Why I Chose to Become an American Citizen Now
By: Sophie Kleeman
Tags: Immigration, Voting, Politics, Family

Why I Chose to Become an American Citizen Now

Contentious elections, endless conflict — but a chance to become whole

Photo: pbombaert/Getty

When my parents told me we were moving to America, I pictured a carousel. Special, beguiling; a place where nothing bad ever happened. In my head, it was like a still photograph of something in motion. The lights were a warm streak of yellow, and the painted horses looked like they were dancing. I was nearly six, and the idea of flying across the world to a place like that was thrilling.

This was the spirited creation of a child, sure, but one that had roots somewhere. I don’t know exactly where it came from, but I suspect that the allure of this country — the mythical American dream — is so relentlessly propagated that it managed to worm its way into the unvarnished brain of a small child. It remained fixed in my mind for a long time. Mostly, I leaned on it when my friends disparaged the country they were born in. “You’re lucky,” I used to insist. “People give up everything to make it to America.”

And then I grew up, and the carousel broke down. It happened in fits, punctuated by national crises and a rising awareness of my own privilege here and all it afforded me and the position of others relative to me. It happened when I read books and essays, when I made friends, when I witnessed cruelty and did nothing to help. It happened as I filled in the lines of my own personhood, and I began to question what, exactly, personhood meant here in America and who was allowed to have it.

The country’s sins were now indistinguishable from my own.

The weight of how much the ideal had disintegrated settled itself between my shoulder blades on the day I became an American. My naturalization ceremony — held this past October, on a Friday too warm for the bright-red coat I wore — was ostensibly a salute to more than 140 immigrants. It was also an ominous celebration of nationalistic assimilation and vaguely funereal: I pledged my loyalty to America and left behind the place I came from. There would be no more slipping out of my Americanness when it suited me. The country’s sins were now indistinguishable from my own.

Perversely, becoming a citizen presented me with a sense of security. That was one of the reasons I chose this moment in time to become a citizen, after all — not out of some patriotic desire to submerge myself in the American swamp, but because the swamp offered more protection than the shore.

People often seem disappointed by this explanation. “That’s why you’re doing this now?” they’d ask, hoping, perhaps, that I was motivated by a sense of civic duty, or that I had gone crazy. But the simple answer, and the one I was loath to give, was that I wanted to feel safe. I wanted proof that I belonged here. I no longer wanted to be able to slip out of my Americanness — not because I considered it to be part of me, but because I didn’t want someone else to decide when it would happen next. Before I took this step, unease was at a constant simmer beneath the surface. My life was not entirely within my control; someone out there could make it hell if they wanted to.

Citizenship seemed like it would be a fundamental, irreparable transformation of my identity.

And yet the truth is that, growing up, I was always privileged enough to not worry about becoming an American citizen. It never felt like a necessity, and my parents waited almost as long as I did. We moved here because my father got a good job, which meant our immigration status was always relatively safe, and because I was a kid, my parents jumped through all the hoops for me. Until now, I never had to reckon with any of this.

It also became a point of secret, mulish pride. I didn’t want to give in. Doing so felt like letting go of some essential part of me — the part that wasn’t from here, that never felt wholly at home, that had always considered herself stuck between two worlds. Citizenship seemed like it would be a fundamental, irreparable transformation of my identity. Maybe I would welcome that someday, but I wanted to be sure about it. Instead, I did it because I felt like I had no other choice. I did it so that if I ever moved away, I had a way back. I did it out of a vague sense of unease, which is, bitterly, the most perfectly American thing of all.

It’s also ludicrous. I’m white. My accent is so neutral that I could be a virtual assistant. I’m fluent in Americana. My path to citizenship didn’t involve fleeing violence or persecution. I didn’t risk my life or my family’s life. I haven’t lived in fear of deportation. I don’t get stopped at airports, and on the street, and in my home, and asked why I’m here. I blend in. And so it feels fraudulent to say that I want to be safe. It feels callous to boil down the prodigious step of becoming a citizen to flinty practicality and curdled cynicism when other people give everything they have to make it through a naturalization ceremony.

A few weeks ago, a letter arrived in the mail from a county official — the same man who presided over my ceremony — congratulating me on becoming a citizen. He also took pains to castigate those who “take shortcuts,” as if that was a decision born out of laziness and duplicity rather than circumstance and necessity. I wanted to set the letter on fire. I know citizenship isn’t meaningless. I know it’s not just an empty token of appreciation from Uncle Sam. But it’s difficult to reconcile the practiced reverence with which it is treated with the feeling that I got lucky — because of where I came from, because of what I look like, because of what I sound like.