Conditional Citizens: On Belonging In America

"This is the first nonfiction book by Laila Lalami, a Moroccan-born novelist who writes searingly about outsiders. It comes at a fraught time for immigrants in America. Lalami movingly chronicles her own journey from optimistic, naturalized American to post-Sept. 11 “conditional citizen” repeatedly scrutinized as an immigrant, an Arab, a Muslim. In one scene, she describes a “white woman in a blue pantsuit” at one of her book readings pressing her on ISIS, as if “I was a specimen, culled from a group of people these readers found mysterious and perhaps dangerous.” Conditional citizens, Lalami writes, are those who cannot dissent without their patriotism being questioned, who cannot move freely, who are jailed without cause. Though the U.S. prides itself on being a country of immigrants, it has often treated new Americans with exclusion and mistrust."