US Citizen

Citizenship of the United States is a status that entails specific rights, duties and benefits. Citizenship is understood as a 'right to have rights' since it serves as a foundation of fundamental rights derived from and protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States, such as the rights to freedom of expression, vote, due process, live and work in the United States, and to receive federal assistance. The implementation of citizenship requires attitudes including allegiance to the republic, participation, and an impulse to promote communities. Certain rights are so fundamental that they are guaranteed to all persons, not just citizens. These include those rights guaranteed by the first 8 Amendments that pertain to individuals. However, not all U.S. citizens, such as those living in Puerto Rico, have the right to vote in federal elections. There are two primary sources of citizenship: birthright citizenship, in which a person is presumed to be a citizen if he or she was born within the territorial limits of the United States, or—providing certain other requirements are met—born abroad to a U.S. citizen parent, and naturalization, a process in which an eligible legal immigrant applies for citizenship and is accepted. These two pathways to citizenship are specified in the Citizenship Clause of the Constitution's 1868 Fourteenth Amendment which reads: National citizenship signifies membership in the country as a whole; state citizenship, in contrast, signifies a relation between a person and a particular state and has application generally limited to domestic matters. State citizenship may affect (1) tax decisions and (2) eligibility for some state-provided benefits such as higher education and (3) eligibility for state political posts such as U.S. senator. In Article One of the Constitution, the power to establish a 'uniform rule of naturalization' is granted explicitly to Congress. U.S. law permits multiple citizenship. A citizen of another country naturalized as a U.S. citizen may retain their previous citizenship, though they must renounce allegiance to the other country. A U.S. citizen retains U.S. citizenship when becoming the citizen of another country, should that country's laws allow it. U.S. citizenship can be renounced by Americans who also hold another citizenship via a formal procedure at a U.S. embassy. Civic participation is not required in the United States. There is no requirement to attend town meetings, belong to a political party, or vote in elections. However, a benefit of naturalization is the ability to 'participate fully in the civic life of the country'. Moreover, to be a citizen means to be vitally important to politics and not ignored. There is disagreement about whether popular lack of involvement in politics is helpful or harmful. Vanderbilt professor Dana D. Nelson suggests that most Americans merely vote for president every four years, and sees this pattern as undemocratic. In her book Bad for Democracy, Nelson argues that declining citizen participation in politics is unhealthy for long term prospects for democracy. 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'. Kaplan elaborated: 'Apathy, after all, often means that the political situation is healthy enough to be ignored. The last thing America needs is more voters—particularly badly educated and alienated ones—with a passion for politics.' 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'.