America is a nation of becoming. Many other nations are not

This is the July 1, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.

BECOMING AMERICAN – A GUEST ESSAY BY ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

My citizenship came from being born on American soil — specifically, the soil of Cleveland. My parents were immigrants, legal at the time, but immigrants.

Birthright citizenship is not just a legal principle. It is deeply connected to a cultural idea: that this is a nation of becoming, that people can become part of it.

It’s worth noting how many other countries with immigrants — France, Germany, many places in the world — don’t have this principle. And it changes the very notion of American-ness: that people can become American.

You go to France, and that’s not the idea. There, Frenchness is a fixed thing — it’s these cheeses, it’s this blood, it’s your grandparents having had to be here. You can sit over there your whole life and never become of it.

I know this because after my parents moved to America in the 1970s and built a life in Cleveland, they tried again — moving with my sister and me in the late 1980s to France. I remember, at 7 years old, watching them arrive in and navigate France, and it dawned on them that they weren’t going to be able to do what they had done in America. They would never become of it.

This capacity — that we allow people to become American — shapes the idea that we are a country of becoming, a country of creation, a country that welcomes new ideas. A country not so scared of its culture evolving that it needs to lock people out.

CHARTS OF THE DAY

Source: New York Times/Siena poll of 3,659 likely voters conducted June 15 and 29, 2026, margin of error +/- 1.9 percentage points.

TODAY ON MORNING JOE

Lisa Rubin on Trump’s legal theories

“This is an administration where what used to be fringe theories about interpreting the Constitution suddenly move into the mainstream. Some of the ideas that motivated Jan. 6 and the legal strategies underpinning it — things no one discussed until suddenly they did — now carry major currency within the Republican Party.”

David Drucker on the Colorado results

“On the Democratic side, we’re now seeing exactly what drove the Tea Party upheaval in the Obama years: voters upset that their own party in Washington isn’t fighting hard enough. The candidate who beat Congresswoman Diana DeGette blames the U.S. for the 9/11 attacks and refuses to call an antisemitic attack on peaceful Jewish protesters in Colorado last year what it was.”

Jon Meacham on America’s founding

“There’s a case to be made that we were really founded in 1965, when a multiracial, multiethnic democracy came more fully into being with the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Voting Rights Act. So we’re really about 60 years old, a developing democracy in a lot of ways.”