Yesterday, October 30th, Axios published a video of President Trump declaring that he could end birthright citizenship through an executive order. He can't because Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution established
TL;DR - This is a VERY bad idea. It is a slippery slope on the road to totalitarianism.
Don't believe me? I've been working my way through Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism for the past several months, taking copious notes, and thinking of working through things on this blog to help clarify my thoughts and give insight to anyone who doesn't want to spend hours and hours reading one of the seminal works on totalitarian political theory. This might actually be the start of that, and I might have to break this blog up to make it more manageable.
There's a lot of history and context that I'll have to cut out in this initial piece, but the most important bit is the late 19th/early 20th Century trend for the ethnic 'nation' to take over the state. That's fine for the "French" living in France, the "Germans" living in Germany, where nationality is synonymous with citizenship, but what about the Jews, who have no state of their own in 1920, or a Russian living in Serbia? What about a German who was living in what was Germany but is now in Poland? These minority 'nations' were supposedly covered under a series of post-war treaties, but in actuality, minorities were second-class citizens because they didn't share the 'blood of the nation' that controls state.
So more and more over the course of WWI, European states amended their laws to be able to denaturalize people. War does crazy things to people. The ruling family in England are now known as the Windsors, but in 1917, their name was "Saxe Coburg and Gotha." They changed their name due to anti-German sentiment. Fun fact - the family is named after Windsor Castle. They just as easily could have been the Balmorals or the Buckinghams.
After the war, there were a bunch of stateless people who become naturalized citizens of the states in which they ended up. There were so many stateless people, and such a fear of statelessness, that the system for naturalization in most countries was overloaded. Instead of giving more money and resources to an overloaded system, European governments started to just deny asylum/refugee status to stateless people. Any Syrians out there? Sound familiar?
European governments passed laws that allowed the state to denaturalize people, to essentially take away their citizenship, by decree. Nearly everywhere this happened, mass denaturalizations followed. It was easier and more efficient to denaturalize people in mass, much like the current administration has prosecuted dozens of people at a time for deportation.
Here's the deal - the political calculus behind asylum and refugee law goes back to the Roman Empire. Why? Because you don't want people who are outside the pale of the law roaming around your territory. Stateless people have absolutely no rights and, concomitantly, no responsibilities. They have no right to work, no right to live. Their entire existence is illegal and subject to the arbitrary whims of the police. Even criminals have rights - the right to an attorney, the right to a speedy trial, and the right to due process. If arrested, they have rights within the prison system. Stateless people, on the other hand, have none of that. They have fewer rights than a criminal. Therefore, and this is important, they GAIN rights by committing a crime. As a criminal, a stateless person won't be treated worse than any other criminal. In a perverse way, the only way to gain the protection of the law is to become an offender of the law.
It should go without saying that you NEVER want a population whose only recourse to rights is to commit a crime. You give a stateless person asylum and naturalize them so that they can acquire the responsibilities of citizenship alongside the rights of citizenship. They now have no incentive to become criminals. Mass denaturalization destroyed any hope that refugees might have had that they could once again live a normal life. It made assimilation impossible. If your citizenship status could be withdrawn, then there was no difference between an insecure citizenship and statelessness.
The danger behind a change to the United States' birthright citizenship is that it is a very slippery slope. At the moment, the United States says, "if you are born on our soil, you are a citizen and therefore subject to our jurisdiction." That idea grants equality under the law. It is a right that the current leadership wants to transform into a privilege. Because if you're born on US soil, but aren't a citizen, then what are you? You have known no other place and may not be eligible for any other citizenship. You are effectively stateless because you don't belong to the nation, and once the government opens the Pandora's Box of who is and is not part of the nation, it is too, too easy to start to deny others their citizenship, or to revoke previously granted citizenship and create an ever-growing body of stateless people. Look at Myanmar for the most relevant example.
I'll end where Arendt does -
There are reasons that rights of asylum and birthright citizenship exist, and they are not to make us feel better about taking care of our fellow man, though that is a tenet of nearly all religions and should never be forgotten. These laws protect us from our own worst impulses. They grant humanity and equality to everyone in our community. In this case of birthright citizenship, rights precede responsibility. Without those rights, there can be no responsibility.
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."Some say that this is so unrealistic a pronouncement that it is nothing more than a stunt, but it is clear that the senior Republican leadership has had this mind for a long time. It has to be taken seriously.
