Carnegie Mellon
Policy & Law Review

Introduction

Historically, the meaning of citizenship has been defined by the balance between its duties and rights, with different periods placing greater emphasis on one or the other. In a constitutional democracy, those duties can include obedience to law, jury service, tax obligations, civic participation, and, in some circumstances, national defense; the rights include legal protection, political participation, and equal standing in the life of the community. Because duties of loyalty and defense presuppose membership in a political community, the questions of who may join that community had always been bound up with them. Looking at the history of granting citizenship in the United States, especially in light of the Revolutionary War and the struggle for independence, it makes sense that membership in the political community would be carefully guarded. A newly formed republic had reason to protect itself from those who remained loyal to foreign powers or who lacked commitment to the newly established constitutional order. In that context, loyalty, patriotism, and the fulfillment of civic duties were not abstract ideals but the conditions of political survival. 

From this perspective, conditioning citizenship on duties appears reasonable: a political community may legitimately wish to ensure that those who join it are prepared to uphold its laws, defend its institutions, and participate in civic life. The expectation of allegiance, historical knowledge, and moral responsibility is therefore connected to the very idea of membership.

At the same time, this emphasis on duties can risk overshadowing the rights that citizenship confers. When access to rights depends on demanding moral or civic conditions, the question of which duties matter is no longer the only one we must consider. Another, equally important question arises: are rights foundational to membership, or are they understood primarily as rewards for demonstrated virtue? 

Two conceptions of political membership frame this question. One treats citizenship as earned status: a recognition of moral fitness and allegiance that the community may demand before admitting a new member. The other treats citizenship as transformative status: a legal act that converts an outsider into an equal, whose membership no longer depends on continuing demonstrations of worth. Although American law practice screens citizenship’s threshold in the language of earned virtue, the constitutional tradition – through the Fourteenth Amendment and preceding Supreme Court cases – commits the United States to citizenship as transformative status: a grant that, once made, establishes equal and secure membership no longer subject to tests of “worthiness.” Recent efforts to condition citizenship, from expanded good-moral-character standards to the now-invalidated Executive Order 14160 – Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, which sought to deny birthright citizenship to children of parents who were unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States, are attempts to import the threshold’s evaluative logic into the status itself and, thus, fail on the Constitution’s own terms.

The Constitutional Meaning of Citizenship

In his groundbreaking work Citizenship and Social Class, T. H. Marshall argues that citizenship secures civil, political, and social rights, and that its importance lies not only in what it demands from the individual, but also in what it grants: a status of “basic human equality” grounded in full membership in a political community.¹ Civil rights include legal protections and liberty interests, including due process. Political rights include participation in governance, most notably voting. And social rights concern access to education, welfare, and the conditions of full social membership, meaning belonging to the community as a full and equal member, not just being physically present under its laws. Two distinct ideas must be kept separate here. Duties can operate as conditions of admission – as a test of worthiness applied before citizenship is granted. The rights at stake, on the other hand, are not the “right to citizenship” itself, but the civil, political, and social rights that citizenship confers once held. The paradox lies in the fact that the first logic, if extended past the moment of admission, threatens the second; rights meant to attach automatically to status come to look like ongoing rewards for demonstrated virtue. Marshall’s framework is useful because it shifts the focus from citizenship as a test of worthiness to citizenship as a structure of equal status – the core of the transformative conception.

The American constitutional tradition reflects this idea most clearly in the Fourteenth Amendment, which constitutionalizes citizenship and immediately links it to due process and equal protection. Section 1 provides:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.²

This text matters for the argument because it presents citizenship as a constitutional status tied to legal equality, not merely as an administrative benefit. The structure of Section 1 suggests that citizenship is not simply a discretionary reward, but part of a broader constitutional framework of rights and equal standing. It is the transformative conception written into constitutional text. 

