Tag Archives: immigration

Let’s Talk About Birthright Citizenship

On Wednesday, I spoke to the Shepherds Center at North United Methodist Church. They had asked for a discussion of birthright citizenship, a status which is currently under attack by Trump (along with the rest of the Constitution). Here’s what I said. (A bit longer than usual–sorry.)

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I’ve been asked to speak about birthright citizenship, and Donald Trump’s effort to eliminate it. Let me just begin with a bit of history, and then consider what would happen if our mad and racist would-be King were to be successful.

As many of you know, in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in the infamous case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. The court ruled that Scott, an escaped slave who was suing for his freedom, was not a citizen because he was of African descent. According to the decision written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, no person of African descent could be a citizen, even if they had been born in the United States.

It took a civil war to change that conclusion, but in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, defining citizenship as applying to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The clear language of the Amendment should have foreclosed debate, but it 1898, the 14th Amendment’s definition of citizenship was challenged in a case involving a man named Wong Kim Ark.

Wong had been born on American soil in 1873; he was the son of Chinese immigrants. That was well before the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited most Chinese immigration and, by extension, the naturalization of Chinese citizens–an Act that was one of several historical eruptions of anti-immigration hostility. Since Wong’s parents weren’t citizens, his status was considered unclear, and as a result, he was denied reentry into the U.S. after visiting China.

Wong waited on a ship in San Francisco harbor for months as his attorney pursued his case. The Department of Justice opposed him, taking the position that people of Chinese descent weren’t citizens, but when the case reached the Supreme Court, Wong won.

Justice Horace Gray wrote the majority opinion, and it’s worth quoting part of it. Gray wrote “The Fourteenth Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States. To hold that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution excludes from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries would be to 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.”

That case became binding precedent and has operated to defend the birthright citizenship rights of other Americans—even including Japanese Americans during WWII—despite the shameful treatment of those citizens.

Bottom line: birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the plain language of the 14th Amendment and subsequent case law, and I doubt that even our deeply corrupt Supreme Court majority will find a way around the clarity of that language and those precedents.

But what would happen if they did—if somehow, the Court found a way to evade the plain language of both the Amendment and the Court’s own, unambiguous precedents? That question was recently examined by the Niskanen Center. The Center describes its mission as the promotion of policies that advance prosperity, opportunity, and human flourishing, guided by the belief that a free market and an effective government are mutually dependent.

I have found the research published by the Center to be both intellectually honest and uncommonly insightful—Niskanen advocates for an adequate social safety net and for the provision of essential public goods, while also supporting laws that foster market competition in areas where markets are appropriate. The Center is firmly committed to liberal democracy and an open society.

The Center’s researchers looked at the probable results of overturning birthright citizenship, and they identified three major ones:  ending birthright citizenship would erode America’s current demographic advantage over rival powers; it would endanger the advantage we have enjoyed in internal assimilation and stability; and it would introduce an unnecessary and protracted distraction from building an immigration system that could guarantee continued American prosperity.

Let’s look at each of these predictions.

We know that the world population is aging: According to U.N., the majority of the world’s population now lives in countries in which the fertility rate is below replacement level. By 2050, deaths will exceed births in more than 130 countries.

Thanks to immigration, the United States is an outlier to that demographic fact. In addition to having higher fertility rates than nearly all other developed countries, America’s “demographic exceptionalism” is tied to what has been our robust immigration. As a result, the U.S. is the only major power currently projected to maintain both population and labor force growth through the mid-century. Meanwhile, both China and Russia are experiencing population decline and are rapidly aging societies.

Ending birthright citizenship would also directly hurt American competitiveness. As Niskanen researchers point out, throwing a quarter of a million children into a position of legal uncertainty each year—which is what reversing birthright citizenship would do– would have a hugely negative effect on America’s strength and prosperity. If the children leave with their parents, which is what the architects of this inhumane policy intend, we’ll struggle to fill jobs—especially those requiring manual labor– and we’ll also struggle to fund Social Security with fewer workers.

If, instead, these children stay in the United States, they’d be treated by the legal system and by large swaths of society as foreigners in the only country they’d ever known, a situation that would challenge the domestic stability that has resulted from our history of comparatively smooth cultural assimilation. That ability to assimilate large numbers of newcomers and their descendants, to turn them into proud Americans, has been a considerable source of America’s strength and stability.

