Content area
Full Text
This article compares identity and citizenship among four immigrant populations in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area to explore the distinctions that immigrants themselves draw between political and cultural belonging. The article addresses the differences between the rights/responsibilities dimensions of citizenship on one hand, and the identity dimensions of citizenship on the other hand. It demonstrates the significance of immigration status in shaping attitudes toward naturalization, citizenship, and the construction of identity, arguing that immigrants have a bifocal outlook on belonging.
Keywords: citizenship; identity; bifocality; immigrant rights; U.S. immigration
"It was hard for me to give up my citizenship of India," said a 52-year-old physician from the state of Maharashtra who had first come to the United States in 1979. Although he admitted that he had little immediate family left in India, he had "a good feeling" about his country of birth:
But then I realized that I would never go back. My wife and children could not live there easily. So I came to the conclusion that I was living in the United States, that I should exercise my right to vote and make a difference. This was not a consequence of my feelings because it was hard emotionally-but of realizing that it was the right thing to do.
In expressing his sentiments, this man reminded me of my own, although our paths to American citizenship are somewhat different. I first entered the United States in 1967 on a student visa. I remained in the country until 1974, when I went abroad to do field research. When I returned to the United States in 1976, I was married to an American citizen and promptly filed an application for a green card, which I received in 1977. I remained on that green card, traveling on a Canadian passport when I left the country, until 1993, when I became a naturalized American citizen. I was prompted to take this step when I learned about a new law, originally proposed by a congressman in California, that was very discriminatory to noncitizen spouses of American citizens. This law, in one sense an insidious legacy of the long historical association between marriage and citizenship (Cott, 1998), denies noncitizen spouses the right to serve as executor on a spouse's estate...