This rights-centered view becomes even clearer in the constitutional treatment of citizenship after it is granted. In Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967),³ the Supreme Court held that citizenship cannot be taken away involuntarily. The case involved Beys Afroyim, a naturalized U.S. citizen whose citizenship the government sought to revoke after he voted in an Israeli election under a statute treating that act as expatriating, meaning conduct treated as causing the loss of citizenship, conduct. The Court rejected the government’s position and held that Congress could not strip a person of citizenship without consent. The decision is significant here because it sharply limits the idea that citizenship remains subject to continuing state approval. It treats citizenship, once secured, as constitutionally protected membership rather than a revocable privilege.

The Tension Between Moral Worth and Constitutional Membership

This is where the central paradox of the essay comes into focus. One feature of U.S. naturalization law that brings this tension into sharp relief is the requirement of “good moral character.” The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS’s) Policy Manual states:

One of the requirements for naturalization is good moral character (GMC). An applicant for naturalization must show that he or she has been, and continues to be, a person of good moral character. […] Conduct prior to the five-year period may also impact whether the applicant meets the requirement.⁴

This language does more than define legal eligibility. It places a moral threshold at the point of entry into citizenship – the earned-status conception in administrative form. The paradox is not simply that moral screening exists. It is that moral screening reflects a mismatch between two understandings of citizenship: one conditional at the point of entry, the other stable and equal once granted. 

The Oath of Allegiance reinforces the logic of duty and loyalty at the moment of admission.⁵ The oath requires the applicant to state:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

The oath makes the duties of membership explicit. It formalizes allegiance, renunciation of prior sovereign loyalty, and willingness to undertake significant civic obligations. Notably, the renunciation clause does not extinguish a prior citizenship; whether that citizenship survives depends on the law of the other state, and many naturalized Americans lawfully remain dual citizens. The clause functions as a declaration of primary allegiance rather than a legal severance. In that sense, it helps explain why screening at the threshold may appear rational: the state seeks assurance that new members are committed to the constitutional order. Yet the same oath also heightens the philosophical tension. If admission is justified through proof of loyalty and moral fitness, what follows if the state later concludes that those qualities are absent? One possible answer is some form of penalty, but that possibility immediately exposes the instability of the justification itself. If admission is premised on demonstrated moral fitness and allegiance, the logic of that premise does not naturally expire at the moment of naturalization, and it is precisely that lingering logic which recent revocation theories attempt to exploit.

If the conditions that justified admission can later fail, then citizenship begins to resemble a status that is never entirely secure. That is not merely a hypothetical worry. Existing law already contains an opening: naturalization remains revocable where it was procured by fraud or illegality, and because the “good moral character” finding is itself an element of lawful procurement, an aggressive administration (purely for the sake of argument, of course) can recharacterize past conduct as concealed moral unfitness and litigate denaturalization on that basis. Faiza Patel and Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center for Justice document such efforts face “high legal hurdles,” but the doctrinal pathway exists, and its use has expanded in periods of heightened enforcement.⁶ That concern is especially visible in the contemporary dispute over birthright citizenship triggered by Executive Order 14160 and the Supreme Court’s April 1, 2026, oral argument in Trump v. Barbara.⁷,⁸ The order rests on a narrowed reading of the Fourteenth Amendment’s phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” claiming that children born in the United States are not automatically citizens when their mother was unlawfully present and the father was neither a U.S. citizen nor a lawful permanent resident, or when the mother was lawfully but temporarily present and the father was neither a U.S. citizen nor a lawful permanent resident. At oral argument, Solicitor General D. John Sauer defended that position by tying citizenship to “domicile” and “direct and immediate allegiance,” arguing that temporary visitors and undocumented immigrants lack the kind of permanent attachment necessary for constitutional membership. But that theory immediately exposed the broader danger of making citizenship turn on uncertain and revisable judgments about loyalty. Justice Jackson, invoking Wong Kim Ark’s rejection of any intent-to-remain requirement, questioned whether the government was smuggling a domicile test into a constitutional text that does not contain one.⁹ Justice Sotomayor raised an even sharper concern: if the government’s theory were accepted, its logic would not stop at prospective denial of citizenship at birth but could invite future efforts to unsettle already-recognized citizenships, much as earlier periods of American law attempted to “unnaturalize” persons once previously accepted as members. Her point echoes Marshall: if membership can be re-litigated whenever the state revises its theory of allegiance, then citizenship is no longer a status of basic human equality but a standing conditioned on the government’s current criteria. The examples this essay has assembled – in domicile theories, residential-attachment requirements, and good-moral-character standards – embodies a possible arsenal of instruments by which the government could render citizenship conditional while formally working around the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee. In that sense, the present controversy does not merely concern newborns. It reveals how an executive theory framed as clarifying the threshold of membership could destabilize the constitutional ideal that citizenship, once recognized, is equal, fixed, and not perpetually subject to renewed tests of allegiance. 

