In fact, the stranded citizens of Yemeni descent in Sana’a; Alvaro, Maria, and Diego and their families in Texas; and the hundreds of naturalized citizens fighting denaturalization cases in U.S. courts today are harbingers of the attacks on citizenship yet to come. The numbers, it may be said, are currently too small to suggest these practices could dislodge longstanding precedent in interpreting the Citizenship Clause. The starting point should be, however, that every American matters—a sentiment that such policies seem designed to undermine. Another necessary response to the relatively small number of cases to date is to question why such massive resources are being mobilized to torment a miniscule fraction of the U.S. population in the pursuit of an un-American fantasy: a perfect, meticulously documented citizenry, homogenous and docile. As the previous chapter indicated, the law gives bureaucratic institutions developed to administer nationality in the United States license to assess the authenticity of Americans differently on the basis of visible markers of “excludable” characteristics—with race and class being the most prominent traits triggering additional scrutiny.692 This feature of modern American life contradicts popular ideals of American citizenship as an equalizing condition; for these ideals to hold true on their own, citizenship would need to be self-evident, and it is not. As noted by Beatrice McKenzie: Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, on the front lines of U.S. birthright citizenship policy, whether in U.S. embassies or consulates abroad, at the border, in the war zone, or at the local polling place, establishing credibility as a citizen has been more difficult for citizens of color.693 Although she was writing about the past, McKenzie’s words are particularly trenchant today. The American Political Community “Equality of condition, as the Jacobins had understood it in the French Revolution, became a reality only in America, whereas on the European continent it was at once replaced by a mere formal equality before the law.” -Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism Citizenship based on birth on the territory is the mode by which the vast majority of Americans access nationality.694 Citizenship and “nationhood” are uniquely intertwined in the United States, and acquisition of citizenship based on place alone (not race, alienage, ethnicity, social 154 UNMAKING AMERICANS