Citizen Nation

(No class Monday 16th, Patriot’s Day)

Throughout this term, we have talked about many complex categories of people who live in the United States and call themselves Americans. Some are citizens; others are legal residents under various visa programs or somewhere along the legal pathway to citizenship; and some are not citizens and have entered the country illegally (either knowingly or unknowingly). Even the term we use to describe that last category can be complicated. “Illegals” is pejorative slang; “illegal alien” is confusing and dehumanizing. Both of these terms criminalize the person, rather than the act he or she may have committed. Most reputable organizations of journalists have called for using the term “undocumented immigrants” instead, others “unauthorized immigrants”; see here, here, here and here for additional discussion of these loaded terms, who uses them, and what they mean in today’s contentious cultural and political contexts.

The reading for Wednesday looks at which Americans are still prevented from voting, whether because of citizenship status or because they have been convicted of crimes. Keyssar talks about both immigration and felon exclusion rules in RV pp. 246-257. Recently our campus hosted journalist and writer Jose Antonio Vargas, founder of DefineAmerican.com, who discovered when he was a teenager, to his surprise, that he had been brought to the country illegally under false papers. Read the essay where he “came out” as an undocumented person, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” published in the New York Times in June 2011. Although his is just one person’s story, it may stand for the experience of many whose legal status is fragile or whose pathway to citizenship is permanently blocked.

You also have due your “Massachusetts Aspects” document, where you’ve been noting whenever our two authors (Keyssar and Schudson) mention Massachusetts. The syllabus describes it as “an annotated list of the themes and events of this course related to the Massachusetts Constitution.” The length and format of this document is up to you, but hopefully it’s been a helpful tool throughout the semester to draw your attention to the local aspects of the larger story of citizenship we’ve been narrating. Also, I will hand out a study guide for the final exam on Wed 18th.