“Being an American is increasingly viewed as an optional box to check, and the honor of citizenship is relative to what is received, not what is required.”
Immigration into the United States has always been beneficial – and confrontational. The tension between foreign population growth and society’s status quo consistently produces heat.
Yet, despite all the internal debates over the past two hundred fifty years, America has taken in more immigrants and refugees than any nation on earth (here) and is currently home to 50 million people not born in the US (here). The Pew Research Center reports that one-fifth of the world’s immigrants reside in the United States.
Like every country, the United States hasn’t always got immigration right, but collectively, the American people owe no apologies to history.
Human Freedom and its promise are like a super magnet, and the US has been and remains the primary destination for immigration worldwide. Unlike any society on earth, the very founding of the United States propositioned the “new man,” a self-governing citizen with “inalienable rights” codified in the covenantal structure of the Constitution—itself, unlike any document in history.
But today, the entire superstructure of our immigration apparatus has collapsed into chaos. Nothing in our history compares to the “open border” policy of the Biden era, where over 10 million illegal aliens (many think it’s closer to 20 million, including the “got-aways” who evaded contact with border authorities) flooded across the US border in organized waves managed largely by the Mexican cartels and human and sexual traffickers. [And none of this includes the millions of people in the US who overstay visas, who, for some reason, the government can’t track or find – unlike your credit card company, which can find you the day after a missed payment.]
Most of the Biden surge were purely economic migrants who broke the law (Title 8, Section 1325 of the US Code (U.S.C.) by entering the US as their first act in their hoped-for new home. Even those claiming refugee status broke existing law by disregarding the long-established legal process requirements of applying for refugee status.
The chaos that ensued with a flood of many millions of illegal aliens crossing the border between 2021 and 2024 has and will continue to have incalculable economic and political effects. Some estimate the direct cost to transport, feed, clothe, and house the waves of humanity to be $150 billion per year, not including Medicaid and direct welfare support – or the massive impact on major metropolitan areas in public services, schools, rents, and transportation.
Politically, there is no doubt that the bedlam, anarchy, and human exploitation on the wide-open border helped elect Donald Trump. In poll after poll, illegal immigration is seen by the vast majority of citizens as dangerous as not locking their doors when they leave their homes or go to bed.
As the states, especially Texas, have attempted to deal with the massive influx of illegals, it’s easy to forget that immigration was primarily a state matter up until the late 1800s. The Constitution nowhere gives that power to the federal government—unlike naturalization.
In 1875, the US Supreme Court ruled in Henderson v. Mayor of New York that the various coastal states’ immigration laws were unconstitutional because Congress had exclusive power to regulate and control “foreign commerce.” The ruling was followed by further application of the Supremacy Clause (Article Vl, Clause 2) and the legal utility of the concept of plenary power, all of which nationalized immigration matters without a Constitutional amendment.
For most of its history, the operable philosophy in the public mind was that immigrants would assimilate into the larger American culture and become part of the great “melting pot.” (That term was first used in the 1780s and was later popularized by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called it a “fusing process” for the “democratic alembic.” In 1908, a popular play, “The Melting Pot,” by Israel Zangwill, celebrated the notion that “America is God’s Crucible” and carried the phrase into widespread use.)
However, with the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act in 1965 and the end to quotas, the melting pot concept, which had been largely successful, has been incrementally and purposefully transformed into the neo-Marxist worldview of multiculturalism and racial identity as a weapon to destroy national identity. The radical left celebrates social chaos above all else, like a bug does a picnic.
Today, the concept and mention of assimilation into American culture has silently slipped away.
This benefactor model now embraces the “open border” radical’s viewpoint that migration by any means – not just in the US but across the Western world – is an economic hammer where any willing worker can enter the US for any available job. This view is shared by many transnational corporations and their hired help in the political classes of both parties, which primarily want the cheapest available labor – not to mention the religious NGO organizations making billions of dollars in resettlement contracts and paid lobbyists.