Despite the current hostility of the Trump administration and the MAGA White Supremacists who want to expel Black and Brown folks and limit immigration to White South Africans, America has had a far better history with immigrants than countries like China and Russia. America actually has had a very good track record of assimilating a wide variety of minorities, and that success has been due in large part to the ideals of American citizenship—ideals that include policies like birthright citizenship. And we need to remember that, for children of immigrant parents, birthright citizenship not only validates their American identity, but also imposes patriotic responsibilities on them. Those children haven’t just voted and served on juries—they’ve fought and died in America’s wars.

Let me just quote two of the concluding paragraphs of the Niskanen paper, describing the likely consequences of abandoning birthright citizenship.

“Many of the children born to illegal immigrants may also be temporarily rendered stateless. Some countries such as India do not automatically grant citizenship to the children of citizens born abroad. Given how politically polarizing other policies involving immigrant children, such as family separation and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), have been, artificially creating a population of potentially hundreds of thousands of stateless children living within the U.S. would become a poison pill in American politics….

The net effect of repealing birthright citizenship would be a prolonged state of chaos in our domestic politics and our immigration system. Doing so would squander key advantages we have over rivals who are gaining ground on the world stage and distract us from being able to build an immigration system that prioritizes the talent we need to remain competitive by miring us in decades of legal challenges, ambiguity, and disunity. As is often the case, those who are currently seeking to suddenly impose mass changes to the social fabric will find that the status quo has functioned well for a reason.”

A few years ago, I looked into the issue of immigration—both legal and not– for a speech to the Lafayette ACLU, and was struck with the sheer extent to which the U.S. has benefitted from it, especially when we look at innovation and economic growth.

The Partnership for a New American Economy issued a research report back in 2010 and found that more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies had been founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, companies founded by immigrants and their children employed more than 10 million people worldwide; and the revenue they generated was greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China and Japan.

The names of those companies are familiar to most of us: Intel, EBay, Google, Tesla, Apple, You Tube, Pay Pal, Yahoo, Nordstrom, Comcast, Proctor and Gamble, Elizabeth Arden, Huffington Post. A 2012 report found that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. As of 2011, one in ten Americans was employed by an immigrant-run business.

On economic grounds alone, then, we should welcome immigrants. But not only do we threaten undocumented persons, we make it incredibly difficult to come here legally. If there is one fact that everyone admits, it is the need to reform a totally dysfunctional and inhumane system. Based upon logic and the national interest, it’s hard to understand why Congress has been unwilling or unable to craft reasonable legislation. Of course, logic and the national interest have been missing from Washington for some time.

The bottom line: repealing birthright citizenship would be stupid—it would be a self-inflicted wound, making America less competitive, less stable and less prosperous. But there is also a moral imperative at stake here.

Those of you who attend these Shepherd Center events recognize what the MAGA bigots clearly do not– the moral and ethical dimensions of this effort to define anyone who isn’t a White Christian as “Other.” The basis of the MAGA movement and its support for the Trump administration is racism, misogyny and White Christian nationalism—with a hefty side helping of anti-Semitism. The effort to overturn birthright citizenship is part and parcel of that larger effort to remake America into a “blood and soil” country—a version of the Third Reich. We cannot let that happen.

Thank you.

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That Pesky Thing Called Reality

There’s an old adage that counsels us to be careful what we wish for.

Before our mad king’s ascension to a second term, lots of Americans held negative views of immigrants. Political pundits attributed a good deal of Trump’s support to his promise to rid the country of these terrible people, the majority of whom (he asserted) were criminals and rapists.

That’s one promise the Trump administration is trying to keep, unlike its promises to curb inflation and cut out government “waste and fraud.” ICE has sent masked, armed enforcers after those nefarious lawbreakers–well, really, after everyone who “looks” undocumented (basically, engaging in racial profiling, yet another Trump administration unconstitutional practice).

So, how much has the keeping of that promise– the delivery of a result that MAGA folks ardently wished for–increased support for the administration? Strangely enough, it turns out that reality has punctured the always dishonest portrayals of America’s undocumented immigrants.

Gallup polling has charted that unanticipated turnaround:

Just months after President Donald Trump returned to office amid a wave of anti-immigration sentiment, the share of U.S. adults saying immigration is a “good thing” for the country has jumped substantially — including among Republicans, according to new Gallup polling.

About 8 in 10 Americans, 79%, say immigration is “a good thing” for the country today, an increase from 64% a year ago and a high point in the nearly 25-year trend. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing right now, down from 32% last year.

What has caused the shift? 

Well, first of all, despite Trump’s dishonest descriptions of an “invasion” of undocumented criminals, it turns out that there really aren’t many criminals out there. Experts have calculated that there may be–at most– only around 78,000 undocumented immigrants with any sort of  criminal record, and of that number, only 14,000 have been convicted of violent crimes. Given Stephen Miller’s demand that ICE arrest 3,000 people a day, ICE has turned its attention to farm workers and day laborers.

