A Naturalized Citizen Reflects on the Declaration
I became an American citizen through a process called “naturalization.” The term appears in the Constitution, but it is much older. Derived from the Latin natio (“birth”), it was already in use by the fifteenth century to mean what it does today: to confer on a foreign-born person the same rights of citizenship as those of the native-born. In the United States, naturalized citizens enjoy the same legal status as native-born citizens except that they can’t hold the office of President.
But there is one other significant difference: unlike birthright citizenship, naturalization can be revoked. Through a process with the ungainly name of “denaturalization,” citizenship conferred by law can be withdrawn by a district court. At a time when the executive branch is challenging the longstanding acceptance of birthright citizenship, it is not hard to imagine that any one of the nearly 25 million naturalized citizens in the United States could become the target of politically motivated denaturalization proceedings. This disquieting prospect does not dim my gratitude for the citizenship this country has conferred on me, nor diminish the intensity of my embrace of its founding ideals.
My naturalization happened as if by magic. I went before a federal judge, renounced allegiance to any foreign power, and swore that “I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies.” The foreign-born judge who administered the oath then welcomed me into my new status as an American citizen. I hugged the Pakistani woman to my right and the Korean man to my left. On my way out of the auditorium, I registered to vote.
My discovery of America, and my becoming American, were midwifed by the texts that shaped its founding and evolution.
Such was my introduction to America. The first words I learned to say in English were “Yankee go home.” When I came to live with my mother in the United States just before my twelfth birthday, my idea of America was of a malevolent bully that imposed its will on weaker countries. It took many years of living in the United States and of studying its history, culture, and politics for me to recognize America as precisely the country I wanted to belong to, and its founding ideals as those that commanded my deepest allegiance. America, I discovered, was founded on an idea. It was a nation, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” I came to see American history as the struggle to realize the profound implications of that simple but all-pervading commitment.
My discovery of America, and my becoming American, were midwifed by the texts that shaped its founding and evolution. The most important of these was the Declaration of Independence. From the time I first read it as a junior in college, it has been my most important guide to understanding what America means and what it means for me to be American. I have dedicated much of my professional life to studying, teaching, and writing about the ideas and commitments that gave birth to America. The whole character of the American project, premised on equality and government by consent of the governed, requires citizens for whom these ideas are alive and whose social lives are invested in the civic experiment of self-government.
America did not emerge as a nation from ancestral tribes bound by blood and soil. To bring it into existence, the Second Continental Congress invoked not kinship, tradition, or geography, but a novel idea of “a people” as constituted by political consent. The Declaration of Independence is the act by which this community of consent declared itself a nation.
The first time I read the Declaration, it was in a version that included Jefferson’s original draft along with the changes Congress made before adopting it on July 4, 1776. Jefferson’s draft included an impassioned condemnation of slavery in which he castigated King George III for violating the “sacred rights of life and liberty” of Africans. Encountering this deleted passage was something of a shock for me and caused me to reevaluate what I thought of Jefferson and the place of slavery in America’s founding.
Equality among people implies democracy, government by consent, the rule of law, the Bill of Rights, limited government, freedom of conscience, freedom of markets, and much more.
As a member of the Virginia legislature and a large slaveholder himself, Jefferson must have known that his attack on slavery would be removed by a Congress seeking unanimous agreement on its most consequential act. But he put it there anyway and then published it in his Autobiography. Congress did leave Jefferson’s grand statement in the final Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Writing 43 years later, John Quincy Adams wondered whether Jefferson understood that these words “laid open a precipice into which the Slave-holding Planters of his Country, sooner or later must fall?” I believe that he did. The signal idea of America is political equality. This bedrock commitment gives the nation its distinctive identity; it is the cardinal principle of its political creed. Equality among people implies democracy, government by consent, the rule of law, the Bill of Rights, limited government, freedom of conscience, freedom of markets, and much more.
The Declaration articulates a vision to which America has returned to again and again to find its soul. On its 250th anniversary, we should do as Lincoln enjoined at the moment of our nation’s greatest crisis: “Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence.”
About the Author
Roosevelt Montás is the John and Margaret Bard Professor in Liberal Education and Civic Life at Bard College and specializes in Antebellum American literature and culture. He is a Jack Miller Center Academic Council Member.