On Citizenship: Social Belonging and Legal Recognition

At the heart of our polarized immigration debates are two primary components of citizenship: social belonging and legal recognition. Because citizenship names the state of belonging to a people, usually a political community, social belonging and its legal recognition must be examined together.

The social component of citizenship, sometimes conditioned by legal protections, emerges through participation in a community wherein mutual responsibility and a sense of belonging are practiced and felt. The legal component of citizenship requires no such participation, as it can be given by governmental prescription, often by birthright. Because the term citizenship is large enough to convey both social realities and legal rights, the legal recognition of citizenship does not fully capture the social reality of citizenship. Active community members often go unrecognized by their government as bearers of certain civil rights, just as legal citizens often refrain from participating in their communities.

Though the term social citizenship is uncommon, people from across the political spectrum often invoke the idea to articulate who deserves legal citizenship. Lately, the political left has tended to widen the concept of social citizenship to advocate for increasing the number of community members with legal recognition. An example can be seen in the promotion of sanctuary jurisdictions to include members of the civic community who currently lack legal status. In her 2025 State of the City address, Boston mayor Michelle Wu told the city’s immigrants that they “belong here,” before adding that “no one tells Boston how to take care of our own, not kings, and not presidents who think they are kings.”[1] By naming immigrants as “our own,” Wu effectively communicates a message of solidarity.

Meanwhile, the political right has tended to shrink the circle of social citizenship to revoke the legal status of community members who do not share a narrow ancestral identity. Vice President J.D. Vance recently argued that those whose ancestors fought in the Civil War “have a hell of a lot more claim over America” than the children of new arrivals. [2] This brand of nativism reconstructs the terms “American” and “foreign” and presents them as competitive. The concept “native American” shifts from describing indigenous groups to describing the ancestors of early European settlers. By discrediting the social citizenship of many non-European groups, prior legal confirmations and civil rights can be taken away.

Whether widening or narrowing our imagination of civic community, the contrasting examples of sanctuary and nativism show that citizenship has never only been a legal category. Legal status is inseparable from social constructions about who belongs and why. As a multiethnic country, the United States was built on the conviction that we can be united in our multiplicity. We are a creedal nation founded on civic principles, not an ethnic nation ruled by heritage. The motto inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States, e pluribus unum (out of many, one), expresses the founders’ confidence that a common life could be formed amid diversity. But American history has so far been dominated by European constructs of identity, government, and reason. To form a lasting common life, establishing the contours of a national identity and shared rationality must similarly move through plurality, diversifying whose standards and which criteria shape our civic imagination.

Consider the following two Black Codes: (1) increasing barriers to employment and (2) policing unemployment. Across the South, laws were passed requiring credentials to work, and failure to provide proof of employment resulted in arrest and a fine. Freed slaves with no access to the necessary credentials for employment were convicted of vagrancy and leased to private employers as laborers. In the 1850s, about two percent of Alabama’s prisoners were Black. By the 1870s that number rose to 74 percent, and by the 1890s, it rose above 90 percent. [4] Legal systems were constructed to codify a preexisting social hierarchy, the legal authority of which reinscribed and perpetuated a racist construction of citizenship. The white constructions of identity and rationality were used to exclusively define social citizenship and gatekeep legal recognition.

Taking a lesson from the legal systems erected after slavery, we should listen to the arguments underlying who is considered legal or illegal and challenge who authorized those boundaries and by what logic. Black Americans deserved to be legally recognized as rights-bearers, as do many of those who are currently denied legal status.

Most look back on the periods from slavery to civil rights for Black Americans with horror. Similar patterns persist today. Migrants are often driven to the United States for a variety of reasons, from unstable economies to violence and climate disruptions. Our history should prompt deeper reflection about why people migrate, especially when caused by the United States. It should also generate curiosity about how our government currently erects “Brown Codes” to rationalize excluding members of our political community.

As Black Codes did, Brown Codes construct a legal system to reinscribe and perpetuate a preexisting social hierarchy. Consider the two categories already explored: (1) increasing barriers to employment and (2) policing unemployment. The Trump administration has eliminated automatic extensions of work permits, shortened the validity of employment authorization, expanded employer audits, and imposed prohibitive visa costs. Many states have simultaneously expanded“public charge” scrutiny, which allows immigration authorities to deny legal recognition on the grounds that applicants may become primarily dependent on government assistance.[5] When the state constructs roadblocks to lawful employment and then treats economic instability as evidence of likely dependency, immigrants are excluded due to conditions those policies create.

Many of the groups across American history who were denied civil rights ought to have been recognized by law as community members. It took struggle and time for their social citizenship to be translated into legal language. Even so, hard-won civil rights achievements are being contested and overturned, illustrating how the boundaries of citizenship continue to be written, erased, and rewritten through the ongoing dialectic between social belonging and legal recognition. We must therefore not only listen to ascriptions of legal status but also to rationalizations of social belonging.

To challenge nativist tendencies, one might point to how immigrants give to and receive from our communities at work and school, in the market and popular culture, in the academy, and through athletics to demonstrate that they constitute who we are and shape where we are going as much as anyone else. For our political community to become united in its multiplicity, we must recognize those who already belong to our diverse ecosystem of mutual gift and reception.

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