For example, multiple media sources have confirmed that the great majority of detainees held at Alligator Alcatraz, the immigration detention center (concentration camp) built in the Florida Everglades, do not have criminal records or charges pending against them in the U.S. — despite Donald Trump claiming the facility would hold “the most vicious people on the planet.”

For that matter, in the case of immigrants who do have records, most of those records are for immigration violations, which are technically civil offenses.

Business owners–especially landscape companies, construction companies and restaurant/hotel owners–have lost significant segments of their workforces, as ICE has rounded up workers who may have been undocumented but who were anything but dangerous criminals. Grocers (and their customers) are dealing with increased prices, as farmers have lost numerous undocumented workers who picked their crops.

And as ICE has moved to deport their friends and neighbors, many more Americans have come to recognize the indiscriminate cruelty of these sweeps. It turns out that abstract promises about ridding the country of undocumented criminals is conflicting with the reality of these roundups.

Masked ICE agents have refused to show ID as they continue to engage in a variety of offensive and unconstitutional behaviors, sparking outrage.

Not only have ICE “enforcers” engaged in racial profiling, “immigration enforcement” is increasingly being used as a barely-veiled cover for efforts to chill the exercise of free speech. Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained by ICE, his student visa revoked, and he was threatened with deportation– not for criminal activity, but for involvement in pro-Palestinian protests. His arrest was widely–and accurately– seen as a part of Trump administration efforts to crack down on student activism. Another widely reported example was the arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, a 30-year-old Tufts University student. She was taken off the street by masked ICE agents near her home. A court subsequently determined that her arrest had been prompted by her co-authorship of an article about the ongoing war in Gaza. 

There’s much more.

The bottom line is that there is a difference between fantasy and reality. When political promises are based on “alternate realities,” the effort to fulfill them can become an (unintentional) educational exercise. 

It turns out that the American economy is heavily dependant on immigrants, both documented and “illegal.” It turns out that constitutional guarantees for everyone are weakened when an administration decides that some people aren’t entitled to them.

It turns out that immigration enforcement is “more complicated than that,” and that pesky realities are significantly different from the racist fantasies that spawned them.

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Sauce For The Goose…None For The Gander

Remember Leona Helmsley, and her infamous statement that “the rules are for the little people”? The Trump administration clearly follows her philosophy, crafting rules that are intended to apply only to “those” people.

The Guardian has reported on a June 11th Justice Department directive that would allow authorities to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship for certain “criminal offenses.” And what are those criminal offenses? Murder? Theft? Arson? Probably not. According to the memo, attorneys in the department can institute proceedings to revoke someone’s United States citizenship if it can be demonstrated that the individual “illegally procured” naturalization, or procured naturalization by “concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.”

Evidently, failure to completely answer questions (“completely” can be in the eye of the beholder) during the naturalization process is sufficiently criminal to justify revocation of a person’s citizenship. (The article did make me think: if a factual omission is a crime serious enough to strip someone of citizenship, wouldn’t being convicted of, say, 32 felonies also be enough? But I digress.) 

The directive creates a process that significantly lightens the burden on the prosecutor. According to the memo, the proceedings are civil, so it emphasizes that the accused would not be entitled to an attorney. Also, since the proceedings are civil, the government has a lighter burden of proof than it would in criminal cases.

The overblown rhetoric of the proposal says prosecutors will focus on people involved “in the commission of war crimes, extrajudicial killings, or other serious human rights abuses … [and] naturalized criminals, gang members, or, indeed, any individuals convicted of crimes who pose an ongoing threat to the US”. But justice department attorneys are given wide discretion on when to pursue denaturalization; the directive specifically includes instances of lying on immigration forms.

The justice department’s civil rights division has been placed at the forefront of Trump’s policy objectives, including ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs within the government as well as ending transgender treatments, among other initiatives.

Well, as long as lying qualifies, let’s look at a couple of high-profile people who should be ripe for denaturalization. For example Vox has identified some questionable aspects of Melania Trump’s immigration process. 

The article reported that Melania broke immigration law when she first came to the U.S. in 1996. She entered the country on a tourist visa and then worked as a professional model–work that violated the terms of that visa. Perhaps she didn’t know better, but–as the Vox article notes–it is also entirely “possible that Melania knowingly committed visa fraud; that, in fact, she lied to US immigration officials when entering the country in August 1996 about her intentions to work while in the US. That’s not just an immigration violation but an outright federal crime.”

