San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Liberty and justice for all?
In ‘Conditional Citizens,’ Laila Lalami looks at how the rights promised by America do not apply to all Americans
The Constitution guarantees equal rights to all U.S. citizens, yet for some Americans, these ideals exist only on paper. Novelist Laila Lalami’s new collection of essays, “Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America,” offers a searing look at the struggle for all Americans to achieve liberty and equality. Lalami eloquently tacks between her experiences as an immigrant to this country and the history of U.S. attempts to exclude different categories of people from the full benefits of citizenship.
Her own “relationship to the state” is clouded by arbitrary parts of her identity over which she has no control: She is “an immigrant, a woman, an Arab, and a Muslim.” “Conditional citizens,” she writes, “are people whose rights the state finds expendable in the pursuit of white supremacy.” The history of conditional citizenship begins at the founding of the United States, with privileges such as voting guaranteed only to White male land owners. After the elimination of slavery, American Blacks fought an uphill battle against legal disenfranchisement. Naturalization for non-white immigrants was either denied or limited by quota systems until the Immigration Act of 1965. Even Indigenous Americans were conditional citizens, displaced whenever natural resources were found in their territories, despite hundreds of treaties signed with the government.
Immigrants who are the same race or religion of a political enemy of the moment, such as Japanese Americans during World War II, or Muslims since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, often find themselves facing sharp — sometimes violent — discrimination. As a public figure, Lalami is frequently asked to explain terrorism, as if all Muslims have a deep understanding of the inner workings of the Islamic State. Lalami notes that her cultural identity derives from a mixture of Arab, Muslim and French practices she absorbed growing up in Morocco. Muslim Americans have divergent histories that do not easily collapse into a monolithic entity usually presumed to be guided by faith alone. As with other ethnic groups that have been profiled and demonized for political reasons, “the complexity of a multitude of private experiences is erased and replaced by a single public story, which grows more convincing with each repetition,” she writes.
Lalami offers a fresh perspective on the double consciousness of the immigrant. She notes that it’s possible to love one’s adopted country and still experience sadness at the loss of one’s birth culture. “All immigrants walk around with a scar left behind by their crossing into a new country, an invisible mark of the exile that became their condition when they were uprooted,” she writes. “Their children grow up without grandparents, without aunts and uncles and cousins, without a reservoir of collective family memory passed down through generations. While immigrants nurse this immense loss, they are told that they must adjust and belong by giving up even more of their culture.”
Citizenship, Lalami observes, should entail being able to simultaneously exhibit patriotism and point out injustices. Yet immigrant citizens who criticize policies are likely to be shut down with the admonition that they should return to their countries. Lalami reminds readers that women living in democracies who raise questions about gender discrimination are often told that they
“should be grateful for the rights they have” in comparison with women in other countries who suffer from a range of extreme practices such as genital mutilation, child marriage and femicide. This “facile argument,” Lalami asserts, discourages “women from trying to reach full equality with men.”
Lalami develops a strong link throughout her book between non-white racial identity and conditional citizenship. American Blacks have always faced higher risks of arrest, incarceration and discrimination in every area, whether they are applying for housing loans or seeking the right to vote. Although the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, guaranteed citizenship to those born in the United States, Native Americans would not gain the right to citizenship until 1924. Because voting rights are controlled at the state level, they had to battle for this right state by state. Lalami also examines the curiously arbitrary racial categories in U.S. censuses, which lump some groups, such as Arabs, into the “White” category even though socially they experience discrimination and mistreatment, just as other minorities do. As a “seductive fiction,” Lalami asserts, race “ensnares both the dominant and non-dominant groups into a narrative that they can scarcely escape, reinforced as it is by the culture, a narrative that teaches them that their success or failure is due exclusively to their individual efforts and that history plays no part in it.”
In Lalami’s telling, racial fears also contribute to the militarization of the U.s.-mexico border. Anyone can encounter checkpoints not only at the border but within 100 miles inland. “This hundred-mile border strip encompasses ... two-thirds of the nation’s population,” Lalami writes. “The vast majority of Americans, roughly 200 million, are effectively living in the border zone and could one day face checkpoints . ... They can be asked about their citizenship status and if they don’t carry a birth certificate or a passport with them and somehow fail to persuade the agent — because of how they look, act, or sound — they can be detained and referred to ICE.” A 1976 Supreme Court case tested border agents’ discretionary powers at checkpoints to stop and question people about their immigration status and to inspect vehicles. The court “ruled that Border Patrol agents do have the narrow authority to ask about immigration status at permanent checkpoints (but not at roving checkpoints) and to visually inspect vehicles,” Lalami writes. “Given the high volume of traffic at the southern border, the Court further decided, agents can use ‘Mexican ancestry’ as a criterion for deciding whom to pull aside.”
The degree of border protection differs considerably on the northern Canadian side vs. the southern Mexican side. Lalami finds this “particularly notable” because the freeway running from Southern California to the Canadian border, she writes, “constitutes one of the major corridors for drug trafficking.” Moreover, Canadians have twice as many visa overstays than Mexicans, estimated at 93,000 compared with 42,000 in 2016, according to a report by the Department of Homeland Security that tracked air and sea arrivals. Which borders are most discussed, feared and policed has everything to do with race.
Conditional citizenship is still conferred on people of color, women, immigrants, religious minorities, even those living in poverty, and Lalami’s insight in showing the subtle and overt ways discrimination operates in so many facets of life is one of this book’s major strengths. These essays amass a shocking amount of evidence that as a country, the United States is falling far short in protecting and guaranteeing its promised full rights to all citizens.
Newcomb, a professor of anthropology at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., wrote this for The Washington Post.