"proper citizen" is correct and can be used in written English.
You can use it to refer to a person who behaves responsibly and follows the law. For example, "As a proper citizen, I make sure to vote in every election."
Whether or not migrants can speak English has become a kind of code for whether or not migrants actively want to integrate and be a "proper" citizen.
It isn't just ambient legal and social racism and the sanctioned persecution of homosexuals that drives him into frenzy, it's the pressure to pass as a proper citizen in white society.
To legitimize myself as a proper citizen of this country, there are times when I have wondered, despite myself, how much distance I must place between myself and those whom Watters and Trump feel free to mock.
He talks with awe about how his wife, a criminal defence barrister, manages to hold down a grown-up job, bring up the girls and be a proper citizen.
It will require proper citizens' rights to be granted to the country's entire population, including marginalised people like the Rohingya Muslims, which all of Myanmar's rulers since independence have neglected to do.
These are serious questions: if those in receipt of income-related benefits aren't proper citizens today, those in receipt of housing benefit might not be full citizens tomorrow.
Outside court, she said through an interpreter: "My number one priority in life is my children and the second is to bring them up as proper citizens of this country".
One man stopped me in the street and said, 'The library is the one place where you find five-year-olds and 90-year-olds together, and it's where young people learn to be proper citizens'.
But his widest ambition for the Roma, who had no land of their own, was that they should be a "transnational" people, a grand pan-European federation of men and women, who, while proper citizens of their own countries, also represented a society broader, freer and more enterprising than that of nation states.And where would he fit into this glorious vision?
If it's human rights, freedoms, justice and being upstanding and proper citizens and servants of society on all levels and in all segments of life, then maybe the government ought to look closer to home before it dishes out lessons in civic duties to others.
Francis Morrone, an art critic and teacher, makes the fascinating charge that recent arrivals have brought an internalized suburban "car" mentality with them, and move among crowded streets in a self-wrapped bubble, talking on cellphones, listening to iPods and refusing to interact like proper citizens.
