...as citizens, often highlighting their capacity as citizens to vote. The reports are obviously significant beyond what they predictably report. In her elegant
book Democracy and the Foreigner (which ties together sources as disparate as The Wizard of Oz and Shane to the
Book of Ruth and Rousseau), political scientist Bonnie Honig describes how naturalization rites actualize our conception of the American nation. “With a hope and a prayer and an oath,” the ceremonies “testify to the fundamental consentworthiness of the regime by symbolically representing the consent that is effectively...