The Limits of Conditional Citizenship

That is the paradox at the heart of citizenship as a political idea. If citizenship is to be granted only after moral screening, does that imply that membership would remain conceptually tied to virtue even after it is secured? If so, citizenship, from that point on, is never fully stable; it remains shadowed by the evaluative logic that justified its grant. What appears permanent becomes, at least in principle, conditional.

At the level of doctrine, however, the legal system resists that conclusion. Once citizenship is granted, it is treated as secure and effectively irrevocable except in cases of fraud or illegality in procurement. This protection is confirmed in contemporary legal cases where current doctrine guards citizenship status even in periods of heightened immigration enforcement not resolving the philosophical puzzle, but containing it.

That arrangement reveals the tension at the center of this essay. If moral fitness were understood as an ongoing condition of membership rather than a one-time threshold requirement, consistency might demand that citizenship also be revocable upon later serious misconduct. That inference is not compelled, but it is the inference that revocation theories invite, and constitutional doctrine strongly resists. 

This resistance reflects a deeper constitutional commitment to equal membership. Once naturalized, a citizen is not supposed to remain a citizen “on probation.” A citizen stands within the constitutional community as a member among members. This is where Marshall’s idea of “basic human equality” becomes constitutionally meaningful: citizenship is not only an entry decision, but a transformation in legal and political status, one that converts an outsider seeking admission into a constitutional member whose standing, once conferred, is no longer on trial. Transformation here means more than receiving a formal document; it means acquiring secure membership, equal protection, and the full legal recognition that attaches to belonging in the polity.

At the same time, the tension persists because the moralized entry model reflects a different understanding of membership. Scholars such as Kevin Lapp and Zachary New help clarify this point. Lapp criticizes the “good moral character” requirement as overbroad and poorly tailored to its stated purpose, arguing that it can exclude deserving immigrants without producing a coherent screening function.¹⁰ New similarly emphasizes the discretionary and inconsistent operation of good-moral-character determinations, showing how they can function as a gatekeeping mechanism that produces uncertainty and fear for lawful permanent residents seeking naturalization.¹¹ This scholarship demonstrates that moral screening is not merely symbolic. It has real legal consequences, and its administration often reveals the instability of using broad moral criteria to govern access to membership.

The requirement reflects what might be called the polity’s “right to exclude”: the idea that the political community has authority to decide who belongs and who does not, and to enforce that boundary through distinct legal mechanisms, including denial of admission, deportation, detention, and other forms of state coercion directed at noncitizens rather than citizens. That idea is not implausible. Political communities do draw membership boundaries. But the exclusionary logic at the point of entry sits uneasily beside a constitutional tradition that treats citizenship, once granted, as equal and secure.

The tension becomes more pronounced when naturalized citizens are compared with birthright citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment uses a single phrase, “born or naturalized,” to describe both. That phrasing suggests parity, not hierarchy. Birthright citizenship itself is built on the idea that membership is not a moral reward, but a constitutional status attached at birth. Contemporary debates over birthright citizenship only underscore how central this principle remains. Rachel Reed’s Harvard Law School commentary, drawing on constitutional scholarship, explains that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” has historically been understood to exclude narrow categories such as diplomats, not undocumented families living under U.S. law.¹² The relevance of that source here is that it helps situate the Fourteenth Amendment within mainstream constitutional interpretation: the Citizenship Clause was designed to secure membership broadly, not to create layered or caste-like categories of belonging.¹³

If naturalized citizenship were revocable for later misconduct, the result would be a two-tier system of membership: one class of citizens secure by birth and another class more vulnerable to moral judgment by the state. That would not simply be a policy adjustment; it would alter the constitutional meaning of citizenship itself. Equal protection presupposes equal civic standing. A constitutional democracy cannot easily sustain a framework in which one category of citizens is fully secure while another remains conditionally included.

