Thus making it invisible to me by default, since like kajillions of other sensible people I run Flashblock.

If this happens to you, just click the two little Flash logos in the upper-left-hand corner of the page and the comments will appear. You'll have to do it again for each page of comments. It's worth the trouble, though, because the overwhelming majority of them consist of people schooling Rovell from a great height.

Damned right we do.

One could make the case that if any U.S. citizenship status is "technical", it's the one that's bestowed on someone by virtue of place of birth. Natural-born citizens are under no obligation to jump through all the hoops the naturalized citizens do to claim that passport.

(Not that I would want to claim any sort of superiority over my natural-born fellow citizens, but that kind of soft bias against naturalized Americans as second-class citizens kind of ruffles my feathers.)

/rant

Given that so many of our forebears were immigrants themselves, I wonder why it is that Mr. Rovell suddenly feels that immigrants are not truly American?

When we lived in Saudi Arabia, my father was involved in a minor (single-car) accident. When the Saudi police saw his passport identification, they noted that he was American, but also fluent in Arabic and obviously NOT a natural-born American. Rather than take care of the issue at hand (my dad's car accident), they chose to chastise my father for "abandoning" his home and his culture to become an American citizen.

My father, in turn, gave the police a thorough brow-beating for disapproving of his decisions, and further noted that he was very proud of his citizenship, thank you, and there would be no further discussion about the country that had given him the education he needed to come to this backwater desert and set up the oil refineries that were transforming this camel-infested wasteland into something resembling a proper first-world country, and he'd appreciate it if they could get on with getting his car taken care of. (My dad isn't the type to take crap from people who talk smack to him.)

Thing is, I think America is a lot of highly contradictory things. But I like that. I think NASCAR is American and I think Chinatown is American. I think white evangelical Christianity is American and I think Ethiopian-born runners with USA plastered across their chest are American. What I resent is the attempt to claim that America is exclusively those things which (some) white native-born Americans say that it is.

We have this "Canadian-by-convenience" argument happening, especially after the last Lebanon War (when we evacuated at public expense all Canadian citizens back to Canada. Many of whom, as soon as the shooting died down, went back to live where their life was, in Beirut, "secure in the knowledge that if it becomes dangerous, they can retreat back to Canada, but not actually doing anything *for* Canada" (besides pay taxes, one assumes)). Funny how we don't complain of the huge numbers of Canadian citizens who spent the first two months of their lives in Vancouver, and the rest (so far) in Hong Kong...

This is stupid. I really appreciate the work my colleagues and the people I interact with do for our country, especially the ones who *weren't* born here (because they frankly usually do more, or harder, work for Canada). I certainly "follow the motions" probably more than I should, and I get away with it because I was born here. I'm proud of my heritage, and I'm proud to be Canadian, but I'm sure not as much as the people who now know where they're going to eat and sleep tonight, and don't have to carry a gun anymore (whether or not they choose to). And if they long for the country of their birth occasionally (especially in the middle of November when it's -30 before the wind chill), so be it. They know why they're here and not there, and they know that for them, it's still right.

For those who are dual-citizens, or who are Canadian citizens but live permanently abroad, I'm sure their life is better for it as well. Good for them. And one of the reasons I am proud of my country is that We Can Afford to have a few Canadians-of-convenience who come here only when they need the health care or the military evacuation.

A lot of bad things have been said about our Multicultural Mosaic policy (and a lot of bad things can be said about it), but that *is* in fact who we are. And Canada is actually better for that. In its own way, so is the U.S. for their immigrants, despite the many, major differences between the two situations.

Technically, their children were American citizens, and thus technically, so is he.

Half of my ancestors were here to greet the other half upon arrival on these shores, some time before there was a United States to be a citizen of. And I say, along with the lady in the harbor:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

It doesn't say anything about what color your skin might be.

First of all, I am an American by birth *and* choice - though I still don't think that maks me any more genuinely American than my grandparents / greatgrandparents who immigrated there. Second, I think that the years I'm spending living abroad actually make me a better citizen than someone who's never left the country. (Take the current health-care debates, for instance - now I can speak as someone who's directly experienced national health systems in two other countries, not to mention a casual visit or two when I got mildly sick during a holiday somewhere.)

