Why This Immigrant Is Proud to Be an American

I became an American citizen eight years ago in a ceremony that took place in a nondescript community college in Northern Virginia.

There was a tinge of disappointment when I received the long-awaited invitation. Years earlier, my friend Kanan, a Tamil refugee from Sri Lanka, had become a citizen on the lawns of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Instead of any similarly august setting, I joined 500 others in a bland auditorium.

It was during the Oath of Allegiance that it happened. Kanan had warned me it would. I was reciting the words “Solemnly, freely, and without mental reservation, I hereby renounce under oath all allegiance to any foreign states” when tears started rolling down my face.

By the time I got to the next line — “My fidelity and allegiance from this day forward is to the United States of America” — I was sobbing tears of relief, joy and the sheer impossibility of it all. I turned to see my beaming natural-born American wife and children on the balcony and grinned. I was now an American like them. The idea of it still fills me with wonder.

I was born and raised in Zimbabwe, in southern Africa, several thousand miles from these shores. I left the impending mayhem of that country — economic collapse, Soviet-style seizures of private land — for the United Kingdom in 1993. Zimbabwe was a British colony, and my mother had English ancestry, but the U.K. never felt like home.

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It was in 2003 that I arrived in New York. America immediately felt different. Not only the scale and grandeur of the Big Apple, but the everyday signifiers. I lived in Brooklyn, and a neighbor, on hearing I was an immigrant, gave me a pocketbook copy of the U.S. Constitution and said to carry it with me.

Someone else urged me to watch the Ken Burns documentary The Civil War, telling me, “If you want to really understand America — North and South — you have to see that.” I knew little about that conflict or the revolution that preceded it, but I was struck by the complexity of America, its vastness and the multitude of its stories.

I was also struck by the flag. It was two years after 9/11, but weekend trips to my future in-laws in suburban New Jersey were like a July 4th parade: tree-shaded streets lined with fluttering Old Glories, an unironic love for one’s country that seemed like such a dated concept to my 35-year-old self.

I had barely seen a Union Jack in all the years I lived in England. America was something else, and I found myself falling for it.

When I married in 2005, my mother and father — white Africans of many generations — flew over. Back in Zimbabwe, their farm was under siege from the state. My new wife’s parents had no such concerns. It occurred to me that the difference between our families was simple: Our immigrant ancestors had taken different boats. The ship to America had been the one to be on.

By 2009, we had two children who had been born in the U.S.A. Talk about winning first prize in God’s lottery. A city takes its toll, though. I wanted them to feel grass under their feet, and my wife yearned for the type of small-town community in which she had grown up. And so we moved south to a historic village in Virginia.