This issue also raises a broader question about membership beyond formal citizenship. Contemporary immigration enforcement makes clear how sharply rights diverge between citizens and noncitizens. Reporting and legal commentary, including discussion of detention practices, bond hearings, and due process limits in immigration proceedings, show that disputes at the boundary of membership often return to the same constitutional vocabulary: due process.¹⁴ This is relevant to the present argument because it shows that constitutional law does not treat noncitizens as outside the legal order altogether, even when it does not recognize them as full political members.

For that reason, the citizenship paradox matters beyond naturalization doctrine. If even noncitizens are entitled to constitutional process while within U.S. jurisdiction, then a model of citizenship permanently shadowed by moral suspicion becomes harder to defend. At the same time, this does not erase the distinction between citizenship and “noncitizenship.” The point is narrower: the constitutional stakes of membership extend beyond the formal category alone.

Citizenship as Equal Membership

That distinction is especially important in deportation law. Deportation is classified as a civil, rather than criminal, proceeding, and that classification affects the procedural safeguards available. Immigration proceedings historically do not include all protections associated with criminal prosecutions: there is generally no constitutional right to an appointed counsel at government expense, no right to a jury trial, and the procedural framework is governed by civil immigration rules rather than the full structure of criminal procedure. At the same time, noncitizens do retain important constitutional protections, including due process, equal protection principles, notice of charges, an opportunity to be heard, and in many contexts First Amendment and Fourth Amendment protections as “persons” within U.S. jurisdiction. Yet deportation can function in practice as a severe exercise of state power, particularly for long-term residents with deep family and community ties. 

The civil-criminal distinction therefore matters not only doctrinally, but conceptually, because it marks the boundary between exclusion and punishment, even as that boundary can become difficult to maintain in practice. When deportation or denaturalization falls uniquely on noncitizens or naturalized citizens, it starts to look like punishment unevenly distributed by category of membership. That asymmetry raises deeper due process concerns, as it suggests that the state may attach life-altering consequences to status in ways that challenge the constitutional promise of equal and secure membership.

What, then, follows from this tension? Returning to the two conceptions of membership with which this essay began, the earned-status view holds that screening for character and loyalty is not incidental; it is part of what gives membership meaning. Citizenship is treated as a status that should be protected at the threshold because it grants access to a constitutional and political community with substantial rights, responsibilities, and collective commitments. This model helps explain the historical and legal appeal of the Oath of Allegiance and the “good moral character” requirement.

The transformative view, by contrast, holds that the central function of citizenship is not to reward virtue, but to establish stable equal standing. Duties remain real, but they do not define the essence of citizenship. Rather, they operate within a constitutional framework in which membership itself is secure. This model aligns more closely with Marshall’s account and with constitutional doctrines that protect citizenship from involuntary revocation.

The American constitutional tradition, especially through the Fourteenth Amendment and Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967), aligns more closely with the second view. Once naturalized, a citizen does not remain “on probation.” The criminal law may judge conduct, but the Constitution secures status. This is why the “good moral character” requirement raises an important philosophical and constitutional question. The issue is not simply whether duties matter. The deeper issue is whether duties define the essence of citizenship, or whether citizenship is the status that makes equal rights possible in the first place. If one follows the constitutional logic of equal protection and due process, the answer points toward citizenship as stable, transformative membership and not a continuing reward for good behavior, but the legal foundation from which rights, accountability, and political responsibility flow.

The stakes of that answer extend beyond naturalization doctrine. For constitutional democracy, the point is fundamental: a polity that reserves the power to re-evaluate its members’ worthiness has not granted citizenship at all, but only a license, and a democracy of licensees is not a community of equals.

Notes