And third, the idea of a marathoner getting citizenship in the US more easily as a "ringer" is really hilarious. That had to be written by someone whose only experience of sport is sitting on his couch watching overpaid "athletes" who get to work out as a full-time job compete in one of only four sports. I mentioned the World Masters Games: of the 28 sports included there, only 7 or 8 even have any professional athletes, in the US, and being a pro in a sport like volleyball or cycling is a tenuous living at best for all but a few. If you're an athlete who is not a professional football, baseball, basketball or hockey player, or at the vey top in sports like tennis or golf, you are in it for the love of the sport and you're struggling to balance training with making a living. No one is coming to you with offers of citizenship - no matter how rewarding you find your sport, it's probably something that makes your life harder, not easier.

We mostly see pro football players as a different species from ordinary people. In a sport like my own rowing, that's not the case: I've been coached by three different Olympians, for example. My coworker across the office who's completed two marathons so far trains six days a week, which is probably fewer hours per day but the same number of training sessions as Mr. Keflizighi. The flip side of that is that even people at the highest levels of their sport have the same struggles we do in finding time and funding for training while stlil managing the rest of their lives.

Mr. Keflizighi's prowess would not have made citizenship any easier even if he'd come to the US when already an elite athlete, and I think that claim is an insult because it so totally ignores all the sacrifices and struggles he's had to make in a sport whose rewards are in honor rather than cash.

Brisk, eh?

Regarding Flash comments: I've seen a lot of small newspapers -- local town papers and college papers -- do this, and I've always assumed it was because there are one or two large companies managing these websites, using some pre-built widget. I'm more than a little surprised to hear that CNBC -- which surely has its own IT folks -- is resorting to that.

In particular, our kids, born in the US, now cannot pass along their Canadian citizenship by birth, even if they move back to Canada and live there for decades. (Those hypothetical grandchildren of ours would be Canadian if they were born in Canada, but that would because of where they were born, not because of our kids' citizenship. If our kids spent a year abroad, and gave birth there, their children would not be Canadian, unless the other parent was native-born Canadian.)

If our next door American neighbors move to Canada for long enough to become a citizen, they can pass on Canadian citizenship by birth after they naturalize. But our kids, who are already Canadian citizens by birth, cannot (re)gain the ability to pass on citizenship by birth.)

This Rovell guy had better regret his idiot words. No one presumes I'm less than perfectly American, and I have dual citizenship. Sigh.

That said, a trip back to South Africa two years ago (my first as an adult, the last trip there was in junior high) revealed rather more South Africanisms in my personality than I'd been aware of. A couple of friends even commented on it when I got back from RSA.

Can we chalk this one up to some sort of dogwhistle (or perhaps unconscious?) racism on the column author's part? If the African ancestry of Mr. Keflizighi had happened to be largely Cape Boer (ie, white) as mine is, would he still have been a "technical American"?

(and can we please add "Unconscious" to the very useful Spelling Reference, please? Damn word never looks right...)

And third, the idea of a marathoner getting citizenship in the US more easily as a "ringer" is really hilarious. That had to be written by someone whose only experience of sport is sitting on his couch watching overpaid "athletes" who get to work out as a full-time job compete in one of only four sports.

I've always muttered that faced with the naturalization test, many Americans (in particular, "conservatives") could not pass it.

I'd like to see Rovell sat down and forced to take the citizenship test. I'd even grant him a week or two to cram for it -- he might learn something.

In general, it's my experience that the people claiming that a naturalized citizen isn't "American enough," generally are not themselves "American enough" to pass a citizenship test. I'd be curious to know whether Mr. Rovell is capable of proving otherwise.

One of my wife's uncles moved to Italy because the family in New York was too crazy. His kids were dual citizens, because the US was ok with that by then, though they moved back here when the boy was approaching Italian draft age and he gave up his Italian citizenship at the time.