The new Trump Administration moved quickly to reinstate many policies it had in place in 2020, which the Biden gang ended in its first weeks in office in conjunction with opening the border gates to one and all. In addition to deporting criminal illegal aliens and resetting the refugee chaos caused by the “catch-and-release program” of the last four years, President Trump also has targeted so-called “birthright citizenship” with a non-retroactive Executive Order (EO) eliminating the practice of pronouncing any child delivered in the US by an illegal alien or a visiting visa holder (often an arranged business service) an automatic citizen of the US. These births are between 6-9% of all US births annually.
Awarding citizenship to foreigners – legal or not – originated with the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 (to strengthen the Civil Rights Act of 1866). It intended to ensure that formerly enslaved people and their children after the Civil War would be considered US citizens and to protect the rights of freedmen in the South. The Amendment states in part, “Every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States.”
The fly in the ointment, of course, is the word “jurisdiction,” which in context means beyond civil law (such as being ineligible to vote, serve on juries, subject to the draft, or unable to obtain a US passport) or “subject to a foreign power.”
Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, who served on the Senate Joint Committee on Reconstruction and helped draft the 13th Amendment (abolishing slavery), was also instrumental in drafting the 14th Amendment.
He spelled out the intent of the 14th Amendment in 1866 before its passage, writing, “This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States. This has long been a great desideratum in the jurisprudence and legislation of this country.”
The Supreme Court has heard several cases involving the 14th Amendment confirming the drafter’s original intent to restrict citizenship by birth. In 1884, Elk v. Wilkins found that the question of “jurisdiction” excluded “children of ministers, consuls, and citizens of foreign states born within the United States.”
Ironically, an 1898 case, Wong Kim Ark, is continually cited in the corporate media and by mass immigration advocates to assert that the Supreme Court had already ruled on the birthright issue. Yet even a casual reading reinforces the Elks language. Reentering the US after a trip abroad, Mr. Ark was stopped by immigration officials who claimed he did not have US citizenship. Yet, the Supreme Court ruling found that Wong Kim Ark was the San Francisco-born child of permanent legal aliens domiciled in the US and, therefore, a citizen by birth. The question of US-born children of illegal aliens was never in question.
A federal judge temporarily stopped President Trump’s EO on birthright citizenship last week, calling it “the most blatantly unconstitutional thing” he had ever seen, demonstrating that even federal judges can be susceptible to the whims and fancies of the propaganda corporate media.
After all these decades, this is the time for the Supreme Court to revisit Ark, re-establish the Supreme Court’s original rulings, and honor the intent of the 14th Amendment. Only the US and Canada, among first-world nations, recognize birthright citizenship. The US would join the European countries that did have birthright laws long ago abandoned them for the practical reasons that they demean actual citizenship to a mere mailing address, discourage assimilation, and encourage illegal aliens and visa tourism to come into the country for the sole reason of delivering a child who will be a citizen without any real allegiance demanded of citizens.
One wag said it was like a lady visiting your home for dinner, and the guest goes into labor in your living room and delivers a baby. Does that mean you are responsible for raising that baby for life just because it was born in your home?
Being an American is increasingly viewed as an optional box to check, and the honor of citizenship is relative to what is received, not what is required. All of this points to the common-sense reality that the time has come for an immigration reboot. Doing so isn’t high-level rocket science. Fixing our immigration is simple and isn’t about will or money. We’ll need a lot less of both if it’s done right.
It shouldn’t require more than a single page of legislation: If you want to come to America, get in line; love to have you. Please have a sponsor, no criminal record, and a few bucks in the bank. If you break the law and come across the border anyway, you will be deported and never be eligible for a visa or to be a US resident. Contact the nearest American consulate or embassy if you are seeking refugee or asylum status – don’t just show up in the US unannounced. We will look for you if you’re in the US on an expired visa on day one of your overstay. And if you want your baby to be born in the US, congrats – but make sure you’re a permanent resident alien first.
It’s not hard at all.