Either way, in order for Melania to have gotten a green card and then US citizenship, she would have had to attest that she hadn’t violated immigration law before — something that now appears to be untrue.

And speaking of “ongoing threats to the U.S.,” what about Donald’s no longer-BFF, Elon Musk? According to Forbes,

Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by The Washington Post,” reported Maria Sacchetti, Faiz Siddiqui and Nick Miroff.

 The reporters found Musk “did not have the legal right to work” when he founded and attracted investment with his brother Kimbal for a company later named Zip2. Kimbal Musk has long been open about their lack of legal status, even explaining in a video interview that he lied when crossing the U.S.-Canadian border so he could attend a business meeting in Silicon Valley. Immigration attorney Ira Kurzban said, “That’s fraud on entry.” He noted that Elon Musk’s brother could have been permanently barred from the United States. Instead, he became CEO of Musk’s first company.

“(Elon) Musk arrived in Palo Alto in 1995 for a graduate degree program at Stanford University but never enrolled in courses, working instead on his startup,” according to the Washington Post. That means Musk committed at least two immigration violations. First, by failing to take courses, he violated his student status. Second, he did not have authorization to work legally in the United States.

Somehow, I doubt the Justice Department’s new directive will cause trouble for these particular scofflaw’s. After all, they’re White–and the Trump administration is all about selective enforcement of those pesky rules.

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Ignorance And Stupidity

On this 4th of July, America is reeling under the combined threats of official ignorance and pervasive stupidity.

To be human, of course, is to be ignorant. There are all sorts of things that virtually all of us fail to understand. In my house, it tends to be most aspects of the emerging digital universe (I know AI is coming but have absolutely no idea how it works or what it portends, and my ability to understand the various devices my grandchildren grew up with is similarly limited). A depressingly significant portion of the population is ignorant of America’s legal framework and the most basic premises undergirding the Constitution and Bill of Rights. For millions of Americans, it’s ignorance of science and the significant difference between a scientific theory and the common use of the term “theory” as an unsupported guess.

Rather obviously, these knowledge gaps are not mutually exclusive….

Ignorance can be remedied. With proper motivation, most of us can fill in those empty spaces in our understanding. We can learn. Stupidity, however, isn’t amenable to similar correction. It’s defined as a lack of intelligence or understanding–an inability to reason or learn.

We are currently governed by people who exhibit both, elected by voters who–at the very least–were ignorant of both the nature of public service and the damage that predictably ensues when incompetent ideologues are placed in positions of authority.

America has a secretary of health and human services whose conspiratorial approach to reality and inability to understand science has led (among other appalling things) to a major outbreak of measles–a disease once virtually eradicated–and who has suggested that those afflicted take cod liver oil. We have an agriculture secretary whose “solution” to high egg prices is advice that we raise our own chickens. We have a secretary of defense–a dipsomaniac– who accidently included a journalist on an unsecured call in which national security matters were discussed. The list goes on…

The “Big Beautiful Bill” that contains MAGA’s policy priorities won’t just deprive millions of health care in order to line the pockets of our plutocrats– it will destroy this country’s storied educational institutions, and derail America’s scientific and technological progress.

The Trump administration’s fixation on ridding the country of immigrants–not simply those who’ve committed crimes, as candidate Trump promised, but any immigrant who lacks lily-white skin– is perhaps the best example of the profound stupidity that always accompanies racism.

Immigrants have been essential elements of American innovation and economic growth. Research conducted by the Partnership for a New American Economy in 2010 documented their importance. More than 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, the companies founded by immigrants and their children employed more than 10 million people worldwide; and the revenue they generated was greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China and Japan.

The names of those companies are familiar to most of us: Intel, EBay, Google, Tesla, Apple, You Tube, Pay Pal, Yahoo, Nordstrom, Comcast, Proctor and Gamble, Elizabeth Arden, Huffington Post. A 2012 report found that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. As of 2011, one in ten Americans was employed by an immigrant-run business.

As we are discovering, America’s agriculture and construction industries overwhelmingly rely on immigrants, the majority of whom are undocumented.

MAGA’s anti-immigrant hysteria is part and parcel of its equally ignorant White Christian Nationalism. There has always been a nativist streak in America– Ellis Island was first established to keep “undesirables” from entering the country. “Give me your tired, your poor, your masses yearning to breathe free” was Emma Lazarus’ response to the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Know-Nothing Party was formed largely by people who feared that Irish Catholic immigrants would take jobs from God-fearing Protestant “real Americans.”

