My fellow Americans, I don’t often address you as that. In fact, I’ve never addressed you as that before because I was not an American until Aug. 7. Before that date, I was merely a sojourner in this great and increasingly unhinged land. Legitimately, I hasten to add. I was a British subject on a green card, that magic carpet to the New World whose upward flight is sustained by lawyers’ fees. I was known to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as an Extraordinary Alien, which sounds like a David Bowie song from the 1970s. Since Aug. 7, I am one of you — or should I say, One of Us.
It’s been nearly 20 years since I first joined the tired and huddled masses of Harvard graduate students. As I assured the examiner at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston, in that time, I have neither been arrested, nor charged in court, nor supplied “a friend” with a deadly weapon. I have, however, donated fulsomely to the IRS, a habit which, along with not being an accessory to murder, is one of the key requirements for moving from green card to U.S. citizen. Another is money, lots of it, for lawyers’ fees, registration fees, postal fees, and charges for breathing within sight of a federal facility.
The naturalization interview was a typically American experience, epic, idealistic, commonplace, and bureaucratic. A collection of strangers from all over the world were thrown together by our relationship to a federal office. As Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has said, America is “not just an idea.” It’s “a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” Ours was a shared history of bureaucratic torment and a shared future of airport-style security, waiting on a sticky seat under the strip lights, and then an interview with the retro stylings of a COVID screen.
I had memorized the answers to the statutory 100 questions. (Personal favorites, Questions 21: “The House of Representatives has how many voting members?” and 67: “Name one of the writers of the Federalist Papers.”) Instead, I was asked six easy ones, such as Question 46: “What is the political party of the president now?” For a second, I thought of saying, “Which president?” or “The party of Obama.” But I said, “The Democratic Party.” This is Massachusetts, after all. You dance with the one who brought you. The inquisitor repeated my answer slowly, as if savoring a bite of ribeye, then swore me in and sent me upstairs.
As Vance says, it is part of your, I mean our, national tradition to “welcome newcomers.” The welcome committee was a little old lady whose accent suggested she had only recently experienced the naturalization ceremony from the other side of her desk. She issued me with a flag and a buff envelope reading “A Message from President Biden.” Inside was a letter on White House stationery, addressed “Dear Fellow American.”
“Look, fat,” it began, “you’re a lying, dog-faced pony soldier. If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” And then some other bunch of malarkey: “Congratulations, and thank you for choosing us and for believing that America is worthy of your aspirations. … In making this journey to America, you have done more than move to a new place. You have become part of an idea. … I am honored to welcome you as a fellow American in our great Nation of immigrants.”
It sounds worse if you read it in President Joe Biden’s voice. It is we who should be worthy of our nation, not the other way round. And I didn’t renounce and abjure my allegiance and fidelity to foreign princes, potentates, and states to belong to an idea. Yes, most Americans are descended from immigrants, but third-generation Americans made up 75% of the population in 2013, which was the last time the Census Bureau cared to look. No one is a hereditary immigrant. A “nation of immigrants” isn’t a nation at all, just a bunch of strangers.
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America is not an idea. It’s an ideal. The reality is that Americans are a nation or they are nothing. The shabby official setting for the Oath of Allegiance, Three Days of the Condor meets The Departed, only sharpened its metaphysical import. We all had tears in our eyes. After the oath, we congratulated each other, shook hands, and took turns taking each other’s photo in front of the Stars and Stripes, little flags in one hand and naturalization certificate in the other. We were united, part of something bigger, like America is supposed to be. A nation, if you can keep it.
There is no place like this country and no people like Americans. And that, my fellow Americans, is why we need to close the borders. Right now. You can’t just keep letting anyone wander in.