The chaotic confrontation in Dearborn, Michigan, on Tuesday -- when a demonstrator attempted to burn a Qur'an and Muslim counter-protesters surged -- was more than a brief flash of drama. Along with other recent controversies in Arab-majority Dearborn, such as when the Muslim mayor told a Christian minister he "was not welcome here" and was an "Islamophobe" for objecting to renaming a local street after a Hezbollah-supporting journalist, this latest cultural skirmish yet again underscores longstanding concerns about America's immigration regime -- and, above all, the nature of American identity itself.

What, exactly, is an American? It's a question that was increasingly on my friend Charlie Kirk's mind in what tragically proved to be his final months. And in light of the Dearborn fracas and the recent election of Zohran Mamdani as the next mayor of America's most iconic metropolis, it's a question that has never been more pressing.

The narrow, legal answer is straightforward: An American is a citizen of the United States, born or naturalized. That definition undergirds equal protection, sets the parameters of the franchise, and helps define the various obligations citizens owe and the rights we enjoy.

But that technical legal definition is unedifying and wildly insufficient. A passport can inform which government recognizes us on paper. But it doesn't tell us what holds the nation together, what binds disparate strangers into a people, and what shared implicit assumptions make the American experiment workable rather than a "Groundhog Day"-style recurring melee of clashing........

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