Independence Day Reminds Us You Can Be American by Choice

Like many holidays, talk of July Fourth immediately summons to mind the ways in which you’ll celebrate. Barbecues. Potlucks. Fireworks displays. Parades. All delightful celebrations. I’d like to add another to the list: naturalization ceremonies.

Society has been missing out by omitting these from the classic Independence Day festivities. The events—during which immigrants are sworn in as U.S. citizens—are infectiously happy occasions generally. (They are free and open to the public, and you can easily find any happening near you via a quick Google search.) But the ones scheduled yearly on the Fourth also serve as a particularly relevant reminder that people can, and do, choose to be American. 

There are many reasons someone might do so, chief among them the very reasons we celebrate the Fourth of July in the first place: Despite our problems, the U.S. offers the sort of freedom, liberty, and opportunity that is anathema to many places around the world. Naturalization ceremonies shine a spotlight on American exceptionalism in a way that most other events cannot.

Not everyone agrees, particularly as we continue sitting in a time of intense polarization around most everything, but especially around immigration. On Tim Pool’s Timcast IRL show last week, for example, the popular podcaster told me that New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani should be stripped of his citizenship and deported, while the remainder of his panel added that we should stop accepting immigrants entirely, at least temporarily. (Mary Morgan, one of the commentators at Timcast, applied this same logic to former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, despite the fact that he was born in Ohio, but I digress.)

The pushback, however, is worth confronting in good faith, especially as it intersects with a holiday that effectively exists to celebrate what makes America great. “I reject the idea that the only way you can be American is by being born here,” I told them. This country, after all, stands for a litany of beautiful things: freedom of expression, property rights, economic opportunity, and equality under the law. Those things are often not guaranteed elsewhere around the globe. Even in countries like the United Kingdom and Germany—supposedly free places—we’re witnessing law enforcement arrest people over peaceful expression and online posts, and that’s to say nothing of countries like Venezuela and Cuba, where centrally-planned economies have left many without even a shot at real success.

“​​I think it’s beautiful that some people are Americans by choice,” I said. “And I don’t think that makes them any less American.”

There is data to support that naturalized Americans are, on the whole, prouder to be here than the native-born. A 2019 study found that 79 percent of naturalized citizens agreed when asked if “America is a better country than most other countries,” compared to 73 percent of the native-born. And when asked, “How proud are you of being American?” 75 percent of naturalized American citizens said they were “very proud,” versus 69 percent of the native-born. That gap shouldn’t be surprising, given that the former chose this country.

This discussion is also often dogged by the claim that immigrants are imported to vote for Democrats. While I don’t place much stock in voting patterns generally, it remains true that naturalized citizens—about 9 percent of the electorate—split very evenly between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in 2024, with some researchers concluding those voters favored Trump by one point.

President Ronald Reagan presciently weighed in on this debate decades ago. “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany, Turkey, or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese,” he said in 1990. “But anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in America and become an American.”

It may be a corny quote. That doesn’t make it less timeless.

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