I'm a technical American from Africa too. I ran the Boston marathon in 1991 with some qualms, as I was still a South African citizen and as such not eligible to compete anywhere in the civilized world. Luckily there was never any danger of me winning so I just hid in the crowd..

One of them--Kristi Yamaguchi, I think--was being interviewed in one of those morning shows, and at the very end was asked to repeat something the anchor had just said, but "in your own language". So she just repeated it in English.

All four of my grandparents came here from Ukraine early in the 20th Century. Does this mean that they were not real Americans? Does it mean their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren (including one Kentucky Colonel, a couple of corporate CEOs [before that position became criminalized], several well-known artists, and a whole slew of people who fought in various US military services in wars from WWII on) are not Americans in some sense? Where do you want to draw the line, "nativists"? Think carefully; you want to make sure you don't preclude yourself and your friends from being "true" Americans!

Bill Stewart @ 26:

Nicely said. Why on earth is membership in some overinflated granfalloon more important than willingness to be a good neighbor?

Now that I look back over this comment, sorry for all the rhetorical questions; reading the outpourings of these nativist idiots makes me want to get Socratic on their asses.

Even so, both my citizenships would be equally valid. Reducing your citizenship to what's written on your passport is useful, but it does not take into account all the things that go into being a citizen, from materially living somewhere to contributing your taxes from it (something a lot of true-blue patriots seem to be in a hurry not to do), to voting for its institutions (something I can do here for many offices), to contributing to the cultural and social life of the place you live in, and sometimes the place you have left.

I shall also say, as an aspiring long-distance runner myself, that a triumph in the Marathon is much more a victory for the individual than for the country he or she comes from.

Just to add my tuppence worth to the points made by Dichroic @ 17 and Anna Feruglio Dal Dan @ 35: training for long-distance running is hard work and time consuming (says she, having trained for and completed her first half-marathon recently). One of the reasons I'm not (yet) intending to try for a full marathon is because I recognise the level of training involved and I don't think I can fit it into my life at the moment - and that's without trying to get to competition level.

It makes them Americans, that's what. Screw the morons like Rovell.

(Weird side note: for a long time, the US did not allow dual citizenship, but now it does. But the country I'm living in, Germany, does not. For various personal and familial reasons, I'm not willing to renounce my US citizenship, but I have inquired a couple of times if there was any hope of an exception being made. One lovely bureaucrat here asked me to my face if I was an accomplished athlete, implying but not quite saying that that might make a difference. Um, no.)

What you describe is pretty much why I have kept my Canadian citizenship despite 40+ years living in the US. I am interested to hear that the US is now more liberal with regards to dual citizenships; regretfully, I have never been able to afford any hobby that involves hiring lawyers.

In reading his original column, I think it's clear that what Mr. Rovell meant to say that Meb Keflezighi was only technically an American runner which, if he had gotten his facts straight, would have been a defensible argument. He thought that Mr. Keflezighi was a product of African running training, competition and culture, and that his victory had little to say about the strength of American running.

I think that would be a defensible point, in the same way that if James Joyce had renounced his Irish citizenship, he would have suddenly stopped being an Irish writer and become a French or Swiss one.

Of course we wouldn't be talking about this if it weren't that Mr. Rovell got his facts completely and utterly wrong. But I'm more inclined to criticize Mr. Rovell for not doing even as much as a close reading Mr. Keflezighi's Wikipedia page (which says he ran for a high school in California), rather than reaching for the overbroad term "American citizen" rather than "American runner."

I meant, of course, that Joyce wouldn't have stopped being Irish.

No one makes any big deal of this; it's just what is. It does sometimes lead to amusing moments, as when recently, in social studies class, the teacher was asking students "where they came from." They've been studying immigration for a couple of weeks, and not just Ellis Island, either, which is refreshing. My dd and her bff are the only students in the class who are neither immigrants nor the children of one or more immigrants. And yet both are the products of (assimilated) immigrant culture, mostly eastern European Jewish.

dd?

Dunkin Donuts? Dungeons and Dragons? Who is their best friend?

My google-fu is failing me. Please help.

Rovell is a class A dolt.

I am absolutely delighted to see literate comments on his posts taking him to task for what he said.

