My fellow Americans, I don’t often address you as that. In fact, I’ve never addressed you as that before because I was not an American until Aug. 7. Before that date, I was merely a sojourner in this great and increasingly unhinged land. Legitimately, I hasten to add. I was a British subject on a green card, that magic carpet to the New World whose upward flight is sustained by lawyers’ fees. I was known to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as an Extraordinary Alien, which sounds like a David Bowie song from the 1970s. Since Aug. 7, I am one of you — or should I say, One of Us.

It’s been nearly 20 years since I first joined the tired and huddled masses of Harvard graduate students. As I assured the examiner at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston, in that time, I have neither been arrested, nor charged in court, nor supplied “a friend” with a deadly weapon. I have, however, donated fulsomely to the IRS, a habit which, along with not being an accessory to murder, is one of the key requirements for moving from green card to U.S. citizen. Another is money, lots of it, for lawyers’ fees, registration fees, postal fees, and charges for breathing within sight of a federal facility.