Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

By Laila Lalami

9 min read

Why does it matter? Because your citizenship has fine print you were never shown.

Citizenship feels like a door. You're outside, then you're inside — ceremony, oath, miniature flag, done. Laila Lalami walked through that door in a Pomona fairground, her new shoes blistering, and stepped out into California sunshine. Then came the airport. A border agent asked her husband how many camels he'd paid for her.

That's the gap this book investigates. Not an embarrassing exception to an otherwise functional system — a structural feature of it. For two centuries, American law has extended full citizenship to some while quietly qualifying it for others based on race, religion, gender, and class. Lalami names this pattern conditional citizenship and traces it from the 1790 Naturalization Act to the Muslim travel ban — and the naming is the first act of repair.

The Oath Was Genuine — So Was the Border Agent's Joke About Camels

The Pomona Fairplex, summer 2000. Three thousand people in a windowless hall at ninety-eight degrees, alien-registration cards surrendered at the door for miniature flags. Laila Lalami stood among them in a sleeveless dress and shoes that had already blistered her feet, her husband Alex in the suit he'd worn at their wedding. A judge in wire-rimmed glasses delivered a homily: vote, serve on juries, maybe run for office. Everyone raised their right hand. Lalami swore to renounce allegiance to any foreign prince and to bear true faith to the laws of the United States. She and Alex came out into the sunlight holding hands. Her colleagues threw a surprise party: red-white-and-blue balloons.

Three months later, she flew home through LAX after a linguistics conference in Hong Kong. Both citizens now, she and Alex went through customs together. The border agent examined their passports, then turned to Alex with a conspiratorial grin and asked how many camels he'd traded for his wife. He stamped her passport while still laughing.

That's the gap this book inhabits: between what the oath meant and what the state delivered the first time it encountered her. The ceremony said she was an equal member of the American family. The border agent said something else: she was legible to him not as a fellow citizen but as a type — Arab, foreign, available for a particular kind of joke. Ten years later, at JFK returning from Morocco, a different agent asked Alex the same question, cows this time instead of camels.

Two encounters with the state, identical in structure, a decade apart. The oath, she concludes, is a threshold — what waits on the other side is a version of citizenship already sorted by race, religion, and origin. The negotiation began before she surrendered the alien-registration card; it continued long after the balloons deflated.

The Legal System Didn't Fail to Include Everyone — It Was Designed to Exclude

The first American citizenship law was a statement of exclusion that said exactly what it meant. The Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted citizenship to "free white persons" residing in the country for at least two years. Not a floor that would be raised with effort; a wall that would be defended for generations.

From that wall, everything else follows. The 1857 Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott that enslaved people and their descendants were categorically ineligible — "beings of an inferior order" was the language the court chose. It took a civil war and the Fourteenth Amendment to extend citizenship to Black Americans. The Reconstruction-era promise of forty acres followed the same logic: Sherman's order had redistributed 400,000 acres of confiscated Confederate land to freed people; Andrew Johnson voided it eight months later and returned the land to the planters who had mounted the rebellion. Inclusion formally offered, then revoked. Indigenous people waited until 1924. Nonwhite immigrants gained equal access regardless of national origin only in 1965. The distance between 1790 and 1965 is 175 years of deliberate legal construction.

The architecture is most visible when someone slips through anyway. Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian-born writer who had served in the U.S. Army, was granted citizenship in 1923. Four days later, the government denaturalized him. The Supreme Court rejected his argument that he was both "Aryan" and "Caucasian" and therefore a "free white person" under any reasonable reading of the statute. Once the ruling came down, federal officials moved to strip citizenship from every Indian-born citizen they could locate. This wasn't bureaucratic error being corrected; it was the machinery doing exactly what it was built to do. When inclusion happened by accident, the system reversed course.

The word Lalami reaches for is "conditional" — but the conditions were never incidental. They were specified at the founding and enforced through two centuries of statute, ruling, and administrative action. The border agent at LAX with his camel joke was working inside a very old tradition. He didn't invent the attitude. The Naturalization Act encoded it before his great-great-grandmother was born. What changes, generation to generation, is which community gets handed the burden of proof.

