Verified by 
“What Do You Want To Do With Me?”
On February 13, 2013, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and a self-declared undocumented immigrant, Jose Antonio Vargas gave a powerful and emotional testimony in Congress about growing up as an undocumented immigrant in America. He concluded his testimony with the following remarks:
"Immigration is about our future. Immigration is about all of us and before we take your questions, I have a few of my own: What do you want to do with me? For all the undocumented immigrants who are actually sitting here at this hearing, for the people watching online and for the 11 million of us, what do you want to do with us? And to me, the most important question, as a student of American history, is this: How do we define American?"
Vargas’ testimony raises question about the viability of the concept of citizenship within the context of contemporary, multicultural America: Who is considered to be a normative cultural citizen in America? Who is an American? How are racial and religious legal American citizens excluded from becoming full-fledged cultural citizens?
It would indeed be a watershed moment in American history if 11 million undocumented migrants, who are Latinos, Asians, and Blacks, get American citizenship by virtue of the passage of the immigration reform bill that is fair and humane. These immigrants will not have to worry about the threat of being deported or stopped by police officers. They can have access to social services, educational loans, can obtain a car license, broaden their employment opportunities, travel freely across the U.S. and between counties, and some 200,000 deported parents of American-born children can reunite with their families. These undocumented immigrants would be able to live normally like the rest of the documented immigrants.
Then what?
While 11 million undocumented migrants may acquire legal citizenship in this country, there is no guarantee that they may be able to acquire cultural citizenship. They may legally reside in America, but may not be necessarily perceived as being “Americans.”
Birth of An American Muslim
Eboo Patel, an American Muslim, and the President of Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago wrote the following in 2007 for a blog for Washington Post.
"My wife and I will (God willing) be having a baby in May, and I find myself having anxiety attacks about his childhood in this country. Will he face a constant barrage of bullies, media messages and authority figures that demean him because of his faith? When I confessed my fear to a group of African-American professors at a college in South Carolina, one said: “It sounds like the experience black parents had, and still have, in the South.”
Eboo Patel was frightened that his son, a future American Citizen, will experience discrimination because of being a Muslim. His story is not an exception as many American Muslims, after the events of 9/11, felt their identity, religion, and customs were attacked and put under suspicion. Immediately after 9/11, there was a violent backlash in the United States against Muslims or those who were thought to be Muslims. In particular, the post-9/11 period has created a new category of identity in the U.S. that perceives many Arabs, South Asian Muslims and Middle Eastern Americans as disloyal and non-patriotic citizens or as individuals who are part of terrorist networks.
Prior to 9/11 many American Muslims, Arabs, and Sikhs had believed that they had achieved full cultural citizenship and integration in America. Yet, a single, cataclysmic, political event such as 9/11 upturned their taken-for-granted acculturation process and migrant identity. American citizenship did not make them immune to experiencing racism, profiling, and hate speech. Suddenly and quite dramatically, they moved from a comfortable sense of belonging to an uneasy state of being an outsider and a threatening one at that. Why did Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans and Sikh Americans felt that they were outsiders and did not belong “here” despite being American citizens?
The Club of Cultural Citizenship
Citizenship as a legal concept has been typically formulated in political and civic terms and guarantees individuals certain constitutional rights and protections from the nation state. Cultural citizenship is a normative project that is tied to historical and contemporary meanings about being “good” citizens. In my book, American Karma: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Indian Diaspora, I have shown how groups who are seen as racially, nationally, and culturally different are excluded from cultural citizenship. Historically, within the U.S. context, the idea of a good citizen has been used to refer to individuals who were upper class, English speaking, White, and had “Anglo” or Euro-American heritage. Even today, to some extent, having cultural citizenship means having white privilege and the cultural and symbolic capital that one acquires by belonging to the majority. Cultural citizenship does not only signify legal status, but instead it represents ideas about who are insiders and outsiders. Renato Rosaldo, Professor of Anthropology, at New York University writes that rather than accepting the dominant assumption that being a “person of color” or having cultural difference is a "sign of inferiority, cultural citizenship asserts that even in contexts of inequality people have a right to their distinctive heritage.” The right to cultural citizenship involves a struggle on part of marginalized minorities to create new spaces of belonging, having a voice and being represented in the political process. Many American citizens who are perceived to have non-American traits during sustained period of conflict and political crisis can face extremely dangerous consequences. American citizens, who are racially and culturally different, also face xenophobic threats when their host society is faced with severe economic downturns. About two weeks ago, New York Times published an editorial stating that the New York Police Department was illegally targeting and conducting surveillance of law-abiding “Muslim groups because of their religious affiliation, not because they present any risk.”
Hyphenated America
I think any debate about immigration reform will have to include a discussion of what does it mean to be American in a multicultural, hyphenated America. There are a large number of first-and second-generation non-white American citizens who identify with their multiple heritages. Many of these Americans have dual, hyphenated identities as Mexican-Americans, Indian-Americans, Dominican-Americans, Caribbean-Americans, Arab-Americans, and Asian-Americans. These hyphenated American citizens travel back and forth between two cultures, often speak dual languages, and have multiple homelands, but they are not always perceived as being “True Americans,” “Real Americans,” “Average Americans” or “Picket Fence Americans.” In May 2012, New York Times reported that America had reached a new milestone, “White births are no longer a majority in the United States. . . while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.” If demography is destiny, then any discussion about what it means to be American, both in contemporary and future America, needs to go beyond matters of legal citizenship.
References
Bhatia, S. (2007). American Karma: Race, Identity, and Culture in the Indian Diaspora. New York University Press. NY: New York.
