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One of the most consequential facts about my life is that I was born in Reston, Virginia.
Obviously, that wasn’t my decision. I also didn’t grow up there. My parents, who are Palestinian, moved to Jerusalem when I was 2 years old and raised me there until I went off to college. But Reston still had a profound impact on the trajectory of my life because by virtue of being born there, I became a birthright citizen of the United States.
I didn’t always think of myself as an American — not because I didn’t want to but because I didn’t yet understand what American identity meant. After all, I was a Palestinian growing up in Jerusalem, so saying I was Palestinian made more sense to me when I was a kid. Even so, I felt a kinship with America. It wasn’t yet home, but it was where I knew my life began and where I knew I’d like to live someday.
I attended an international school, and our yearbooks always listed people’s nationalities next to their names. Some years the school listed me as Palestinian. Others, I was listed as both Palestinian and American. I remember flipping through the yearbook as soon as I got my hands on it just to see if “USA” was listed as one of my nationalities. In the years that it was, I would smile.
To be sure, I loved growing up in Jerusalem. But there’s a reason I felt so desperate to be tied to America in some way: Living under Israeli occupation includes daily indignities that you can viscerally feel — even as a child — and that make you want to leave. And by the mere accident of the location of my birth, I had what I believed was a one-way ticket to freedom. So when I turned 18, I decided to go to college in Washington, D.C., and I have lived in the United States ever since.
It wasn’t until I moved back to America that I finally understood what makes American identity unique. When I first got to college, I felt shy about saying that I was American in addition to being Palestinian. But early on, one student who lived on my floor had trouble understanding why I didn’t say I’m American. He told me that if I was born here, then I was an American — end of story. I responded by saying that if I’d been born somewhere else, like, say, Switzerland, I wouldn’t be Swiss, and that if he’d been born in Palestine, he wouldn’t be Palestinian. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he was still a little confused and said something along the lines of Well, that’s not how it works here.
I quickly learned that he was right. I immersed myself in the city. I learned about its history and culture. I read more about American history. I never felt like an outsider or a foreigner. I realized that just like Palestine, America was my country too.
I have always admired America for granting birthright citizenship so broadly, not just because I am a beneficiary of it but because I genuinely believe it’s one of the greatest ways to define citizenship — not as something that is earned but something that is inherent. On paper, at least, there’s a promise that everyone is equal at birth. We certainly don’t live up to that promise, but it’s a commitment that more countries should make.
So when President Trump started attacking birthright citizenship in his first term, I didn’t take him seriously. And when he tried to end it by executive order in his second term, I still didn’t take him seriously. Birthright citizenship, enshrined in the Constitution under the 14th Amendment, is so fundamental to American identity that I assumed even a conservative Supreme Court would slap any challenge down.
Of course, there have always been people who challenge my Americanness and people who claim that they are somehow more American than others. But I have never cared. Like it or not, I’m an American no matter what anyone thinks. And in my experience, such rigid, constricted views on American identity have always existed on the political fringes. What’s sad is that Trump brought that fringe idea about birthright citizenship into the mainstream, and what should have been a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court to strike down his executive order ended up being a 6-3 decision. The justices split even more narrowly, 5-4, on the key question of whether the executive order violated the Constitution. That’s a blow not just to birthright citizenship but to American identity itself.
Unlike so many other national identities around the world, American identity transcends bloodlines. It’s malleable, and anyone who is born here can claim it if they choose. America, after all, is a nation made up of people whose roots can be traced back to all corners of the world. People came here under many different circumstances — colonization, enslavement, poverty, persecution, despair — and, over the course of two and a half centuries, they’ve built the country we know today, with many moral failures and triumphs along the way.
So by virtue of being born in Reston, I am now part of that story, too. And that’s something I love about America: I don’t have to publicly profess my loyalty to or admiration for this country to be a part of it. I can criticize it week after week in this very newspaper and still claim it as my own. I don’t have to speak English to be an American, and I don’t have to look a certain way or believe in any particular religion to have the right to live freely here. What America gave me — and millions of others — at birth is the ability to grow up and be my true self, to embrace all of my identities, and still feel like I belong here. And ultimately, no president or Supreme Court justice could ever make me feel any differently.
Abdallah Fayyad can be reached at abdallah.fayyad@globe.com. Follow him @abdallah_fayyad.