Citizenship and taxation have been linked for centuries. The most famous slogan in U.S. political history — “No taxation without representation!” — was central to the nation’s founding. And the sentiment remains a powerful element of American political culture even today.
But noting this linkage isn’t the same as explaining it. What should we make of this connection between the rights of citizenship and the responsibilities of taxpaying? Tax scholars have typically focused on the formal elements of citizenship — the rights and benefits that flow from membership in a civic community. But as Tessa Davis, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, has recently pointed out, this formalistic view doesn’t tell the whole story.
“Citizenship is a continually unfolding story that nations tell themselves,” Davis contends in her important contribution to a new essay collection, Taxation, Citizenship and Democracy in the 21st Century. “Tax’s role in that story is more visceral and less technical than it may seem.”
Performative Citizenship
In her essay, “Taxation and Belonging: The History and Rhetoric of Tax, Full Citizenship, and Community Membership in the United States,” Davis challenges tax scholars to adopt a broader view of citizenship. “Citizenship is a legal category and a product of social imagination,” she writes. Tax scholarship would be enriched by more attention to the latter, and especially to the “performative” aspects of citizenship: tax-related behaviors and expectations that surround membership in a civic community.
Notably, Davis contends that benefit theory is central to the link between taxation and citizenship. Long out of favor among tax scholars, the concept deserves a fresh look, she argues. “A colloquial version of benefit theory matters to individuals in ways that aren’t captured in the tax scholarship conceptions,” Davis writes. “Where tax thinks of ability to pay and benefit theory as different visions of how to allocate tax burdens within the taxable community, the popular imagination casts both as facets of defining the taxable community itself, evaluating the fairness of a cohesive tax/transfer system, and shaping the meaning of citizenship itself.”
Davis begins her essay with a helpful discussion of immigration. “A more robust discussion of taxation and citizenship requires broadening the traditional view of whose stories matter in shaping tax policy,” she asserts, “and considering the intersection of taxation and immigration is a natural point of departure.”
Through a textual analysis of a nonlegal source — issues of The Atlantic magazine published since its founding in 1857 — Davis illuminates the linkage between membership in a political community and the responsibilities of taxpaying. Notably, she finds little evidence that people talked about this issue until quite recently. “The overwhelming majority of the articles that discuss taxation and immigration are published after 2000,” Davis says. “Tax and immigration was simply not a frequent subject of debate until recent decades.”
I’m a bit surprised by that finding; tax and immigration have been hot-button issues since the founding, and U.S. history is peppered with bitter debates over both. Some of these debates occurred simultaneously, as they did during the 1920s. It seems unlikely that no one thought to link them until the dawn of the 21st century.
I suspect that Davis is wrestling with the limits of her source material. While a link between tax and immigration may have been largely absent from The Atlantic before 2000, it was almost certainly evident elsewhere.
In fact, I can offer visible (if anecdotal) proof of that earlier linkage. Sometime between 1909 and 1932 (the Library of Congress can’t be more precise), the National Photo Company distributed a picture of “aliens filing income taxes” at the United States Custom House in New York City. “Three thousand aliens daily are filing their income tax returns,” the company noted in its caption, “and each day they pay about $25,000 into the United States Treasury.”
The caption suggests a positive view of taxpaying by resident aliens (most of whom were likely on the path to citizenship). And indeed, positivity was also a hallmark of the links that Davis discovered in her survey of The Atlantic. “Deeply negative views of immigration are limited,” she writes. “The majority of the articles in the corpus take a positive view of immigration.”
Taxpayer Status
Davis underscores another finding from her survey that also seems striking: the infrequent use of the word “taxpayer.” She emphasizes the importance of this rhetorical dog that didn’t bark. “Tax policy discussions make rhetorical decisions, whether deliberately or not, when they refer to persons as individuals, citizens, or taxpayers,” she writes. And this element of tax rhetoric cuts two ways, both of them important.