Chris W. @ 41/42:

Perhaps he didn't mean to show some sort of nativist agenda, but that's what he did. I also don't think that saying that he's technically an American runner is much of an improvement. It brings along a lot of the same baggage, whether it's more defensible or not.

It's pretty insulting to be called a "technical american." It implies that one is not really a citizen, it's only because of a loophole they are. At least that is how it comes across. In my adoptive family I am the 1st or 2nd generation (depending on the side of the family) born in the US. Going by my biological it gets murkier (half were here from the 1700s). But in the end that doesn't matter, this guy doesn't seem to get that. It's not like tenure, it's not "I was here first so I am more American."

@Abi: It's important to remember that most Americans are not asses, and do recall where their roots are and what it means to become, and be, an American. If you think about all the parades and how people call themselves "X-American" you can see that.

Depending on context, it would be either "dear daughter", "deployment descriptor", "Doctor of Divinity" or "dataset definition".

Be careful with that joke. Unfortunately, some parts of the European extreme right are not joking when they bring that up.

I hope that's still true. I'm not naive, and I've seen how newcomers from, frex, Vietnam or Latin America have been treated, with suspicion or worse. And yet there was always the opposite, the welcoming and acceptance. I've always held fast to the belief that the US was one of the few countries where you could come from anywhere and still be viewed as a "real American", regardless of things like accent. America(n) as a state of mind, as it were. So many things have changed for the worse since I left, and it would be depressing to have to add this to the list.

Give the elite media any opportunity to explicitly define who "Real Americans" are and they'll quickly work towards a definition that counts only white, Republican, rednecks living in the Confederate states.

Give the elite media any opportunity to implicitly define who "Real Americans" are and they'll slyly argue that only Republicans wealthy enough to have retirement-sized 401Ks count as real citizens.

Why, oh why, do we have to have a press corpse rather than a press corps?

...brisk exchange...with CNBC... I may or may not post it on Making Light.

Oh, please please do! I'll get my popcorn ready!

One my more Conservative friends (we won't even go into where he stands on health care) was the first to chime in calling Rovell a dolt.

There is a fair bit of hope in the world.

In Salazar’s view, Keflezighi’s victory is another indication that American distance running is coming back. Keflezighi never ran competitively before he came to the United States, and he did all his training here.

“Can American-born guys and gals compete?” Salazar said. “I think we are starting to see that.

“Does Meb resolve that argument? No. He wasn’t born here.

“And neither was I.”

[Michelle] Kwan and [Tara] Lipinski were the co-favorites to win the 1998 Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan. [Kwan] placed first in the Short Program portion of the competition, winning eight first place votes out of nine judges. In the Free Skate, Kwan skated a 7 triple performance but placed behind Lipinski who also did a 7 triple performance that included a triple loop/triple loop combination and a triple toe-loop/half-loop/Triple Salchow. Kwan ended up winning the silver medal, with the gold medal being won by rival Tara Lipinski and the bronze medal by Chen Lu.[24] Lipinski and Chen both retired from competitive skating shortly after the Olympics, while Kwan went on to win the 1998 World Championships in Minneapolis.

A controversy was sparked when MSNBC used the headline "American Beats Kwan" to report the result of the Nagano competition. The headline, according to Joann Lee, Associate Professor and Director of Journalism at Queens College in New York City, implied that Kwan is not American. MSNBC subsequently issued an apology.

(from Wikipedia, but straightforward reporting of facts)

I don't know...we have stories of how my great-great grandfather was treated when he came to America during the Potato Famine. They're not nice stories of warm acceptance, either. The Irish may be a respectable mainstream community now, but it was not always the case.

We only have a trace or two left in current language: "get one's Irish up", meaning to lose one's temper; "blarney" as charming lies. But if you go back to the mid-to-late 1800's, an "Irish beauty" was a woman with a black eye, and "Irish confetti" was bricks. Shops would post Help Wanted signs with the annotation N.I.N.A. : No Irish Need Apply.

And when I grew up, we still told Polak jokes.