The animus isn’t new, but it rests on widespread ignorance. As David Brooks (no bleeding heart liberal) has observed, when you wade into the evidence you find that the case for restricting immigration is pathetically weak. “The only people who have less actual data on their side are the people who deny climate change.”

Trump’s fixation on immigration has consistently been both stupid and ignorant, as well as inhumane. Remember his first term promise to build a “beautiful wall” on our southern border? The vast majority of people who are in the country illegally flew in and overstayed their visas—something a wall would neither address or prevent. (It would, however, focus on those Brown people…)

MAGA’s slogan ought to be: “Owning the libs by cutting off our noses to spite our faces.” Unfortunately, we “libs” live here too…

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Telling It Like It Is

Jay Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois recently made a speech in New Hampshire that has received significant–and merited–attention. Pritzker really “told it like it is.”

Heather Cox Richardson recently quoted from Pritzker’s speech at length, and today, I am going to do the same, because Pritzker’s words deserve widespread distribution.

“It’s wrong to snatch a person off the street and ship them to a foreign gulag with no chance to defend themselves in a court of law.” This is not about immigration, he said, but about the Constitution. “Standing for the idea that the government doesn’t have the right to kidnap you without due process is arguably the MOST EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGN SLOGAN IN HISTORY,” he said. “Today, it’s an immigrant with a tattoo. Tomorrow, it’s a citizen whose Facebook post annoys Trump.”

Pritzker called for “real, sensible immigration reform.”

“Immigration—with all its struggles and its complexities—is part of the secret sauce that makes America great, always. Immigrants strengthen our communities, enrich our neighborhoods, renew our passion for America’s greatness, enliven our music and our culture, enhance understanding of the world. The success of our economy depends upon immigrants. In fact, forty-six percent…of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.”

Trump’s attacks on immigrants, he said, are likely to make the U.S. economy fail. Indeed, he suggested, making America fail is the point of the Trump administration’s actions.

“We have a Secretary of Education who hates teachers and schools. We have a Secretary of Transportation who hates public transit. We have an Attorney General who hates the Constitution. We have a Secretary of State, the son of naturalized citizens—a family of refugees—on a crusade to expel our country of both.

“We have a head of the Department of Government Efficiency— an immigrant granted the privilege of living and working here, a man who has made hundreds of billions of dollars after the government rescued his business for him—who is looking to destroy the American middle class to fund tax cuts for himself. And we have a President who claims to love America but who hates our military so much that he calls them ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ and who can’t be bothered to delay his golf game to greet the bodies of four fallen US soldiers. And we have a Grand Old Party, founded by one of our nation’s bravest Presidents, Abraham Lincoln—who today would be a Democrat, I might add—… so afraid of the felon and the fraud that they put in the White House that they would sooner watch him destroy our country than lift a hand to save it.”

 “It’s time to stop wondering if you can trust the nuclear codes to people who don’t know how to organize a group chat. It’s time to stop ignoring the hypocrisy in wearing a big gold cross while announcing the defunding of children’s cancer research. And time to stop thinking we can reason or negotiate with a madman. Time to stop apologizing when we were NOT wrong. Time to stop surrendering, when we need to fight.

“Our small businesses don’t deserve to be bankrupted by unsustainable tariffs. Our retirees don’t deserve to be left destitute by a Social Security Administration decimated by Elon Musk. Our citizens don’t deserve to lose healthcare coverage because Republicans want to hand a tax cut to billionaires. Our federal workers don’t deserve to have, well, a 19-year-old DOGE bro called Big Balls destroy their careers.

“Autistic kids and adults who are loving contributors to our society don’t deserve to be stigmatized by a weird nepo baby who once stashed a dead bear in the backseat of his car.

“Our military servicemembers don’t deserve to be told by a washed up Fox TV commentator, who drank too much and committed sexual assault before being appointed Secretary of Defense, that they can’t serve this country simply because they’re Black or gay or a woman.

“And If it sounds like I’m becoming contemptuous of Donald Trump and the people that he has elevated, it’s because… I am. You should be too. They are an affront to every value this country was founded upon.”

“I understand the tendency to give in to despair right now. But despair is an indulgence that we cannot afford in the times upon which history turns. Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.

“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box, and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact—because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”

“Cowardice can be contagious. But so too can courage…. Just as the hope that we hold onto in the darkness, shines with its own…special light.

“Tonight, I’m telling you what I’m willing to do…is fight—for our democracy, for our liberty, for the opportunity for all our people to live lives that are meaningful and free. And I see around me tonight a roomful of people who are ready to do the same.”

“So I have one question for all of you. Are you ready for the fight?”

To which I say “yes.” And “amen.”

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