"In the year that King Uzziah died" is a prepositional phrase acting as an adverbial modifier; it explains when “I saw the Lord.” Within that prepositional phrase is a dependent clause “that King Uzziah died,” which is a restrictive relative clause. What’s important about that, if you’re not reveling in the beauty of the sentence diagram itself, is that all parts before the comma need each other, and all work to make the rest of the sentence more meaningful. Following the comma, “I saw the Lord” is the independent clause, which is the only kind of clause that can stand alone.
Maybe the sentence should have started with “On the day that my husband became an American citizen.” Then that phrase would be the modifier working to make the rest of the sentence more meaningful. As in, on the day my husband sacrificed some sense of self, or shifted his status of belonging, or obtained whatever it is that citizenship bestows upon a human, on that same day, my daughter was taken care of by medical professionals whom we trusted, and who, with precision, removed one obstacle to her thriving, in a procedure paid for by the health insurance her father obtains through his work at an American company.
But I think my original syntax was right. On the day that my daughter’s adenoids were removed, my husband became an American citizen. Then the extraction of the adenoids is the modifier, somehow directing meaning. The angel flying toward my daughter with the hot coal between tongs, touching her mouth, removing the lazy adenoids. Are they even supposed to be here? On the day of this removal, my husband became an American citizen. He had decided on his own to do so, yet the choice felt forced. Some higher power got to choose who joined our national community, and in the end, they chose my husband, the “right” color person, to belong.
Irony, then, that the last part of the sentence is the independent clause. The only one that doesn’t need anything else to make it complete.
Life for immigrants is only going to get worse in the United States. The one Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in July of 2025 is a firehose of funds into ICE, which will now operate with more money than most countries’ military forces.11
More detention centers. More ICE agents. Fewer people with Temporary Protected Status. More people with lifetimes in the US, with families, with jobs, with myriad ways of belonging, whose lives will be upturned. And now a president threatening to deny green cards, to denaturalize those who aren’t sufficiently supportive of him, and even to revoke the citizenship of Americans born in the United States.
Art retains his Polish citizenship. But now he also has an 8.5x11 gilded certificate of US citizenship that costs $500 to replace if lost or damaged. He has filed it in a safe place. Although he relinquished his alien card, the certificate still contains his alien number. The immigration officer told him to cover that number if he held it up in the photos after the ceremony.
On paper, my husband belongs to two countries; in his heart, the math is less clear. He’s legally part of whatever this country has become, though. And the outcome he’s most excited about now is voting: a right and a privilege.
The Belonging Barometer study knew this would happen. Researchers found that a greater sense of national belonging was associated with support for democracy rather than a non-democratic government.12 Maybe this is the reason for hope. Maybe belonging is itself hope. In any case, researchers found that individuals who felt that they belonged in America were less likely to agree with the statement that “our democracy is beyond repair.”13
11 https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/mass-deportation-trump-democracy/
12 The Belonging Barometer https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/the-belonging-barometer/ p 38
13 The Belonging Barometer https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/the-belonging-barometer/ p 38
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