ISTR that the network coverage of any competition in which Michelle Kwan and Kristy Yamaguchi were entered spun it as a grudge match, with the clear, if unstated, idea that since they were both Asian, they must be in head-to-head competition. This always pissed me off; aside from the fact that they're both native-born US citizens, their styles and talents are very different: Kwan is one of the finest artistic skaters/ice dancers¹ alive, whereas Yamaguchi's strengths are technical jumping and precision skating.

1. Not necessarily in the formal sense in which ice-dancing is defined by the international skating organizations. But I'll save that rant for another time.

abi @ 66:

That sort of ethnic bigotry still exists in the US; it's just mostly underground because going public with it usually results in being dog-piled. For instance, Eva's closest friend, a Catholic who grew up in what was then rural Oregon, whom she's known for almost 30 years, still can't understand how we can have financial problems since of course all Jews are rich.

That remind me of a line from Blazing Saddles that I shall not repeat because it manages to insult three ethnic groups in one short sentence.

WRT to immigration, sometimes it doesn't have to be cross-border to mark you as different. A family may be regarded as "blow-ins" because they've only been in the village for 3 generations. The micro- as opposed to the macro-, I guess.

Now they say "No travellers". Plus ça change.

I'm a Canadian who's always been vaguely irritated with the US's idea that it's allowed to tell Canada who's allowed to be Canadian and who's not.

About 20 years ago, a Canadian friend of mine (at the time married to an American and living in the US) considered getting her US citizenship. She phoned the US Immigration department for information, and was told that she would have to renounce her Canadian citizenship. When she phoned the Canadian embassy, she was told she could if she wanted to, but Canada would always consider her Canadian.

I mean, I get it if it's the other way around. If, say, Abi gets her Dutch citizenship, and the US gov't sends her a registered letter that she's no longer considered American, well, that sucks, but it's the American gov't deciding who its own citizens are. If Abi's husband decided to get his American citizenship, would the Americans be allowed to tell the Dutch gov't that they are not allowed to consider him Dutch anymore?

Lose the accent and they can blend in.

I have friends, whose families have been here since the 1700s, who get asked for green cards.

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1753.html

I've had both US and Irish citizenship for over a decade now; both passports have been renewed since then. For the US passport, I simply included a signed statement affirming that I did not intend to renounce my US citizenship and that I had continued to reside, vote, and pay taxes in the US since that date. (The process I went through didn't require a renunciatory oath, though even if it had the US wouldn't recognize that alone as a renunciation.)

Looking back to Debbie's #38: are there any other EU countries you could more easily get citizenship in? Many of them, including Ireland, allow dual nationality.

Quick recommendation, Friday, 6th November ABC Local Radio Conversations program.  Talk with ?Alan? ?Mckay?, not on site yet.  Vietnam War veteran turned author, historian.  Much is experience of some 'contacts', but there's other good.  Some what happened after.  Others might find Australian viewpoint new.

Gasp!  Shocking story about shootings at Fort Hood just in News.  My sympathy to all involved.  Bad in so many ways.  Gunna cause all kinds of repercussions …

Back when I was in grad school in the city of Gritty Waffle a friend of mine, a native of a Caribbean island, with a clear and distinctive accent and very dark skin, had gone shopping in the adjacent Mexican metropolis. On returning to the border, he discovered that he'd left his identifying documentation back home. He marched up to the immigration checkpoint. The immigration officer asked him "You US?" He squared his shoulders, shook his dreadlocks and in his best imitation American accent answered "Yup." He was waved through with no further check.

more generally, i'm ashamed of my own country's governments choosing to pander to racist right & left's prejudices, and not only discriminate against would-be immigrants by their implicit colour*, but further - by lumping in everyone attempting to claim sanctuary from political or religious persecution, unless they can prove they are not seeking economic advantage, and declare their status as seekers of sanctuary immediately they disembark. to some immigration official ominously in uniform with the power to turn them away more-or-less upon personal whim, who has chosen a career that pretty well inevitably will put them into such a position at least some of their time.

