In the 14th admendment to the Constitution, it states “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” I tried to look up state citizenship online but all you get is a lot of crazy. So some questions:
–How do you become a citizen of a state, and how can you lose it?
–In 2016, is being a citizen and a resident of a state legally the same thing?
–Are there any legal rights you get from state citizenship that you don’t get from U.S. citizenship?
In general terms, by being or becoming a citizen of the United States and by residing in the State. You lose by either ceasing to be a citizen of the US, or by ceasing to reside in the state
No: you can reside in a state without being a citizen of the US. For example, I resided in Ohio without ever being a US citizen, so I wasn’t a citizen of Ohio.
I suspect that the main rights that you get are rights to participate in state elections, plebiscites and petitions.
State colleges can have different fees for residents versus non-residents. Their residency requirements are defined. I remember friends who wanted to go to college in California as residents (due to the very low cost and very good schools), scheming to fit the residency requirements at the time.
Residency /= citizenship however.
This is one of the only exceptions, though. In pretty much everything else (maybe actually everything else), a state has to treat citizens equally starting the second they take up residence. For example, it used to be common for there to be long waiting periods for voter registration (a year or more), but those laws were struck down on the grounds that they violated the right of people to move from state to state and become citizens.
As I was having a will made recently, I got into the minutae of residence v. domicile. I was living for two years (on a limited term contract) in NY and my wife-to-be was similarly in Conn. After discussing it with the notary (they make wills in Quebec), we decided I was still domiciled at the time in PA, where I had lived for 26 years before going to NY temporarily, and my fiancee in NJ, and that our property status at the time we married in NJ with no contract would be governed by the laws of PA. So there are some things that seem to depend on your state. The relation between being citizen, resident, and domiciled in a state are unclear to me. Perhaps a lawyer could comment.
State citizenship meant a lot to people in the 18th century. Even after independence there wasn’t a formal entity like the United States of America. People were citizens of their colonies, and then states. The Articles of Confederation were quite explicit in this:
This didn’t work at all, so the modern Constitution superseded it. That placed sovereignty in the nation. Long-held understandings of sovereignty couldn’t be changed quite as fast as words, so that it took until the Civil War to firmly establish that the states were subordinate to the federal government and that the nation couldn’t be sundered.
No matter what people on the Internet like to say, there is no modern equivalent of state citizenship. There is state residency, as others have noted here, but that’s merely a convenience. You lose that as soon as you change your state of residence, a process that is not always obvious, also as noted.
Whether you get legal rights from a state is a matter of your definition of rights. The Bill of Rights applied to the federal government and not to state governments, but since the 14th Amendment the Supreme Court has issued a series of decisions applying them to both. You certainly are covered by different laws in different states. Some laws at some times in some places could be interpreted as conferring different levels of rights - Jim Crow laws are the most prominent example - but those were applied to all, residents and non-residents.
Since the point of the 14th Amendment was to stop states from treating black people as less than human, it seems to me that they included those words just in case one of the states decided to pull something like…
BLACK PERSON: I’d like to register to vote, please.
WHITE PERSON: You can’t; you’re not a citizen.
BLACK PERSON: According to the 14th Amendment, I’m a citizen of the United States.
WHITE PERSON: Yeah, but this is Alabama and you’re not a citizen of Alabama, therefore you can’t register to vote in Alabama.
Kind of. It was a direct response to the Dred Scott decision that said that someone could be a citizen of a state but not a United States citizen.
There are actually lots of exceptions to treating people equally the moment they take up residence. - everything from resident vs non-resident tuition to car registration and driver's license rules and taxes. New residents are not expected to change car registrations and driver's license on the day they move- they usually have 30 days to do so.That Supreme Court decision you refer to allowed residency requirements , just not lengthy ones and suggested 30 days was an ample period of time. I'm taxed differently as a NYS resident than I would be as a non-resident, even though the only difference might be a single day of physical presence.
Try the word “resident” so far as states go.
As for myself, I am in the state of confusion!
Exactly right.
The 14th Amendment also extended federal rights to the states, e.g. it required state governments to respect the Bill of Rights too.
The word citizenship generally only applies to one belonging to one’s country. Residency is more apt to describe a smaller, local boundary. However, before the US Civil War Americans most definitely identified with their state first, and the country as a whole second. Documents before it usually state, “These United States are…”, rather than, “The United States is”.
Well, of course, citizenship originally involved an identification with, or a certain status within, a city; there’s a bit of a clue in the word itself. It only later came it connote legal status as a subject or national of a state.
While the 14th amendment defining citizenship of both the US and the various states dates only from 1868, there’s no doubt that there was a concept of US citizenship from much earlier. Art 1 of the Constitution provides that Congress has the power “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization”, and article 2 refers explicitly to a “Citizen of the United States” as a qualification for becoming President. Indeed, one of the possible qualifications is that someone should have been a citizen of the US at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, indicating that for the framers of the Constitution there was already a concept of US citizenship even before the Constitution was adopted. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 speaks of “the subjects of Great Britain and the citizens of the United States” as being two distinct but corresponding groups.
So I’d say that right from the get-go there was a concept of US citizenship and a concept of state citizenship, and people were comfortable with the idea of being both a US citizen and a state citizen at the same time. While it’s true that in the earlier period of the US people’s cultural and community identity may have been first and foremost with their state, that wouldn’t be inconsistent with seeing citizenship as a legal construct, and as seeing US citizenship as more significant, in practical terms, than, say, citizenship of New Jersey.
Yes. The 14th Amendment established that US and state citizenship was more than some kind of dual citizenship, like between two separate countries. A citizen of a state is a full citizen of the US and therefore the state must respect the rights of that person as a US citizen and not just as a state citizen with perhaps a lower level of rights. It made citizenship and the citizen’s relationship to the government the same as the states’ relationship to the federal government - the federal part is supreme, and if it conflicts with the state, the federal part prevails.
If there were any significant status to state citizenship then there would have to be 50 different criteria for establishing it. Even the sense that a citizen of the US residing in a particular state doesn’t work because the 50 states can apply different laws to non-US citizens that are it’s residents. It’s just a remnant of the concept of the US as a group of individual sovereign states only voluntarily united. And yet that unworkable concept will just not die.
In my genealogical research, I found it interesting that in the “old country” they kept records not only on people moving into the region from elsewhere in the country, they also recorded people who left the region.
In the US, I don’t know that any such records being kept at the state level.
If “state citizenship” were an actual legal concept, then it would cause havoc with all the rules about how long you have to be a resident before you can get a driver’s license, in-state tuition, run for office, register to vote, etc. All of which may be quite different. Courts would insist on some uniformity.
Well yes and no.
The 14th Amendment did not automatically do it then. and it does not automatically do it now. It wasn’t until as late as 1925 that the first Supreme Court decision said that it did.
Since then, a series of judgements looked at the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, and bit by bit asserted that they applied to the states as well. I don’t know of any case in which such an assignment was denied since then, although an 1876 specifically denied that the 1st and 2nd amendments applied. There are still aspects that have never been adjudicated. I assume that most legislatures now consider themselves bound by all clauses in the Constitution but I also assume that future court cases will be heard to affirm this.
True. I was speaking from the perspective of today.
I get your point, but it still matters at least in one regard. One must usually be a state citizen in order to vote in that state.
No, one must be a state resident. Can you point to any language in any state’s constitution or laws that requires state citizenship to vote, uses the term state citizen, or defines what a state citizen is and isn’t?