TL;DR - This is a VERY bad idea. It is a slippery slope on the road to totalitarianism.
Don't believe me? I've been working my way through Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism for the past several months, taking copious notes, and thinking of working through things on this blog to help clarify my thoughts and give insight to anyone who doesn't want to spend hours and hours reading one of the seminal works on totalitarian political theory. This might actually be the start of that, and I might have to break this blog up to make it more manageable.
There's a lot of history and context that I'll have to cut out in this initial piece, but the most important bit is the late 19th/early 20th Century trend for the ethnic 'nation' to take over the state. That's fine for the "French" living in France, the "Germans" living in Germany, where nationality is synonymous with citizenship, but what about the Jews, who have no state of their own in 1920, or a Russian living in Serbia? What about a German who was living in what was Germany but is now in Poland? These minority 'nations' were supposedly covered under a series of post-war treaties, but in actuality, minorities were second-class citizens because they didn't share the 'blood of the nation' that controls state.
So more and more over the course of WWI, European states amended their laws to be able to denaturalize people. War does crazy things to people. The ruling family in England are now known as the Windsors, but in 1917, their name was "Saxe Coburg and Gotha." They changed their name due to anti-German sentiment. Fun fact - the family is named after Windsor Castle. They just as easily could have been the Balmorals or the Buckinghams.
After the war, there were a bunch of stateless people who become naturalized citizens of the states in which they ended up. There were so many stateless people, and such a fear of statelessness, that the system for naturalization in most countries was overloaded. Instead of giving more money and resources to an overloaded system, European governments started to just deny asylum/refugee status to stateless people. Any Syrians out there? Sound familiar?
European governments passed laws that allowed the state to denaturalize people, to essentially take away their citizenship, by decree. Nearly everywhere this happened, mass denaturalizations followed. It was easier and more efficient to denaturalize people in mass, much like the current administration has prosecuted dozens of people at a time for deportation.
Here's the deal - the political calculus behind asylum and refugee law goes back to the Roman Empire. Why? Because you don't want people who are outside the pale of the law roaming around your territory. Stateless people have absolutely no rights and, concomitantly, no responsibilities. They have no right to work, no right to live. Their entire existence is illegal and subject to the arbitrary whims of the police. Even criminals have rights - the right to an attorney, the right to a speedy trial, and the right to due process. If arrested, they have rights within the prison system. Stateless people, on the other hand, have none of that. They have fewer rights than a criminal. Therefore, and this is important, they GAIN rights by committing a crime. As a criminal, a stateless person won't be treated worse than any other criminal. In a perverse way, the only way to gain the protection of the law is to become an offender of the law.
It should go without saying that you NEVER want a population whose only recourse to rights is to commit a crime. You give a stateless person asylum and naturalize them so that they can acquire the responsibilities of citizenship alongside the rights of citizenship. They now have no incentive to become criminals. Mass denaturalization destroyed any hope that refugees might have had that they could once again live a normal life. It made assimilation impossible. If your citizenship status could be withdrawn, then there was no difference between an insecure citizenship and statelessness.
The danger behind a change to the United States' birthright citizenship is that it is a very slippery slope. At the moment, the United States says, "if you are born on our soil, you are a citizen and therefore subject to our jurisdiction." That idea grants equality under the law. It is a right that the current leadership wants to transform into a privilege. Because if you're born on US soil, but aren't a citizen, then what are you? You have known no other place and may not be eligible for any other citizenship. You are effectively stateless because you don't belong to the nation, and once the government opens the Pandora's Box of who is and is not part of the nation, it is too, too easy to start to deny others their citizenship, or to revoke previously granted citizenship and create an ever-growing body of stateless people. Look at Myanmar for the most relevant example.
I'll end where Arendt does -
"The nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality...the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and under-privileged individuals. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states."As stateless populations grew, the police grew in power and influence. They gained arbitrary control over a mass group of people without rights. The inability of states to treat stateless people as legal persons, led to the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, which, as Arendt writes, made it all "the more difficult...for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police."
There are reasons that rights of asylum and birthright citizenship exist, and they are not to make us feel better about taking care of our fellow man, though that is a tenet of nearly all religions and should never be forgotten. These laws protect us from our own worst impulses. They grant humanity and equality to everyone in our community. In this case of birthright citizenship, rights precede responsibility. Without those rights, there can be no responsibility.