ISIS and the Islamophobes Need the Same Thing: Your Gray Zone Gone

What that architecture produces, two centuries later, is a specific expectation: that Muslim Americans must account for ISIS before they're allowed to talk about anything else.

Spring 2015, a hotel ballroom in Arizona. Laila Lalami is presenting her novel about Estebanico — a 16th-century enslaved Muslim man who was among the first outsiders to cross North America — when the conversation drifts from Morocco to Islam to ISIS. She's been asked about terrorist groups at literary events before. She answers, tired, and moves on.

What Lalami didn't name out loud is that the woman's question and ISIS's ideology share a structural demand. One month earlier, ISIS had published a twelve-page article in its English-language magazine Dabiq — high-resolution photos, multiple footnotes — titled "The Extinction of the Grayzone." The gray zone, the authors explained, was the space where Muslims lived alongside people of other faiths without declaring for the caliphate. These people were the "grayish hypocrites." ISIS's goal was their elimination: make coexistence so punished and dangerous that every Muslim would be forced into one of two camps.

The ultimatum mirrors George W. Bush's post-9/11 declaration that "either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Two authorities, one ultimatum.

ISIS needed anti-Muslim backlash for the same reason it needed fighters. Each attack in the West, and each wave of hostility directed at Western Muslims in response, helped seal off the middle ground the organization was working to eliminate. Islamophobia didn't oppose this project. It completed it. The jihadist and the Islamophobe were collaborators with different aesthetics and the same strategic goal.

A few weeks after Arizona, Lalami's daughter announced at breakfast that she wanted to be president. Lalami said she'd vote for her, then looked away — because half of Americans told pollsters that year they wouldn't vote for a Muslim candidate. Her daughter had never heard of the gray zone. She'd spent her whole life inside it.

The Southern Wall Has Always Been About Race — the Canadian Border Proves It

The security argument falls apart when you look at the numbers. Canada accounts for roughly 93,000 estimated visa overstays in the United States annually — twice Mexico's figure, five times Colombia's. The northern border stretches 5,500 miles to the southern's 1,900, with far more remote terrain for undetected crossings. Drugs flow across it too: fentanyl, ecstasy, and before those, OxyContin. No president has called Canadians criminals. No attorney general flew to Blaine, Washington, to deliver speeches about "war zones" and innocent civilians under siege. No wall has been proposed.

Jeff Sessions, speaking to Border Patrol agents in Nogales, Arizona, in 2017, described the southern border as "ground zero" — a place where honest ranchers lived under threat from criminal organizations that rape and kill. Location becomes character: American equals honest worker; non-American equals criminal alien. The Canada numbers sit there as a flat refutation. If risk were the actual logic, the longer and more porous northern border would be the obvious target. The structure follows the racial profile of who's arriving.

The zone this logic creates reaches further than the actual border. A 1953 Justice Department regulation defines "reasonable distance" as 100 miles from any external boundary, putting roughly 200 million Americans, two-thirds of the population, in territory where Border Patrol can demand proof of citizenship. The Supreme Court's 1976 ruling in Martinez-Fuerte made the racial dimension explicit: agents may use "Mexican ancestry" as a criterion for pulling a vehicle aside. Justice Brennan's dissent predicted exactly what followed. Residents of Arivaca, Arizona, documented 2,379 vehicle stops and found Latinx drivers disproportionately targeted. The border doesn't stay at the border. It travels with a particular face.

Whiteness Is the One Identity Nobody Has to Explain or Defend — Even in a Court of Law

Think about what it means to be the default option. On a form, the default is pre-selected: you don't have to make a case for it. Everyone else does. The legal history of Arab-American citizenship makes this concrete, in three cases spread across three decades.

George Dow, a Syrian Christian living in South Carolina, applied for naturalization in 1915 and was turned down twice — his skin, a judge ruled, was "darker than the usual person of white European descent." Whiteness, at that moment, was a matter of pigment. On appeal, he was granted citizenship because earlier Syrian applicants had been approved, and the court decided that people from parts of Asia, Syria included, could be considered white. Geography could override skin color.

Twenty-seven years later, Ahmed Hassan, a Yemeni immigrant in Michigan, applied and was denied on different grounds: "Arabs as a class are not white." What disqualified him had shifted from skin to religion. Islam created "a wide gulf" from the "predominantly Christian peoples of Europe." Christianity, it turned out, was also required.