The use of citizen, as opposed to taxpayer, “may imply a more positive, reciprocal understanding of the relationship between the state and the individual,” Davis writes. Other scholars have underscored the negative framing that typically surrounds “taxpayer” phrasing; Davis quotes Harvard historian Jill Lepore to illustrate. In an article about contemporary politics and the effort to defend higher levels of taxation, Lepore wrote:
How much can Democrats gain? That depends, in some measure, on how well they can explain what they’d like to do to the tax code, and why. They might be able to do that better if they’d stop talking about citizens as taxpayers, about taxes as investments, about politics as business, about government as a market, and about taxes as though the only thing that can possibly be said is “cut.”
By emphasizing the painful act of parting with hard-earned cash, “taxpayer” rhetoric tends to pit individuals against the state. And that contentious framing sometimes makes its way into arguments over immigration.
The word “taxpayer” appears frequently in anti-immigrant writing, Davis points out. (Less frequently in The Atlantic, however, since most of the magazine’s articles are generally pro-immigration.) The term underscores the burden that immigrants ostensibly impose on people (that is, citizens) who are already paying taxes. “Deserving Americans are taxpayers placed in direct conflict with undeserving immigrants in such rhetoric,” Davis writes.
Sometimes, however, “taxpayer” rhetoric appears without the negative framing. Some stories in The Atlantic, for instance, emphasize taxpaying as an element of performative citizenship: When immigrants pay taxes — like those at the Custom House in the early 1900s — they are building a claim to full membership in America’s civic community. They are demonstrating, Davis writes, “that they deserve full community membership and the rights of citizenship, often invoking language similar to benefit theory.”
The positive use of “taxpayer” rhetoric appears in many Atlantic articles. “Immigrants’ taxpayer status remains relevant,” Davis says. “It is a transactional frame that does not necessarily end in full citizenship but which does draw a tight connection between community membership and economic activity.”
Several Atlantic articles underscore the importance of this connection. “Immigrants are not entitled only to what they pay for, in this view,” Davis explains. “Rather, their participation in economic life, including payment of taxes, is one of many indicators of their moral claim to citizenship. It is not about benefits and burdens; it’s about belonging.”
Other Disciplines
Scholars in various disciplines have emphasized the link between taxpaying and belonging, illuminating “the role that tax has played in shaping the bounds of citizenship in the United States.” Historical social movements around civil rights and women’s rights have featured discussions of taxpaying, and Davis surveys some of this literature. Tax, she concludes, “was and remains part of a broader process of imagining what citizenship is and means — a process that has continued to evolve since the founding.”
Davis’s work on immigration resonates with this broader literature on the fiscal elements of citizenship. And while she is careful to acknowledge the ways in which “taxpayer” framing has sometimes been used to exclude people from a civic community, she also demonstrates a positive function for this rhetoric. “Despite its checkered history as legal ground for rights and full citizenship, taxpayer status has and continues to command weight as ground for a moral claim to rights and community membership,” she writes.
Davis ends by restating her challenge to her fellow tax scholars. “In a time where there are increasing calls for law and legal theory to recognize and reckon with how it intersects with power and identity,” she contends, “acknowledging the role of tax in multiple social movements presents as an opportunity for tax to develop a more nuanced understanding of its place in the construction and practice of citizenship and democracy.”
Perhaps the most striking element of Davis’s argument, at least for me, is her effort to center the notion of benefit theory, rescuing it from the intellectual backwater where it typically resides. Defined in its most traditional sense, benefit theory seems ill-suited to modern fiscal policymaking; its theoretical and practical weaknesses are well established and almost universally acknowledged in the tax community.
But if we expand our notion of benefit theory to encompass a more popular usage of the concept, it looks much more relevant to modern policy debates. “The rumors of benefit theory’s demise are, then, perhaps overstated,” Davis suggests. “At its core the public remains more engaged with the debates over the validity of taxation than it seems are tax specialists.”