Citizenship of the United States

In Article One of the Constitution, the power to establish a "uniform rule of naturalization" is granted explicitly to Congress.

Vanderbilt professor Dana D. Nelson suggests that most Americans merely vote for president every four years, and sees this pattern as undemocratic.

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] 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".

"[24] The earliest recorded instances of dual citizenship began before the French Revolution when the British captured American ships and forced them back to Europe.

In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment specifically defined persons who were either born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction as citizens.

Secondary schools ideally teach the basics of citizenship and create "informed and responsible citizens" who are "skilled in the arts of effective deliberation and action.

[57] There was speculation that if the administration of president Barack Obama passed immigration reform measures, then the agency could face a "welcome but overwhelming surge of Americans-in-waiting" and longer processing times for citizenship applications.

For example, applicants must generally have been permanent residents for five years (three if married to a United States citizen), be of "good moral character" (meaning no felony convictions), be of "sound mind" in the judgment of immigration officials, have a knowledge of the Constitution, and be able to speak and understand English unless they are elderly or disabled.

[76] Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and former Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner, doubted that fee increases deter citizenship-seekers.

[71] In 2009, the number of immigrants applying for citizenship plunged 62%; reasons cited were the slowing economy and the cost of naturalization.

The eight individuals are Sir Winston Churchill, Raoul Wallenberg, William Penn, Hannah Callowhill Penn, Mother Teresa, the Marquis de Lafayette, Casimir Pulaski, and Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, Viscount of Galveston and Count of Gálvez.

Sometimes, the government awarded non-citizen immigrants who died fighting for American forces with the posthumous title of United States citizen, but this is not considered honorary citizenship.

US citizenship's main advantage for a corporation is the protection and support of the United States government in legal or bureaucratic disputes.

[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".

Currently, American Samoa is the only unincorporated territory of the United States where newborn infants become non-citizen U.S. nationals at birth.

Although international law and Supreme Court dicta would regard persons born in a United States Minor Outlying Island as non-citizen nationals of the United States, the nationality status of such persons is not specifically mentioned by US law (and none of these islands is inhabited, so the question does not routinely arise).

Circuit Court upheld the government's position that American Samoa is not "in the United States" for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment and thus American Samoans are nationals but not citizens at birth,[81] A 2021 ruling by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals similarly upheld the government's position and reversed a lower court ruling that said American Samoan plaintiffs were United States citizens at birth.

[82][83] Unlike people born in American Samoa, people born in Puerto Rico, Guam, the United States Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands (on or after November 4, 1986) have United States citizenship at birth, as Congress has granted this status by law.

[89] 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.

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.

[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".

[citation needed] 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".

[105] Out of an estimated three to six million United States citizens residing abroad, between five and six thousand relinquished citizenship each year in 2015 and 2016.