Mom and Dad lived in Paraguay for six years before they thought about applying for citizenship. The naturalization process there is smooth so the possibility always remained open. In the end, they didn’t do it, and not having Paraguayan citizenship didn’t bother them. For some people, the feeling of attachment to a place speaks louder than knowing that with other passports they could travel almost visa-free for a lifetime. For me, it’s still hard. Paraguay was all I had seen for a long time, and not having the citizenship of the country whose culture I identify with has been a bit of a struggle, leaving me with a feeling that something might be missing. I try to believe I am not alone in this problem. People in our school have multi-layered identities and their stories and paths have changed so much over time that they have created new identities for themselves.

Where are you from, someone might ask.

Alright, but where are you actually from, is the inevitable follow-up. If we respond with the same country, they might question if we were really from there.

In high school, I studied with people from a hundred different countries. The deal seemed simple; you go there representing your own country. However, the countries we supposedly represent, the way we look and the front cover of our passports do not give a complete picture of who we are, how we identify and where we have lived. In fact, in international environments, we don’t really represent a country, a culture or its people. Instead, we represent ourselves, our own values and what we stand for. Therefore, things like citizenship can become secondary, although they are nevertheless still relevant.

In an ideal world, people would not categorize each other on the basis of nationality or citizenship. In my understanding, nationality is related to a person’s membership and identification with a recognised ethnic group or peoples. Citizenship, however, is a legal instrument that can equate to nationality in most countries, but is not limited to it, especially in multinational or pluralist states. Why does citizenship matter then? Maybe because it is an opportunity to identify people and provide a measure of justice to those living in and contributing to a country, to themselves or to the hopes that they have for that country.

It’s not always easy, though, to talk about citizenship or understand the parameters under which it could be granted, denied or annulled. Citizenship is a system with inputs and outputs. People adopt it, renounce it, despise it and dream of it. But it’s not they who decide. Authorities have the final word on whether the residents of a country deserve citizenship. As I write this I find out that the President-elect of the United States has proposed removing citizenship from anyone who burns the U.S. American flag. A friend also recently told me about his family getting economic citizenship from a Caribbean island. Lastly, European and U.S. American friends of mine who were adopted from South American countries are now searching for their biological families and considering whether to adopt the citizenship of the place where they were born, in order to complete a missing piece of their identity.

Having worked in the past on several campaigns regarding adoptees and stateless persons, I’ve come to believe that no matter how hard it is, long-term residents of a country deserve a pathway to citizenship, or at least the possibility of it, so that even if it cannot be fully realized for them, their children can obtain it. Meeting people who are descendents of migrants, stateless people and adoptees and having friends who are immigrants has made me more aware that these people would do anything for the country they’ve been brought up in, the country they now love.

It scares me to think that many families could be broken up because of deportation. People’s stories of migration, legality and documentation are so particular and vary so much that it is hard to judge based on generalizations. What if we gave everyone the opportunity to express their reasons, to have legal counseling, to prove their good standing in a country, to return to the land they were dispossessed from or to remain in the place where they have made a living?

My concern is, again, that nowadays a lot of people are lost because they need, deserve or have worked hard toward acquiring citizenship, but it is denied to them on the basis of prejudice. Broken accents, darker skin, arbitrary borders drawn by colonial powers, people of the same origin making mistakes in the past — all of these count as reasons for denying someone citizenship. What do indigenous peoples think about citizenship? What do second, third and fourth generations have to say about citizenship? What would the world look like if we realized that as much as citizenship protects us, it can also be a very arbitrary way of dividing us?

I don’t have the answer to all of those questions. Neither am I an expert on the topic of citizenship nor I am in a position to decide who is, or isn’t, deserving of citizenship. What I can do, though, is share my impressions, and invite a critical reflection on how we identify and are identified by others.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I am Colombian, by citizenship.