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When a software engineer inherits a legacy codebase, the first thing she reads is the data model. Not the UI, not the business logic — the schema. Because the schema encodes assumptions about the world that are orders of magnitude harder to change than any code built on top of it.
The United States citizenship schema looks roughly like this:
citizen: bool
One field. You have it or you don't. Its value is determined by birthplace, parentage, or a years-long naturalization process. Physical presence in the territory is assumed to co-vary: if you're a citizen, you live here, or you left and we'll tax you anyway. If you're not a citizen, you're here on a visa or you're not here at all. The border and the membership roll are the same thing.
The proposal: run a migration.
citizen: bool // default: true for all humans
resident: bool // default: false; toggled by physical presence and legal authorization
One new field. One changed default. The border still exists — residency is still enforced, movement is still controlled. But the schema now distinguishes two things that were always separate but never named: membership and presence.
Nation-states run two logically distinct functions through the same citizenship field:
The membership function: who counts? Whose interests does the political community take responsibility for? Who has standing to make claims on the national project?
The territorial function: who may physically occupy the space, access the public goods, vote in elections, draw on the infrastructure?
These are not the same. The US already acknowledges this in practice: it taxes its citizens who live abroad (membership without presence) and it extends certain constitutional protections to non-citizens present on US soil (presence without formal membership). The schema pretends they're one thing when the actual logic requires two.
The migration makes the logical structure explicit.
Nonresident citizen: member of the political community, not physically present. Has standing in the moral community's self-description. Does not have operational rights contingent on physical presence (voting, public benefits, movement across the border at will).
Resident (citizen or otherwise): physically present by legal authorization. Has the full operational bundle tied to presence.
The revolutionary part is not the second field — residency is already tracked. The revolutionary part is the changed default on the first: from you have to earn membership to you are a member until the territorial function requires otherwise.
The steelman against this proposal is not "borders should be enforced" — the migration preserves border enforcement completely. The steelman is: an empty category either dilutes or enables capture. If nonresident citizenship has no operational content, it's either a meaningless label (dilution) or a basis for US jurisdiction over all humans (imperial capture). Neither is good.
So the migration requires a minimum viable content for the nonresident class. At least one enforceable right or obligation that applies to all members regardless of where they live, and that is specific enough to be tested.
Three candidates:
Negative right: no US-initiated lethality against members. The US does not target members for killing, imprisonment, or government-sponsored coercion. This is already nominally true for US citizens, and its violation (overseas drone strikes against citizens) is already treated as a constitutional crisis. Extending it universally is an expansion of existing doctrine, not a new category.
Procedural right: lawful pathway to residency exists and is accessible. The process of becoming a resident is a right, not a privilege. The queue may be long; the criteria may be strict; but the existence of a process is guaranteed. No human is permanently excluded from the possibility of residency.
Negative right: US foreign policy does not knowingly support a government against the basic interests of that government's own members. The US does not arm or finance regimes that are killing, imprisoning, or systematically dispossessing their own populations. This has obvious geopolitical complications, but the principle is the same as the domestic one: you don't support coercion against members.
None of these is sufficient alone; the minimum viable set might be all three. But the point is structural: nonresident citizenship needs at least one right that travels with the person regardless of their location, or the category is architecturally inert.
The separation is already being built incrementally:
Estonia's e-residency (2014–): A government status that grants access to business and legal infrastructure without the right to live in Estonia. Over 100,000 holders from 181 countries. This is not citizenship, but it runs the same architectural logic — legal membership decoupled from physical presence, enabling participation in a nation's infrastructure from anywhere. It works.
Every Law a Commit (March 2026): An engineer parsed the full US Code — 60,000+ sections, 53 titles — into a Git repository where each law is a file and every amendment is a commit. Law is code. The citizenship schema is one data model in that codebase. The migration is a PR with a changed default value.
Yarvin's Patchwork: The same SE metaphor, opposite ambition. Where this migration expands one nation's membership to include all humans, Yarvin's proposal fragments sovereignty into thousands of micro-patches, each with citizenship-as-product, citizens as customers, and exit as the accountability mechanism. Both proposals treat citizenship as a design choice, not a natural fact. Yarvin shrinks the membership unit. This proposal expands it. The disagreement is about direction, not about whether citizenship is a schema.
Charter cities and network states: Governance decoupled from birthright territory (Romer, Balaji). New legal spaces with new membership definitions. The membership function and the territorial function are already separated in these frameworks — they just build new systems rather than refactoring existing ones. The citizenship-as-schema proposal is the refactor path.
The proposal makes most sense for a nation that:
The US qualifies on all three. Dario Amodei has noted concern about geographic disparity in AI benefits — 50% growth in Silicon Valley versus near-stagnation elsewhere. In the current schema, that disparity is a geopolitical problem: the US is responsible for its citizens, and everyone else is foreign policy. Under the migrated schema, it's an internal distribution problem — the same kind of problem the US has wrestled with (imperfectly) in managing inequality among its own population. The framing changes. The tools available change. The obligations are different.
This is not incidentally about AI. The timing matters. The generation of AI capabilities is happening in one place and will affect everyone. The legal and moral infrastructure for managing that distribution either exists or it doesn't. The schema migration is part of what building that infrastructure looks like.
The proposal includes "and eventually nonhuman peoples." This is the forward-compatible clause.
Under the current schema, membership is a physical fact determined by birth location or naturalization. There is no principled mechanism for extending it to AI systems, corporations that have developed something like stakeholder interests, or future entities whose nature we can't currently specify.
Under the migrated schema, membership is a logical property. The relevant question becomes: what conditions does membership track? The answer, unpacked: entities whose interests are affected by the national project, and who can participate in or be held accountable by that project in some meaningful way.
This is the agency-as-model principle applied to political community. Agency is a stance we take toward systems when the model produces better predictions than the alternatives. Citizenship, analogously, could become a stance we take toward entities when including them in the moral community produces better outcomes than excluding them.
This doesn't mean AI systems should vote. It means the schema can accommodate the question when the question becomes live, rather than foreclosing it by design. The current schema cannot accommodate it at all — membership is a birth fact, and AI systems are not born.
A schema that can grow is more valuable than one that cannot.
The same split resolves a problem that is currently speculative and will not remain so. When humans live permanently on the Moon or Mars, they will be nonresidents of every Earth territory — no physical presence, no jurisdiction, no operational connection. But they will be humans, and their interests will be shaped by Earth institutions: property rights, communications infrastructure, legal frameworks, the decisions of Earth-based AI systems.
Under the current schema, those humans fall outside every national membership function by definition. Under the migrated schema, the resolution is clean: membership travels with persons, residency does not. A human on Mars is a member of the human political community, with the rights and obligations the community assigns to nonresidents, and no rights contingent on presence they cannot assert.
The schema needs to say "member, located elsewhere." The migration adds that field.
It is not a proposal to give 8 billion people the right to move to the US. The residency boolean governs that, and it doesn't change.
It is not a claim that the operational consequences are immediately workable. They're not. The minimum viable content of nonresident citizenship requires careful development.
It is not a geopolitical proposal. It doesn't say what other nations should do. It says what the US schema should represent about itself.
It is a proposal about what nations are for. A nation optimized for the human project — in an age when "the human project" includes entities and interests that don't respect territory — needs a membership function that doesn't either.
The border still exists. The wall can stay if that's what residents vote for. But the nation's answer to the question who are you for? should not be limited by an accident of where someone was born, on this planet or otherwise.