* - their skin colour being generally presumed from their country of origin

Abi, it really isn't. The rise of the BNP is symptomatic of a lot of things - successive governments' failure to heed the interests of the dwindling white working class, mostly - but it isn't aimed at the Scots. The BNP, as far as I can work out, would like the Scots to _remain_ their fellow countrymen at a time when many Scots would rather not.

Inasmuch as there has been a rise in English Nationalism (which the BNP, as its name suggests, isn't, quite) it's been fuelled by a feeling that the Scots (and to some extent Welsh and Irish) are getting an unfairly good deal out of the Union (over-representation in the UK Parliament, overallocation of resources) while loudly insisting the opposite. [I am studiously neither endorsing nor constradicting this position.] But the BNP is something else entirely, and the two shouldn't be confused.

I have a Latina colleague from New Mexico whose family has lived there since the late 1700s. She says her grandmother says, "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us."

Now, at the moment, the US does not formally inform Canada when a Canadian becomes a US citizen, nor (as I understand) does Canada currently recognize the renunciation involved in that process; that is, they'll still consider you Canadian unless you renounce it to them more directly. But if you do naturalize as a US citizen, with the required renunciation clause, my understanding is that the US will *not* consider you a dual citizen thereafter.

(And I can fully understand that many folks would not want to take an oath renouncing their original citizenship, if they want to keep it, even if their original country considers the oath non-binding.)

If I'm wrong about any of the facts above, though, I'd love to know.

That is exactly me. As has been said here on occasion, the words you use are important (words mean something).

Gary McKay commanded a rifle platoon that patrolled the jungles and grasslands of Vietnam in silence for days on end. He was wounded in the fighting and evenutally awarded the Miliatry Cross for valour.
Gary went on to serve in the army for 30 years.
His autobiography In Good Company was published back in the 1980s, but it's still in print. His most recent book, written with co-author Elizabeth Stewart, is about the Australian surgical team that treated Vietnamese civilians as the war raged around them. It's called With Healing Hands

But, thinking about it, I can think of a set who would not mind that.

a bit late, I guess, but FWIW... I saw a sign at a nightclub in the '80's that said "No desert people." Since I live in L.A. I still haven't figured that one out.

It was a simple misspelling: that should have been a double 's', and to be picky they also left off a comma. Probably the pastry chef was sick that day.

Tehanu @96, can you remember where nightclub was? Assuming USA, place with access from 'desert' or not? Or were you already in LA? (Was Burning Man around at that time?)

...and they also forget that one of America's mot famous and most iconic characters is a illegal refugee from an alien world.

Batman, being a citizen and not as law-abiding as Superman tries to keep up, but he is, after all, only human.

*For certain parochial values of American.

Watching the first few seasons of "Smallville", it looked to me like they were saying Metropolis was Chicago; people from Smallville, Kansas were driving there on day trips. Of course it's possible that one of Zod's little pranks left a wormhole to Kansas at the distal end of the Holland Tunnel.

More seriously, a different borough of New York City doesn't make ANY sense. There's a city center in both. They each have a mayor! They each have a chief of police. They are both major cities. It's not like Metropolis could be Manhattan and Gotham could be Brooklyn. Not possible.

Years ago, when I was running an RPG that combined the Marvel, DC, and various other fictional universes, I decided that Metropolis and Gotham were neighborhoods in NYC. The former was in midtown Manhattan, the latter somewhere in Brooklyn.

At King Con Brooklyn the other week, there was a panel discussing the early days of Batman. One of the panelists pointed out that Superman started out as a hero of the proletariat, who fought against slumlords, corrupt politicians, and other forms of systematized injustice. Later on he became a defender of normal society against super-villains, and thereby a supporter of the ruling class. Batman, similarly, started out as a vigilante, and later became an ally of the police.

How about simply an alternate reality scenario where the boroughs became two cities instead of one?

Yeah, American capitalist society has become very good at co-opting almost any reform personality or movement. Example: Amazon makes money off this classic bit of Yippie anarchism.

Metropolis in New Jersey. That would explain so much.

That doesn't even need to be very alternate: Brooklyn absorbs Queens, and someone sells Staten Island to New Jersey (for one dollar and other good and valuable considerations).