What does it mean to be an American, not just a citizen?

A passport doesn’t tell us what holds the nation together, what binds disparate strangers into a people

- JOSH HAMMER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

MICHAEL LOCCISANO Getty Images AMERICAN FLAGS are displayed at a Veterans Day parade this month in New York City.

THE CHAOTIC confrontation in Dearborn, Mich., on Tuesday — when a demonstrator attempted to burn a Quran and counterprotesters defending Islam surged — was more than a brief flash of drama. Along with other recent controversies in Arab American-majority Dearborn, such as when the Muslim mayor told a Christian minister he “was not welcome here” and was an “Islamophobe” for objecting to renaming a local street after a Michigan journalist who had praised Hezbollah, this latest cultural skirmish yet again underscores longstanding concerns about America’s immigration regime—and, above all, the nature of American identity itself.

What, exactly, is an American? It’s a question that was increasingly on my friend Charlie Kirk’s mind in what tragically proved to be his final months.

The narrow, legal answer is straightforward: An American is a citizen of the United States, born or naturalized. That definition undergirds equal protection, sets the parameters of the franchise and helps define the various obligations citizens owe and the rights we enjoy.

But that technical legal definition is unedifying and wildly insufficient. A passport can inform which government recognizes us on paper. But it doesn’t tell us what holds the nation together, what binds disparate strangers into a people and what shared implicit assumptions make the American experiment workable rather than a “Groundhog Day”-style recurring melee of clashing worldviews.

Since the origins of the republic, the United States has always had a legal identity and a cultural one. The legal identity is broader, permitting more inclusivity.