Taxation and belonging: the history and rhetoric of tax, full citizenship, and community membership in the United States

Most of the recent scholarship on taxation and citizenship in the United States focuses on either or both exit taxes and citizenship-based taxation. Such work, while important, understands citizenship too narrowly and privileges or gives outsized importance to the stories of some individuals whose lives sit at the intersection of tax and citizenship to the exclusion or minimization of others. This chapter embraces the idea—widely accepted and explored outside tax scholarship—that citizenship is both formal and performative. Using textual analysis of magazine articles on taxation and immigration, this chapter connects the use of taxpayer status arguments to similar arguments in civil and gender rights movements in the U.S. Recognizing the prevalence and rhetorical weight of taxpayer status arguments across different social movements should, this chapter argues, push tax scholars to think differently about citizenship and taxation, as well as how to apply traditional tax policy metrics in the space.