On July 1 Trump administration lawyers told a federal judge that they could begin enforcing President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship before the end of July — moving quickly to enforce the order just days after a landmark Supreme Court ruling.
Trump’s order, signed on the first day of his second White House term, directs all U.S. government agencies to refuse to issue citizenship documents to children born to illegal immigrants, or who do not have at least one parent who is an American citizen of lawful permanent resident. It was soon blocked by lower courts before eventually making its way to the Supreme Court, which reviewed the case in May. The high court’s 6-3 ruling focused on the authority of lower courts’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions.
The United States is one of only 38 countries that guarantees citizenship to any individual born within its territory – a policy that has been in place since Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. But efforts to end the practice have increased because the current system is open to abuse and encourages illegal migration.
Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1868, grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.“ Birthright citizenship was intended to repeal the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which it ruled that Black people, free or enslaved, were not U.S. citizens.
Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment has long been misinterpreted. The original intention of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was not meant to apply to children born to parents who are only temporarily living in the United States or are not U.S. citizens.
The practice incentivizes birth tourism, with tens of thousands of foreign expecting mothers intentionally traveling to the United States to give birth to obtain U.S. citizenship for their child.
This is some light years from the concept of citizenship as it has developed in Europe over the centuries. It was in classical Hellas that the concept of citizenship emerged as membership in the sovereign body of free men which deliberates, promulgates and enforces the laws governing their polity. Citizens were active participants in the demos which ruled the community, and jealous of that right. In Athens, isonomia, legal equality, isegoria, freedom of speech, and koinonia, community and identity, were the core values in a system which resolutely excluded aliens. The latter could be, and were, subjected to Athenian imperial tyranny or worse (e.g. Melos).
Some three to four centuries later, Roman law gradually codified citizenship as a set of personal rights and protections clearly defined and guaranteed. Civitas was famously and very effectively invoked by St. Paul to Porcius Festus (Acts: 25:12). It was prized by those who had it and coveted by those who did not. Civis Romanus sum was not merely an affirmation of intensely felt pride, but also an assertion that the speaker had special status among other men and was a recipient of unique rights and privileges.
In medieval times it was in the cities of central and northern Europe that the maxim was coined “the air of the city makes you free”. The late medieval city was structured as a community to which the individual was attached – often by oath – separately from his links with his professional corporation, guild or tribe. But modern citizenship was codified only with the emergence of the Westphalian state system after 1648. This process was characterized by the territorialization of sovereignty. The community of citizens generally coincided with the state’s resident population, but citizenship was not a simple reflection of residence: it was a permanent personal status irrespective of temporary or prolonged absence from the territory of the state.
The Westphalian nation state had sought to instill in its citizens the primacy of loyalty to itself, to the detriment of traditional local, religious or ethnic allegiances. This was achieved to a considerable extent in the early American Republic, and spectacularly so in France after the Revolution. By the end of the 19th century, in much of Europe west of Russia, the most significant aspect of citizenship – just like in ancient Greece – became the right to participate in the exercise of political power: the right to belong to a body invested with political authority, or to vote for the members of such body.
In the United States before the Civil War, despite the formal elevation of civic identity over ethnicity, the latter always was the assumed, if not explicitly acknowledged, substrate of the former. Hence America’s acceptance of the jus sanguinis principle regarding the citizenship of children born to Americans abroad. For the first third of the history of the Republic, this would have applied almost exclusively to persons belonging to the founding Anglo-Saxon stock.
The competing principle of jus soli gained constitutional sanction in 1868 with adoption of the 14th Amendment, however. Even that ill-drafted Amendment – intended at the time solely to extend citizenship to freedmen – might not have proved fatal to the concept of American citizenship were it not for disastrous and unwarranted extrapolations of the 1898 case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark. It observed that “[e]very citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States.”
In that case, constitutional language regarding “jurisdiction” of the United States (which earlier had denied citizenship to Indians in tribal communities) had not yet been stretched to the breaking point. It did scuttle the ethnic principle, however, on the paradoxical grounds that failing to do so would “deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German or other European parentage, who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.”
In due course, without explicit judicial or legislative warrant, the question of jurisdiction fell out of so-called birthright citizenship entirely, so that a child born to any woman from any point on the globe having illegally encroached into U.S. territory is deemed to be just as American, if not more so, than the descendants of passengers on the Mayflower.
The final degradation of citizenship came with its granting to tens of millions of people who have no discernible affinity to this country, unless “America” is defined as a random mélange of individuals who only have in common the quest for special “rights” and the resentful disdain for the ethnos of the founders and historic builders of the United States.
