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Birthright Citizenship Is A Pernicious Lie That’s Destroying America
Beyond the legal arguments about the 14th Amendment is the moral argument: who is America for, and what makes someone an American?
Birthright Citizenship Is A Pernicious Lie That’s Destroying America
Beyond the legal arguments about the 14th Amendment is the moral argument: who is America for, and what makes someone an American?
thefederalist.com
On his first day in office, President Trump did the country a great service by issuing an executive order rejecting birthright citizenship as a requirement of the 14th Amendment.
Whether Trump’s order will withstand the legal challenges remains to be seen (a federal judge in Seattle temporarily blocked the order on Thursday). But the challenges themselves will force a reckoning on this issue, perhaps even at the Supreme Court.
Such a reckoning is overdue. For far too long we have accepted without question the outlandish idea that every single person born on U.S. soil automatically becomes an American citizen, and that the 14th Amendment somehow mandates this suicidal policy.
I’m not going to do a deep dive into the legal arguments for why the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause doesn’t grant automatic citizenship to everyone born on U.S. soil (for that, see here, here, here, here, here, and here). Suffice to say, it wasn’t until about the middle of the 20th century, amid massive upheavals in American life, that the notion of “birthright citizenship” was adopted — over and against how we had understood the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause since it was adopted in 1868.
Briefly, the legal argument is this: to acquire citizenship, the 14th Amendment requires a person to be born in the United States and be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which means you owe your total allegiance to the United States alone and not some foreign power. In other words, the children of illegal immigrants, or those here on a temporary basis, were not American citizens. That’s what the drafters of the 14th Amendment said at the time and that’s how the Supreme Court understood it when ruling on 14th Amendment-related cases in the decades following ratification.
~Snip~
Every foreigner who comes here understands what this means as it applies to their own homeland. It has been a grave error that we have insisted for so long that none of it applies to us. Making a case against birthright citizenship will mean making a case against the pernicious ideology of multiculturalism, which we have been taught makes us strong but in reality makes us weaker and poorer.
~Snip~
We have to get comfortable saying these things and defending them. Yes, the legal and constitutional arguments against birthright citizenship are very strong, and they might in the end win the day. But regardless of the outcome of the legal battle over the 14th Amendment, we have to insist, without apology, on a fuller understanding of the American nation and the American people. An American is not just someone who happens to be born here. For a foreign national to become an American, he has to thoroughly adopt our culture, language, and way of life — and resolve to pass all of those habits and customs onto his posterity, here in his adopted homeland. Nothing less than his complete allegiance and complete assimilation will do.
Commentary:
Davidson makes some good points but misses the most important point. In order to be an American it is most important that the immigrant place and give allegiance to America above his country of origin.
