America is a nation of becoming. Many other nations are not

This is the July 1, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.

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BECOMING AMERICAN – A GUEST ESSAY BY ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

My citizenship came from being born on American soil — specifically, the soil of Cleveland. My parents were immigrants, legal at the time, but immigrants. 

Birthright citizenship is not just a legal principle. It is deeply connected to a cultural idea: that this is a nation of becoming, that people can become part of it.

It’s worth noting how many other countries with immigrants — France, Germany, many places in the world — don’t have this principle. And it changes the very notion of American-ness: that people can become American. 

You go to France, and that’s not the idea. There, Frenchness is a fixed thing — it’s these cheeses, it’s this blood, it’s your gr andparents having had to be here. You can sit over there your whole life and never become of it.

I know this because after my parents moved to America in the 1970s and built a life in Cleveland, they tried again — moving with my sister and me in the late 1980s to France. I remember, at 7 years old, watching them arrive in and navigate France, and it dawned on them that they weren’t going to be able to do what they had done in America. They would never become of it. 

This capacity — that we allow people to become American — shapes the idea that we are a country of becoming, a country of creation, a country that welcomes new ideas. A country not so scared of its culture evolving that it needs to lock people out.

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