As immigration and citizenship scholar Linda Bosniak argues in The Citizen and the Alien, "Formal citizenship status often fails to protect people from exclusion and violence directed at those perceived to be 'foreign' in character, habit, or appearance." And for Muslim Americans, amid the buildup toward a "clash of civilizations" and the war on terror it facilitated, their faith, again, became the very marker of foreignness and menace.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of legal citizenship versus social belonging and how formal status does not guarantee protection from discrimination.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 237