In the United States, citizenship status has a huge impact on how well this country works for us.

Beyond the right to vote and to carry a U.S. passport and enjoy protection from deportation,

citizenship can affect where and whether we can work, access health care, or obtain a license to drive.

The binary between citizen and non-citizen residents of this country can be so stark that we might easily forget.

Citizenship itself is a social construct.

We made the rules and we can change them.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

My guest would remind us that not only can we change the rules around citizenship, what

it confers and who qualifies, but we have changed them many times and in many

ways over the decades. And those shifting policies have often reflected our sensibilities

around race, sexual orientation, and who deserves to be treated as fully human. Daisy Hernandez is

Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University, and she's an author.

Her new book is called Citizenship, Notes on an American Myth.

Daisy, welcome to think.

Thank you so much for having me.

This book reminded me of something that should be obvious but is often overlooked,

that citizenship is a social construct. Will you talk about that?

Yes, absolutely. I think that a lot of times in the U.S., especially, we tend to think of citizenship

as a legal status. It's black and white. Either you have it or you don't have it. But in a lot of

ways, citizenship very much functions as a social

construct or a fiction in the sense that it can really determine the kind of safety that we have

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