there were mass protests numbering hundreds of thousands of people throughout the United States demanding United States citizenship for illegal immigrants.[98] Many carried banners which read "We Have A Dream Too".[98] One estimate is that there were 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States in 2006.[98] Many American high school students have citizenship issues.[99] In 2008, it was estimated that there were 65,000 illegal immigrant students.[99] The number was less clear for post-secondary education. A 1982 Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe 457 U.S. 202 (1982),[f] entitled illegal immigrants to free education from kindergarten through high school.[99][100][101] Undocumented immigrants who get arrested face difficulties in the courtroom as they have no constitutional right to challenge the outcome of their deportation hearings.[102] In 2009, writer Tom Barry of the Boston Review criticized the crackdown against illegal immigrants since it "flooded the federal courts with nonviolent offenders, besieged poor communities, and dramatically increased the United States prison population, while doing little to solve the problem itself".[103] Barry criticized the United States' high incarceration rate as being "fives times greater than the average rate in the rest of the world".[103] Virginia senator Jim Webb agreed that "we are doing something dramatically wrong in our criminal justice system".[103]
Revocation of citizenship[edit]
Citizenship can be revoked under certain circumstances. For instance, if held that a naturalized person has concealed material evidence, willfully misrepresented themselves, or engaged in subversive activities, then they may have their naturalization revoked.[111]
A citizen does not lose United States citizenship when they perform such acts like seeking office in a foreign state.[112] However, the higher office and more important role a citizen holds in a foreign government, the more limited the exercise of consular rights of United States citizenship will be: "Serving as a foreign head of state/government or foreign minister may affect the level of immunity from United States jurisdiction that a dual national may be afforded. All such cases should be referred to the Office of the Assistant Legal Adviser for Consular Affairs".[112]
From September 22, 1922, to the passage of Nationality Act of 1940, a woman holding United States citizenship could lose it simply by marriage to an alien or certain aliens ineligible for citizenship.[113][114]