Two years later, Mohamed Mohriez, a Muslim immigrant from what is now Saudi Arabia, applied in Massachusetts and was granted citizenship. The court's reasoning: America's "vital interests as a world power" in the Middle East required it. The same religious background that had disqualified Hassan now disqualified nothing, because geopolitics needed Arab allies against Nazism.

The same man, in different political circumstances, would have been classified differently. What shifted across those thirty years was what America needed; the applicants stayed the same. Whiteness reclassified itself by political convenience. The only consistency was that whiteness itself was never put on trial. No court ever demanded that a white applicant demonstrate his whiteness from first principles. The default needs no case.

'Why Didn't She Report It?' Is a Question That Already Contains Its Answer

A Friday morning, a company kitchen at Channel One News in Los Angeles. A senior TV producer reached out to hug Laila Lalami — as he routinely hugged the women on their floor — and she stepped aside and said quietly: "Please don't call her sweetheart." She meant the young assistant he habitually pulled close while she rushed to fetch whatever he demanded. He looked surprised. He said nothing.

On Monday, her boss wouldn't meet her eyes. Budget was too tight, he said; he should have thought it through. Two months earlier, he'd praised her attention to detail. Budget had never come up. She walked out into sunshine understanding what the transaction had been.

She considered reporting it to Human Resources. She thought through what that required: photographs, emails, recordings — evidence she hadn't known to collect. HR departments work for the company, not the employee. She had broken the silence and lost her livelihood.

That's the first answer to the question Lalami had once naively asked about other women: Why didn't she report him? What she'd missed: reporting requires the system to treat a woman's account as credible before it's heard. It largely hasn't. Athenian courts barred women from being litigants. Jewish law required two female witnesses to equal one male. Paul instructed women to remain silent in churches. The Qur'an required two women where one man would suffice, in case one of the women "errs." Lalami names what's underneath: the weight of that disbelief, handed down — the root system beneath the question itself. When Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate with one-hundred-percent certainty, and Brett Kavanaugh responded by asking Senator Klobuchar "Have you?" — composure was a luxury he could afford and she could not.

Later, in a Casablanca editor's office, a famous columnist grabbed her wrist and asked her to sit on his lap. The editor and a sportswriter laughed. She said nothing. She'd asked that same question herself about other women; now she had her answer. She doesn't let herself off easy about that. She doesn't ask you to, either.

Despair Is a Political Gift You Give to the People Who Built the System

Systems designed to exhaust you are counting on exactly that — on you deciding the labor isn't worth it. Despair is not a natural response to an unjust system. It's a service you render to the people who built it. That's the argument Lalami makes in the book's final chapter.

She personifies despair: seductive because it costs nothing, cynical when it murmurs What were you expecting? It was ever thus, fearful when it warns you that you'll lose time and money and friends. But she's most interested in what despair does rather than how it feels. When you step back from a system designed to exclude you, the system doesn't miss you. It keeps running. Despair, she writes, is a gift to the status quo.

The work of undoing it is unglamorous and mostly local. Lalami mentions two retired lawyers in Florida who spend their spare time offering free legal assistance, and a group of mothers who organized to open libraries in California schools that didn't have them. These are not figures you'll recognize. They have no platforms and no theory of change beyond doing the thing that needs to be done, every day, without recognition. Equal citizenship isn't built by waiting for an election to fix the architecture; it's built by everyone who decides the work is theirs.

Lalami closes at the Jefferson Memorial, reading an inscription about institutions advancing with the human mind, then amends Jefferson directly: all people are created equal, and we must work to make sure that so they remain. Not a promise. A condition. The oath at the Pomona Fairplex meant something — but what it means, finally, depends on whether the people who took it show up for the labor.

What "All Men Are Created Equal" Actually Asks of You

Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" while 135 people labored at Monticello to fund his life. Lalami doesn't discard the sentence — she amends the verb: not are, but must be made to remain. That shift converts inheritance into obligation. The gap between what the oath promises and what you actually receive is real, measurable, and exactly the size of the work left undone. The question the book hands you is whether you do too.