To Become a Citizen

I will become an American citizen tomorrow, Wednesday, October 29th, 2025. I have complicated feelings about this.

Not too long ago, I would have imagined my naturalization to be a lot more celebratory. It is, after all, the last step in my immigration journey of more than 12 years. A journey that has taken a majority of my life. To think of the number of people who would do anything, anything, to be in my position today. To become a citizen of the United States of America? My own position of privilege, and my sheer luck, is not lost on me.

And yet, today, on the eve of my American naturalization, I feel… Disconcerted. Antsy. Quite frankly, I am ready to get it over with.

This isn’t because I don’t cherish this opportunity reserved for a privileged few. Rather, the current state of our country, and my position within it, has forced me to conceptualize this conferral of civil rights and responsibilities in a purely utilitarian manner. In short, it’s (hopefully) a guarantee that, even if I get abducted and banished to a country I don’t know, at least some mechanism will be available for me to reenter my home country.

This fear of deportation has been omnipresent in my life since Dear Leader attempted to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder who was an active participant and organizer of the Student Intifada in Columbia University last year, as well as other student activists.

I was also a student activist and organizer of the Student Intifada against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I was part of the negotiating committee for our chapter, and was in constant discussions with the Chancellor of my university. I had the opportunity to meet with some of the Regents of the University of California to discuss divestment from the state of Israel.

This was a year and a half ago, in May of 2024. Now, my former university, like many others, is being investigated for alleged antisemitism by Dear Leader, for daring to allow protests against an apartheid state. Communications regarding the protests are or will be parts of these investigations; communications that will, no doubt, include my name as an organizer of our encampments.

I have no regrets regarding my actions. I would not have been able to live with myself had I not at least attempted to speak truth to power in the best way I could, as our country unquestioningly bankrolls the worst genocide this century.

However, these wrongful arrests worried me; they concretized the simple fact that, if it were up to our government, I would not be here. My transgressive actions against genocide is enough for Dear Leader to declare me an enemy of the state. I have no doubt that, if he were to know of my existence and my role in our protests, he would, like many before me, use the full power of the state to have me abducted and deported from this country, never to return.

Indeed, my joy at attaining citizenship in this country is quite muted compared to the comparatively huge relief of knowing that that sheet of paper will, at least, make such a deportation marginally more difficult for The Powers That Be.

But why become a citizen?

This is a question that I’ve heard from many people, even after giving the response I described above. My previous reasoning is, admittedly, rather utilitarian and self-serving. It says nothing of what exactly becoming a citizen means to me (apart from marginally better legal protections). Some of my American friends on the political left find it confusing, why exactly I would want to become a citizen of what I would describe as an evil state, a state that is aiding and abetting a full-scale genocide of a people.

My more philosophical answer for why I choose to become a citizen is rather simple: it’s because the United States is everything I know. This country is the only one in which I’ve felt a kinship with the people within it, the only country where I’ve been part of a shared national experience. If I were to move anywhere else (yes, even my country of birth), I don’t think I could ever feel as anything more than a foreigner. I could spend my life trying to fit in with the people around me, yet I would always long for this country I grew up in, the one which molded me into the person I am today.

I find that this answer confuses a lot of people who have not had the experience of moving countries at a young age. Taken to the extreme, a far-right agitator would even call this experience virtually impossible. ”How could you call this country your home,” they might ask, “if you were born and raised in a foreign country, by foreign parents?”

My answer to this is personal, and in no way do I mean to generalize my own experience for all immigrants. However, I will say this: it’s true that, for 10 years of my life, I lived in another country, spoke another language, was part of a different culture from the one I experience today in this country. This experience, no doubt, had a huge effect on who I would come to be today.

Yet I have very little conscious recollection of how exactly these factors have affected who I am now. This is not to say I have no memory of who I was when I was 10 — of course I do — but I had not developed a coherent sense of self that directly follows into who I am today. My memories of my past country are in broad strokes — remember very little of the minutiae of the culture and customs over there.

It’s also true that, after I moved to this country, I spent some of my most important formative years — my adolescence and young adulthood — learning, living, being part of the culture of this country. This country is where I truly developed my love for sciences — and where I found my mentors to make this love into a career. This is the country where I met the love of my life, without whom I would be a completely different person from who I am today. This nation’s social and economic systems are the only ones I’m truly familiar with, systems which, in turn, have fundamentally shaped the personal and political beliefs that I hold today.

In truth, if I had never moved to the United States, I would be a person completely unrecognizable to myself. My life’s path has diverged to such an extent because of my life here that I simply cannot imagine any life in which I did not move to the United States.

This is not always the case — my father, who is now scratching his fifties, moved to this country in his thirties. It’s not particularly difficult for him to imagine a life for himself if he’d never moved here. This shouldn’t be surprising, of course. He already had a wife, an established career, a knowledge of the culture, and engrained, deeply held beliefs.

This is simply not the case for me. Without my life in the United States, I have no “me” that I would ever recognize.

I have beliefs that many in this country would find reprehensible. I’ve called myself a socialist and communist in the past, and, to many, such beliefs are fundamentally incongruous with what they believe America to be. Many would find my very presence in the United States a threat from a foreign adversary, something to be “sent back”.

Yet, in truth,the reasons why I hold the beliefs I do are because  of my life in America. These are not beliefs that I held prior to my life here (unless you consider basic regard for human life to be a belief incongruous with America). My beliefs were shaped and molded by the social, economic, and political systems of governance and control that I’ve had to learn and live with during my formative years here in America — the only systems I have any real experience with. My desire to change them, likewise, follows through from this.

It is America who made me. I am part of America, and America is part of me.

Out of Many

My beliefs are typically misconstrued as a hatred for America. This couldn’t be further from the truth. My life in America has shaped me into a humanist. For every example of hatred in this country, I have found a hundred examples of generosity, compassion, and love. I have found so much beauty, so much kindness, so many diverse people, places, cultures, community, and friendship within this country, that I find it difficult to put my love of this place into words. America is a land of many. The existence of such a diverse, varied community of people would have been thought near-impossible, and yet here, despite the best efforts of many, it exists, thrives, and prospers. I believe this is something worth cherishing and protecting.

It is precisely because of my love of this place and the people within it that I hold my beliefs. I am still hopeful that, together, the people of this country can create systems of governance which are a force for good in our society and the world at large (Quite frankly, our planet cannot survive this not being the case.) I am ready and willing to play my part to make this hope a reality, whatever form that takes.

As I become a citizen, I pledge to myself to fight tooth and nail to better my adopted country, to improve the lives of my fellow human, and to leave my country and my planet a better place than how I left it. In the end, what else matters?