After I published this piece, I started reading the book “White by Law” by Ian Haney López. I hate when I publish a piece and then I come across something that fits perfectly with the piece. So, I will include these quotes here: 1.[R]ights ought not to rest on citizenship, because citizenship, as a political status, is too easily taken away. 2. Citizenship is a legal construct, an abstraction, a theory. No matter what the safeguards, it is at best something given, and given to some and not to others, and it can be taken away. 3. Citizenship, easily granted and easily withheld, is a tenuous concept on which to hang social privileges such as the right to attend school or to receive medical care. 4. It [citizenship] is made even more untenable as a basis for social distinctions when one understands, as the prerequisite cases powerfully demonstrate, that citizenship easily serves as a proxy for race. 5. And then we have this word from Malcolm X: “Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans.”