Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship

Chapter 5. Citizen Terrorists and the Challenges of Plural Citizenship

Chapter 5 CitizenTerrorists and the Challenges of Plural Citizenship PETER H. SCHUCK Americans commonly think of terrorists as foreigners, typically from the Mideast or “Afpak” region. Probability, not xenophobia, underlies this belief, given the background of most known terrorists and the hundreds of millions of people around the world who despise America’s liberal culture , its sturdy support for Israel, its religious diversity and tolerance, and much else. Almost all of those who wish to destroy American power, institutions , and ways of life tend to fit the stereotype. But in an era when the United States has become increasingly receptive to many forms of plural citizenship, it should not be surprising that some citizen terrorists identify with other societies. This reality was dramatized during just a few months in 2010 when three American citizens were arrested in connection with bomb plots: Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized citizen from Pakistan, for an unsuccessful car-bomb attempt in Times Square, and the other two for international jihadist activities. These three Americans are not the first to be prosecuted for such crimes. Jose Padilla’s “dirty bomb” plot and Timothy McVeigh’s mass murder in Oklahoma City are other examples of acts of terrorism perpetrated by Americans against Americans on American soil. Unlike McVeigh, most of the American terrorists have been dual citizens whose primary allegiance is to Islamic countries and Islaminspired creeds. These examples of citizens engaged in domestic terrorism—which I define here as terrorist activity launched by American citizens against other Americans and not such activity initiated on U.S. soil by noncitizens—may be dreadful harbingers of catastrophes to come. Federal officials predict that 98 Immigration, Sovereignty, and Plural Citizenships these acts are likely to increase. Such prognostication is, of course, an inherently difficult one to assess, but it seems plausible considering the tactical advantages that citizenship confers on extremists who seek to inflict great damage on our society. After all, they can use their American passports to come and go as they please, and they enjoy the same extensive legal rights accorded to all criminal suspects under U.S. law. They can claim these advantages , moreover, even if their ties to American society are exceedingly tenuous and fleeting, and even if their citizenship merely reflects the accident of birth, followed by a life lived abroad that often includes a different citizenship that they value far more. Citizenship law, then, must be one piece of our intricate national-security mosaic. By citizenship law, I mean the set of legal rules enacted by Congress and interpreted by the federal courts that prescribe how individuals may become citizens, how they may lose that status, which rights this status confers , and what their access is to plural citizenship. This essay explains what these rules are and why they matter. If the risk for Americans terrorizing Americans in American cities is indeed growing, then citizenship law, like criminal and national-security law, must take account of this disturbing fact. Whether and how these rules should be changed are separate and genuinely difficult questions. The issue of political loyalty—what it means, how it is measured, and especially what risk exists that powerful officials might question and manipulate it at the cost of our precious individual liberties—is a very old issue for Americans, and it has always been fraught. From the beginning of the republic, our history has been punctuated with periods in which that risk materialized in ugly, divisive, and frightening forms—for example, the Alien and Sedition laws of the late 1790s, the Know-Nothings in the 1850s, and McCarthyism a century later. Some think we are entering another such period today, with the adoption of anti-immigrant legislation in border states, but I see little resemblance to the earlier periods—in part, because almost all these actions target illegal migrants, not the vastly larger group with legal status. In a liberal polity whose paramount values are individual freedom and limited government, citizenship must not be too intrusive, demanding, or subject to government discretion. This is probably what the constitutional theorist Alexander Bickel meant in writing that American citizenship “is at best a simple idea for a simple government.” Using citizenship law to monitor loyalty cannot be done without triggering delicate, uncertain, and potentially dangerous tradeoffs; extreme caution is warranted. As we confront the risk of domestic terrorism, we must always keep very much in mind this CitizenTerrorists and Plural...