Defining who we are seems like a simple thing. I am (fill-in-the-blank).

But who you are, who you believe yourself to be - gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity - has been under attack.

A number of the 200-plus executive orders issued by President Trump seek to define, limit, or otherwise affect certain identities. The ones that inspired this and my prior issue have to do with birthright citizenship.

A quick timeline of what’s happened with birthright citizenship: The executive order that more or less sought to end birthright citizenship was one of many issued on Trump’s first days in office. It impacted those whose parents were in the country unlawfully or on temporary visas. After a lawsuit, the case made its way up to the Supreme Court. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that birthright citizenship was protected by the 14th Amendment.

In August, two more executive orders were released. One targets “birth tourism” and the other narrows the declaration to only include those whose parents are from an “alien enemy” and children whose parents work for another government (like ambassadors).

Birthright citizenship is one example of how we seek to define bounds for who we are through the legal system. For lack of an easier (not better) framework, legal definitions are applied to our identity, because that is the system we live in and our brains love black and white bounds.

In truth, the lines of your identity aren’t so cut and dry, and many live as squishy cogs trying to fit themselves into the sharp-cornered boxes of legal status as identity.

A squishy cog is constantly asking “Is that me? Are they talking about all of me? Or sort of me?”

I was born in the U.S. and even had to take a beat to understand whether birthright citizenship applied to me, as both of my parents are now U.S. citizens, and have been for more than 40 years, but immigrated nonetheless.

Even with a year of research, and many hours thinking and overthinking, I cannot make the people I am writing for any less squishy. I am learning to be comfortable in my undefined state, which may eventually solve for my internal struggle, but will likely never be validated by the outside world.

My siblings, who were both born in Vietnam, but naturalized, are split. One sibling is concerned about getting swept up in an ICE raid and sent to a country they barely know. They don’t feel like an immigrant because of memory - having immigrated at a very young age, they only have fleeting memories of Vietnam.

The other has never voiced any worries, and identifies as an immigrant not because they remember Vietnam, but because they remember how hard it was when they first got to the U.S. But whether they feel like they are immigrants has no bearing on their worries and political ideals. It might feel like a paradox for my sibling to identify as an immigrant, but support politicians whose policies impact immigrants the most. However, it happens all the time.

The truth is legal status, like citizenship, might put us in one box or another, but it doesn’t negate our experience, or correlate with it. The way we feel is an experience, not a status.

Over the 4th of July, I had a long conversation with a varied group - some were immigrants, some new U.S. citizens, some born in the United States. For some time, we talked about whether we feel American and what that means to us. The same thing happened in that group - legal status didn’t correlate to whether anyone felt like they identified as an American.

For my part, I can’t call myself American, full stop. I often say Vietnamese American. I’m a little bit of both.

In an essay for Clerestory, Winson Law wrote about this dissonance as a kid of immigrants like me, but in relation to his mother.

“Perhaps the reason why my mom resists the label ‘American’ is that she mistrusts judgment and prejudice from her fellow citizens. Why claim this identity when other Americans see her as different and inferior? Better to remain a proud Chinese person (‘look at how powerful and rich China is now!’) than to be counted among white supremacists (‘did you see what they did to the businesses in Chinatown?’).”

Jose Antonio Vargas has been finding his way through dissonance and publicly talking about his path to finding his own identity. After he released a book on his story, he discussed the idea that citizenship is not a legal status - to be American means that you participate in your community.

“Citizenship is more than what you are. It’s what you practice being,” he said in 2017.

That brings us back to the central question: Can you call yourself American if you are not an American citizen? What if you just feel American?

Take military members who serve, despite not being U.S. citizens. To them being in the military is about the act of serving the community or being part of the military community. At one swearing in ceremony in 2019, about 25 military members talked to Smithsonian magazine about their decision to seek citizenship after or during the military service.

At the time, there were roughly 20,000 non-citizen service members, Smithsonian magazine reported. In 2008, the George W. Bush administration actually recruited immigrants to be in the military, hoping to capitalize on their language or medical skills. That program was suspended in 2017, leaving some of those service members in limbo.

“It bothered me that I served my country, but I didn’t have all the rights of citizens,” one said to Smithsonian magazine.

So why does whether you are a citizen, and if so, what kind of citizen you are, get all mixed up with your sense of belonging?

Social Identity Theory says that people construct their identity, their concept of who they are, by way of group membership. Mix this up with the Census or any bureaucratic form asking you “what you identify as” in terms of race/sex/gender/etc.

Identity in some contexts is status. That makes it easy for our system of cogs. But identity in the way we internalize it, and the way we treat other people? Not the same. Squishy.

The point of pursuing this as a line of reporting and writing started as a quest to define this thing I felt. In a lifetime of not belonging, this is a group where I do feel I belong, and that sense of belonging only exists because the borders around the definition are not certain. Attacks on identity feel personal because identity is personal and subjective.

To have a number, to know how many we are, is comforting in some sense, but numbers are one lens, one way of looking at identity.

Legal status is another quantifiable metric for a subjective definition. Like numbers, it only proves the existence of a shared identity. (More on this next time).

Identity isn’t a mathematical formula, or a checklist. Identity, like belonging, is a feeling. We define who we are, and we live by way of that definition.

Further reading

A pile of links not including those linked above that might be of interest

A call to action from Port of Entry for kids of immigrants

Americans once understood birthright citizenship - The Atlantic

Smithsonian magazine on the Asian American history part of this story

A good interview with an ACLU lawyer on the case