This dissertation explores the relationship between formal citizenship and civic engagement. It challenges the presumption of a transformation from disinterested alien to engaged citizen. Social science has often assumed immigrants follow a developmental path of incorporation that is progressive, universal and unilinear and results in identity consolidation at naturalization. It posited that immigrants naturalize for attachment to or to gain benefits in the receiving society. This study strips away such assumptions by asking the immigrants themselves about their thoughts, opinions and experiences with citizenship, immigrant incorporation and civic engagement. It carves out permanent residents as potential citizens and naturalized citizens as citizens by choice. This study is one of the first to examine permanent residents, the only noncitizens who may naturalize. It poses several main questions: why do people naturalize and why don't they? How do immigrants civically engage before and after naturalization? How do people who never naturalize participate? How does naturalization coalesce with identity? It relies on thick description to illustrate how permanent residents and naturalized citizens frame citizenship and how those understandings inform their civic engagement. I conducted semi-structured interviews in 2004-2006 with 29 permanent residents and 40 naturalized citizens in New York and Berlin, cities with receptive immigrant policies located in states with polar opposite citizenship policies. I used grounded theory to discover categories of meaning around citizenship and immigrant incorporation from the immigrants' perspective. I provided a legal and policy context of immigrants' rights and obligations. Based on the data, I argue that legal status does not provide a meaningful context for how immigrants understand their own experiences. The developmental model that is often the basis for understanding immigrant incorporation has limited value in the US and even less in the German context. Rather, immigrants frame citizenship four distinct ways using benefit seeking, claims making, incidental and developmental approaches. The degree and scope of participation is more related to the frame they use than their citizenship status. Formal citizenship status has little bearing on whether people civically engage but does affect how they engage. Maintaining unincorporated populations regardless of citizenship status has security implications.