“You are as American as anyone whose family has been here for generations.”

Editor's Note: The article below was written in August 2016 after a journey to Kalamazoo, MI to witness and support a dear friend who was being naturalized. She was especially thrilled to have had the day of her ceremony advanced by several months, sensing the experience would have a different vibe under the inclusive orientation of then-President Barack Obama than if it were to occur under his successor, whom many of us feared would likely be the man we can now thankfully refer to as "the former guy". 

This piece is being published here for the first time.

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Last week I attended a naturalization ceremony for the first time in my life. I highly recommend the experience for every American. It is a sobering and exhilarating experience and a wonderful antidote to the xenophobia and false patriotism being spewed around these days.

The ceremony took place at Kalamazoo Valley Community College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where 131 people from 38 different countries¹ forswore their allegiance to their countries of origin and pledged their loyalty to the United States. My longstanding habit when seeing or meeting new people is usually to try and discern something about their place of origin; it is usually on some level a key to their personal stories, their personalities, and their way of looking at the world. On this day, I didn’t even try; it would have been a hopeless task, even had I in hand the list set out in the footnote below.

And of course, it didn’t matter on this day. While one of the immigration officials presiding over the ceremony remarked that “every person has a story that needs to be preserved”, the main story was the collective new home of these newly minted citizens.

Perhaps the heart of the ceremony, along with the recitation of the oath of citizenship and the 90-second videotaped welcome from the President, were these words of assurance and injunction to our new fellow citizens: “You are as American as anyone whose family has been here for generations.”

All in attendance were reminded that there is no requirement of blood or ancestral ties to be American; that the only requirement is loyalty.

Following the recitation of the oath, each new citizen was called to the stage to receive his or her certificate of citizenship. The daunting task of calling each new citizen by name was made slightly easier after the official said the job would be easy, because “these are all American names”.

The hour-long ceremony also included a montage of photo images of the United States topography and its people, accompanied by an exquisite singing of two stanzas of “America the Beautiful” that cast a spell over the entire 500 people in attendance.

Douglas Pierce, a supervisor with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services², said in an interview following the ceremony, that about 15,000 citizens would be naturalized in Michigan this year.

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^[1] Australia-4; Bhutan-11; Bosnia-3; Brazil-3; Burma-14; Cambodia-1; Canada-7; China-1; Cuba-4; Ethiopia-1; Germany-4; Granada-1; Guatemala-1; Haiti-2; India-10; Iraq-1; Ireland-2; Jamaica-1; Jordan-1; Kenya-1; Laos-1; Liberia-1; Malaysia-1; Mexico-15; Nepal-2; Nigeria-6; Pakistan-2; Peru-1; Phillipines-4; Russia-1; Slovakia-1; South Africa-2; Sudan-2; Sweden-1; The Netherlands-1; United Kingdom-5; Vietnam-11; Zambia-1.

^[2] USCIS is a component of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It performs many administrative functions previously carried out by the former United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which was part of the Department of Justice.