Becoming American

I'm a citizen now

By Andy Morffew, CC BY 2.0

A couple of weeks ago, after almost a decade living in Seattle as an immigrant from Canada, I stood in a room full of people in a government building near the airport and swore to uphold the constitution of the United States of America. Before swearing the oath, I was given a manila envelope containing a miniature American flag, a printed welcome letter from Joe Biden, and a voter registration form. After it was over, everyone took pictures in front of the podium.

My path to citizenship was very smooth, perhaps the smoothest possible. To begin with, in the minds of some Americans I didn’t really count as an immigrant, or at least didn’t fit the picture that usually goes with that word. I’m white and a native English speaker, and I come from a country allied with and very culturally similar to the United States — I usually “pass” as American unless I volunteer information otherwise. Canada doesn’t have a large green card backlog (the USA has a system granting an equal annual allotment of green cards to nationals of every country regardless of population or number of applicants, resulting in massive disparities in waiting periods). My father is an American citizen by birth, although that status comes with a bit of an asterisk. Furthermore, I had a professional job at a well-resourced company with immigration lawyers on retainer who could help me through every step of the process. When I finally filled out the naturalization paperwork last October after five years on a green card, information on the internet told me the process would take upwards of eight months; instead, it took roughly three.

Do I feel any different, now that I’m a citizen? My rights and duties are certainly different. When filling out the naturalization form, one item on the questionnaire that gave me pause was the question of whether I’d be prepared to take up arms to defend the United States. As a woman nearing middle age, that eventuality is unlikely, but I considered the question seriously. Was I truly willing? Well, that’s what citizenship means, I told myself. If I voluntarily place myself under the protection of the mighty American state, that relationship is supposed to be reciprocal.

As for my feelings, I can’t say that I feel American. I do, however, feel a little less Canadian than before; or perhaps I should say that my relationship to my Canadianness is different. When I first moved to Seattle I felt painfully, proudly Canadian. Both of those feelings, these days, are much more smoothed out.

Last year, I was on vacation with my parents in France. We were staying in a small village, and the three of us were chatting over dinner at an outdoor table. As we were readying to leave, a French gentleman at an adjacent table got up to ask us: what country were we from? We told him, and his wife made a fist-pump of victory. They’d been speculating about our nationality, he explained. He thought our accents sounded American, but his wife thought we couldn’t be — we were speaking far too quietly to be Americans, who are always loud. She pegged us as Canadian.

This encounter is basically a Canadian’s dream: Canadians love, love, love feeling superior to Americans, almost as much as they love being noticed by Americans. I’ve heard anecdotally that Americans who move across the border are often surprised and hurt by how much casual anti-Americanism Canadians tend to throw around. When I was growing up, I heard a lot about the superiority of Canadian schools, Canadian health care, Canadian progressivism, and Canadian institutions in general as compared to our neighbor’s (a few of those claims are correct; many are dubious).

The USA occupies so much Canadian brain space that the culture has kind of warped as a result — perhaps it was always destined to be warped in this way, living next door to one of the most powerful nations that has ever existed. The fear that Canadian culture (whatever that is) will get totally subsumed by the USA has driven a lot of policy, sometimes with odd effects. Canada does a decent job of supporting its creatives, but those creatives strike a bit of a bargain in exchange for the grants: they have to produce Canadiana. It’s a cliché, but true, that anyone creatively ambitious who is able to build their career in the USA instead generally does so.

And what about the other direction? Canadians tend to wildly overestimate how much Americans know or care about Canada, in the same way that “rivalries” between cities usually only go in one direction. Most Americans do not think about Canada at all. Really, at all. They do not believe that anything important or interesting happens in Canada and will feel a combination of annoyance and amusement if asked to entertain the possibility. Occasionally, mentioning my homeland in conversation, I can almost see people wince: is she going to try to make me think about Canada? And when Canada is mentioned, it’s often as a joke — and not the cute “they say ‘eh’ and ‘aboot’ and are sorry about everything” jokes that some Canadians like to imagine, but more like: the entire notion of Canada is a joke, their sovereignty is a joke, it’s cute that they think they’re a real country — not “sweet kitten” cute, but “plump cat missing its jump and smacking into the wall” cute. I used to get genuinely offended by these kinds of jokes, along with “we could invade you in seconds” jokes, but now I shrug them off. A bumbling, toothless, tiny version of a massively fearsome nation? That’s kind of inherently funny, even if I’m not laughing.

This was difficult for me when I first moved. I moved to Seattle, then a modestly sized and relatively homogenous city, from Toronto, which is several times its size and more diverse, and was an insufferable snob about it (true to Toronto stereotype). Some of this was personal, of course: in Toronto I had built up a community and some social capital and I had accomplishments I was proud of; none of those things carried over to my new life. Seattle also felt square, conformist, and sleepy to me compared to the city I had just left. No one here knows how to throw a party, I thought; no one knows how to banter. I was deeply disappointed in the quality of the opera company. I felt like a big-city snob, but the people I talked to seemed to be under the impression that Toronto was roughly the size of Omaha, so my snobbery wasn’t even legible. People often literally couldn’t hear my quiet voice, which was never really a problem before. I was wounded, indignant! I felt extremely Canadian. I gratuitously brought up the Canadarm multiple times in conversation as revenge. A few years of earning, I thought, and I’ll go back.

Nearly ten years later, I’m still here. With full awareness of my privilege, I’ll say that this country has been very good to me: it’s a very good place to be curious and ambitious, and the scope of what I can accomplish is greater. I’ve been to some good parties and have friends I can banter with (the opera has not improved and my feelings about Seattle are still decidedly mixed). And while it’s true that I felt like my identity was erased when I first moved, sometimes it’s kind of nice. I might tell people I’m from Alberta, or that I went to the University of Alberta in Edmonton. What kind of place is Alberta? What are the stereotypes about people from Alberta? Is the University of Alberta a good school or a bad school? They have no idea! My past is a blank, entirely generic¹. And any smugness I might feel is quickly obliterated with the knowledge that I know just as little about cities in India, Brazil, and most other countries in the world with the exception of the United States. That said, I still get personally offended whenever I get a medical bill.

The more time I spend here, the more Canadian smugness just looks petty and embarrassing to me, especially the at-least-we’re-not-them back-patting. It’s especially obvious during big news events in American politics, when Canadians love to take to twitter with condescending “as a Canadian…” platitudes. The American project was always a far more ambitious one than Canada’s, which took a long time to grow out of being a British colony (for which it is now being punished by the embarrassment of having to put King Charles III on its coinage). And, since I’m a liberal humanist at heart, I have a lot of sincere, basic admiration when it comes to American ideals, even when the country falls short of them or outright betrays them: democracy, fairness and equality under the law, peaceful transfer of power, openness to newcomers, freedom to live as one chooses. The country has been very good to me, and it’s full of life and beauty and — yes — opportunity. Swearing the oath, I felt it was important not to be cynical, especially when surrounded by people who had to fight much harder than me to be there. And now, here, I’m a little bit more free.

1. Proof: this New York Review of Books article about the new Mean Girls movie says of Cadys’ character, who is “from Africa”: “Cady otherwise might as well have been from Estonia, or Alberta.”