Are Americans citizens of their State (Arisona, New York, etc) first and the United States second or the USA first and the State second?
I’m aware that Dependencies and Territories (e.g. Puerto Rico) are different.
American citizens are citizens of their state and the United States for different purposes. “First” and “second” doesn’t really enter into it.
US citizens first. I’m not aware of any States that have citizens. There are resident requirements for things like college fees or divorce (as examples).
Is there such concept as a “citizen” of a US state?
Every state has citizens.
14th Amendment: All people born or naturalized in the US are citizens if the US and of the state in which they reside.
IOW after the 14th was ratified, original citizenship is that of the US, and state citizenship is an incidental to residence.
A majority of the Territories nowadays are under the same provision, IIRC, although by specific statute rather than through the 14th – e.g. in PR there has been US citizenship since 1917 but only since 1941 it has been under “soil birthright”. And the US Appeals Court ruled that a claim of separate sole PR citizenship is ineffectual.
Citizen of the United States, legal resident of Oregon.
The effect of the 14th is that no state may deny its local “citizenship” rights to any US citizen that dwells therein. You move in, establish residence, and you can vote, run for office, serve on juries, etc. in your new state.
I’m not sure that being a “citizen” of South Carolina (where I currently reside) has any real meaning. Since the 14th Amendment precludes South Carolina from denying equal protection to ANY person within its jurisdiction, attempting to limit the benefits of a particular law to “citizens” of the state only would suffer some issues. I’m not aware of any federal case from after the adoption of the 14th Amendment which purports to confirm the conferring upon a person some benefit based upon that person’s citizenship status with a given state.
Has the issue ever arisen in American law?
Well, there was a rather extended conflict. Union v. Confederacy
Less jokingly, see the Supremacy Clause of the U. S. Constitution. Action in law generated by state statute is pre-empted and null if in conflict with the Constitution or Constitutionally-valid federal law.
The idea of “citizenship” per se isn’t interesting; it’s the rights, obligations, and legal liabilities attached to citizenship that matter, so that’s where all the body of common law focuses. Lots of cases cited in that Wikipedia article.
That last statement is the kicker.
A citizen of the United States is **always **a citizen of the United States, unless they renounce it, which is not easily done. An American remains an American no matter where they go, and they are recognized under international law as being American. If an American takes a job in Warsaw, she remains American. National citizenship is, in effect, a permanent characteristic of a person.
State citizenship is a current situation. If you are from Ohio and move to Kentucky, you cease being a “Citizen” of the State of Ohio, and become a “citizen” of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. By moving all your shit across a river, your “State citizenship” changes. It’s a transient property. True national citizenship is not; it changes only with great effort.
In any sense that matters this is true of any big federal state. For legal purposes - taxes, who you get your health insurance from, so on and so forth - there is a difference between being a resident of Ontario or of Saskatchewan; being a resident of Durango or of Sonora; being a resident of Queensland or of New South Wales. But those people are always citizens of Canada, Mexico, and Australia, respectively.
At least once, when Alaska wanted to pay long-time residents more money from its permanent fund than more recent transplants. The Supreme Court invalidated the plan on equal protection grounds.
There is a case in which the fluid nature of state residency can be frozen: active duty military are held to be residents of either the state in which they joined active duty service or the state they are assigned to (assuming a stateside assignment). Usually, that means if a servicemember chooses to retain “home town” state residency, they’re exempted from state requirements incumbent on them in the state they’re assigned to: their car can stay registered in the home state and not forced to be re-registered in their new state, their state income taxes (on their military pay) are assessed and payable to their home state, not their residence state, they’re entitled to vote absentee in their home state rather than registering in their assignment state, etc.
This is the concept of a “State of Legal Residency”. You declare the SLR with a DoD form executed at your personnel office. (No, you can’t just name any state as your SLR. You have to be physically resident in that state to change your residency to that state. The states don’t like it when military personnel shop for income-tax-free states of residence, so if you want to be a resident of Texas for instance, you only get the opportunity if you are assigned to Texas and take up meaningful residence there – home ownership or rental, for instance.)
The 14th Amendment was passed just after the Civil War; it’s original purpose was to ensure that all residents of the slave states were given equal rights, especially the now-free black slaves. Jim Crow laws were already being proposed in the slave states to deny blacks equal rights. (It was working, but in 1876 a dirty deal gave the Presidency to Republican Hayes over the vote winner Democrat Sam Tilden, in exchange for Federal troops stopping enforcing it.)
I’m not sure if it has been upheld in court much, but it is part of the legal underpinning of the various “equal treatment” arguments in various legal cases, most recently gay marriage and challenges to restrictive voting laws.
So citizenship in the USA & their resident states isn’t first and second, they are simultaneous & equal parts of American citizenship.
It matters for purpose of Federal Court diversity jurisdiction. It’s not enough to allege the plaintiff and defendant are residents of different states, they must be citizens of different states.
28 USC 1332:
Conundrum solved: “Citizen of a state” and “Resident of a state” are perfectly synonymous. No conflict of definition to create a bogus distinction in Constitution or law.
Problem. Solved.
More specifically, the Citizen of a State is a Resident of the State who is a US Citizen.
If I recall from the debate at one point about Richard Nixon (a president who released his tax forms) he too claimed California residency and paid taxes there because that was his address before becoming a commander in chief of the Army and moving to his post at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. I presume this is, however, a federal law or rule about defining residency when the federal government requires you to move in its service, which only incidentally affects “citizenship”.
My impression is that a state CAN restrict your state “citizenship” within certain limits. Most often this is relevant for elections, or certain other routine matters. For instance, you may not be eligible to vote in your local voting district(s) until you have lived there for at least X number of days.
On a somewhat different note – eligibility of some forms of state assistance. I moved to Wisconsin and I had to reside here for a full year while NOT going to school in order to qualify for in-state tuition rates at Wisconsin public universities.