This phenomenon is most strikingly evident in the readiness of the successive regimes in Washington to grant citizenship to self-avowedly devout Muslims who believe in jihad, in the need for institutionalized inequality of “infidels,” the establishment of the Sharia law etc. Let us point out here that a foreigner who becomes naturalized has to declare, on oath,
… that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law… and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God…
For a Muslim to declare all of the above in good faith, and especially that he accepts the Constitution of the United States as the source of his highest loyalty, is an act of apostasy par excellence, and apostasy is punishable by death under the Islamic law. The Sharia, to a Muslim, is not an addition to the secular legal code with which it coexists, with “the Constitution and laws of the United States of America”; it is the only true code, the only rightful basis of obligation.
How can a self-avowedly devout Muslim take the oath of American citizenship and expect the rest of us to believe that it was done in good faith, and not only to get that coveted passport? He can do it only if in taking the oath he is practicing taqiyya, the art of dissimulation that was inaugurated by Muhammad to help destabilize and undermine non-Muslim communities considered ripe for a touch of Jihad. Or else because he is not devout enough and confused, in other words not a very good Muslim; but in that latter case there is the ever-present danger that, at some point in the future, he or his American-born offspring will rediscover their roots.
At present the best foreign model for the reform of U.S. citizenship laws is provided by Switzerland. The oldest continuous democracy in the world has some of the toughest naturalization rules in the world. You must live in the country legally for at least ten years on a C permit (the green card equivalent), pay taxes, and have no criminal record, before you can apply. It still does not mean that your wish will be granted, and the fact that you were born in Zurich or Lausanne does not make any difference. There are no “amnesties” and illegal immigrants are promptly deported if caught. Even if an applicant satisfies all other conditions, the local community in which he resides has the final say: it can interview him and hold a public vote before naturalization is approved. If rejected he can apply again, but only after ten years.
Switzerland’s enlightened bien-pensants who run the federal government in Berne want citizenship applications to be processed centrally, “along national guidelines,” taking the decision out of the hands of local communities. Such proposals were decisively defeated in a nation-wide referendum two decades ago, in September 2004. This result was a victory for local democratic institutions of very long standing over the tendency of state bureaucracy to centralize all power. It demonstrated that at least one Western country will continue to uphold the right of local communities to decide who will qualify for naturalization. Unique in today’s West, this healthy sense of Swiss citizenship reflects an underlying assumption of kinship among citizens that cannot be fulfilled by mere residence and observance of the rules.
Naturalization in Athens or Rome was possible but difficult; it was a privilege and by no means a right. Likewise in today’s Switzerland if you want to belong, you have to prove a high degree of cultural and civilizational kinship with the host-society. The Swiss rightly sense that many immigrants have no kinship with their land and no connection to their community, except for the unsurprising desire to partake in its wealth. But Alpine common sense is light years away from the postmodern understanding of citizenship promoted in the European Union and in North America. The Swiss example points at some useful steps that the second Trump administration – however unlikely it seems – may consider in reforming the entire naturalization process.
The reform needs to start with the open and resolute rejection of the notion that countries do not belong to the people who have inhabited, developed and defended them for generations, that they can and should belong instead to whoever happens to be within their boundaries at any given moment, regardless of their mores, convictions, or intentions.
The traitor class wants the whole world to share its death wish, to self-annihilate as peoples with a historical memory and a cultural identity. In May last year Joe Biden thus called Japan and India “xenophobic” because they are countries that “don’t want immigrants.” He claimed that the coming U.S. election was about “freedom, America and democracy,” because “we welcome immigrants.”
This is a colossal lie which must be fought tooth and nail; but to fight it effectively, a gigantic reversal needs to transform the lives of countless still complacent Americans. In all probability the model of feasible recovery requires a catastrophic event, most likely a massive, rapidly spreading global economic crisis. The meltdown and the collapse of confidence in the ability of the all-pervasive State to manage relief would force millions of people to re-examine their lives and their assumptions.
By being disillusioned in progress the masses may rediscover the value and force of tradition. Children would no longer be a burden and a financial liability. They would regain their traditional value as economic assets and the substitute for collapsed social security and pension systems. The family might re-emerge as the essential social unit. Amidst collapsing political structures and a loss of faith in the political system, all ideological propositions would be recognized as empty abstracts.
In the end true communities of true citizens, bonded by memory, language, faith, and myth, might be revived. And in extreme adversity the eyes of men and women might be lifted, once again, to Heaven.
It is very much in the American interest that this, or something like this, happens soon.
