“The destruction of a man’s rights, the killing of the judicial person in him, is a prerequisite for dominating him entirely.” –Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Clarity in language is never immune to the treachery of sinister intentions. “Truth will set you free” and “Work will set you free” are clear, noble statements. The first is from the gospels. The second is from an 1873 German novel by Lorenz Diefenbach. Both are forever defiled by the Nazis hanging the work slogan above the entrance to the Auschwitz death camp. A similarly bigoted motive is behind Trump’s defilement of the clear language of the 14th Amendment in the birthright citizenship case.
It is not just about birthright. It is about anyone’s citizenship.
The case the U.S. Supreme Court will decide by July 4 hinges on 13 words in the 14th Amendment: whether anyone “born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” is a citizen. The wording is clear enough that for over 150 years birthright citizenship granted to anyone born here under any circumstance has been undisputed. The amendment helped mend the country’s vilest cancer and supercharge its prosperity.
From 1619 to 1868, when the amendment was ratified, all enslaved persons and most of their descendants were considered neither citizens nor humans, but property. After the Emancipation Proclamation they remained stateless nonpersons, like refugees or “displaced persons” without rights in their own country. Only the 14th Amendment recognized them as human beings with rights as equal as those of whites–as citizens.
Most of us Americans easily understand the difference between being an American citizen and, say, a citizen of Mexico, the European Union, Uzbekistan. Most of us, I would suggest, have no idea what it’s like to have no citizenship whatsoever, to be a stateless person–a person unrecognized by any country, with no rights of belonging anywhere, with no rights, period. It is humiliating and demoralizing, like being one of Orwell’s unpersons, invisible, irrelevant, at the mercy of any state’s whims (or murder) without recourse. A stateless person’s status is closer to that of a person on death row than to the community of human beings.
That’s why the term “illegal alien” is so toxic, why its peddling by demagogues, its blind acceptance by media and adoption in government documents or even some classroom materials is groundwork for the unconscionable: it formalizes the dehumanization of the person, both as an “illegal” entity and as an “alien.” The person is not just a foreign body. It is not even a person. It has no right of existence among us. It must be either expelled or exterminated.
Fortunately we have not crossed the line beyond expulsion. But we have yellow-starred millions as “illegal aliens.” (The Pew Research Center put the figure at 14 million in 2023, or 4 percent of the population.)
The debate over birthright citizenship has focused on what would happen to future babies born on American soil to non-American parents. That’s not Trump’s endgame. If you’ve been paying attention to his totalitarian approach to immigration, the endgame is to use the elimination of birthright citizenship as the stepping stone to his final solution: the denaturalization of masses of migrants who obtained citizenship simply by being born here. The distance between a Supreme Court decision in favor of Trump’s order and Germany’s Nuremberg Laws of 1935 is mere degrees.
One of the terrifying things about the attack on the 14th Amendment is that it is not novel at all. It is a method perfected by democracies going back a century and a half.
Germany alone was not guilty of stripping citizenship from 600,000 Jews with its Nuremberg Laws. France, Belgium, Portugal and other democracies stripped Germans and others of citizenship from the beginning of the last century, and condemned colonial subjects and “undesirables”–their “illegal aliens”–to statelessness well into the 1960s. Poles, Ukrainians and Baltic region refugees expelled by Soviet expansion were made stateless and held in concentration camps.
Mr. Guizac, the Polish refugee at the center of Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 story, “The Displaced Person,” is a stateless person trying to pull his cousin out of one such concentration camp, where she’s been held for three years. Right after Arthur Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon, his novel of Soviet camp brutality and mind control, he wrote Scum of the Earth, his memoir of internment in a French concentration camp. “Men of exemplary courage and daring, after having been labelled ‘refugees’ and beaten out of three or four countries, went about as if carrying an invisible leper’s bell,” he wrote.
We did this to 127,000 Japanese-Americans, interning them in concentration camps during World War II. They did not officially lose their citizenship. But citizenship meant nothing for those war years, when it mattered most. The rights protecting all other Americans did not protect them. They were stateless. It took the Supreme Court until 2018 to declare internment “gravely wrong,” though it did so in a 5-4 decision ratifying Trump’s first of many xenophobic travel bans, which opened the door to the birthright aberration.
Depending on how it goes, the birthright decision could lead to millions more losing citizenship. The decision itself won’t be retroactive. But it would provide the precedent for Congress to write purity laws enabling denaturalization. As slippery slopes go, it’s an ice-skate to Nuremberg.
For a state to have the power to denaturalize a citizen, to condemn people to statelessness, is one of the most arbitrary and cruelest powers a state could exercise. It gives the state the power to fabricate “illegal aliens.” That’s where we would be headed.
If the 14th Amendment’s language wasn’t intended to make that obscenity impossible, the totality of the Bill of Rights–a monument to the unconditional sovereignty of the individual–certainly does. In that sense, the mere existence of the birthright citizenship case in this nothing nation but for immigrants, the fact that it has gotten this far or risks anything less than a unanimous decision demolishing it, is not just an offense to the 14th Amendment. It is an assault on every amendment, and the disgrace of the sestercentennial anniversary we would be celebrating within days of the decision.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
You may be right says
Google me this …
If a pregnant woman goes to China and has her child in a Chinese hospital, is the child a Chinese citizen?
A child born in China is generally only a Chinese citizen if at least one parent is a Chinese national, according to the Nationality Law of the People’s Republic of China. If both parents are foreign citizens, the child is typically not a Chinese citizen. China follows jus sanguinis (citizenship by blood) rather than jus soli (birthright citizenship).
If a pregnant woman goes to Spain and has her child in a Spanish hospital, is the child a Spanish citizen?
No, a child born in Spain to foreign parents does not automatically become a Spanish citizen. Spain generally follows citizenship by blood (jus sanguinis), not by place of birth (jus soli). The child inherits the parents’ nationality, though they may have a faster, facilitated path to Spanish citizenship after one year of legal residence.
If a pregnant woman goes to Ireland and has her child in an Irish hospital, is the child an Irish citizen?
Not automatically. Under Irish law, since January 1, 2005, birth in Ireland does not automatically grant citizenship. To be an Irish citizen, at least one parent must be an Irish citizen, a British citizen, or a legal resident with a proven, substantial connection to Ireland (usually 3 years of residency) prior to the birth.
If a pregnant woman goes to Germany and has her child in a German hospital, is the child a German citizen?
No, a child born in Germany to foreign parents does not automatically acquire German citizenship solely by being born in a German hospital. Germany primarily uses jus sanguinis (citizenship by descent), not jus soli (citizenship by birthright), which differs from the U.S. system.
If a pregnant woman goes to Russia and has her child in a russian hospital, is the child a russian citizen?
A child born in Russia to foreign parents is not automatically a Russian citizen. Russia does not grant unconditional birthright citizenship (jus soli); citizenship is usually acquired if at least one parent is a Russian citizen or if the child would otherwise be stateless.
Approximately 30 to 35 nations worldwide offer unrestricted birthright citizenship (often called jus soli or “right of the soil”), which automatically grants citizenship to children born within their territory regardless of their parents’ citizenship or immigration status. The vast majority of these countries are located in North, Central, and South America, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina.
Pierre Tristam says
No googling needed. I really don’t give a crap what the situation is in China, Germany, Lebanon, Lesotho or Uranus. I don’t live in those countries or planets. Those countries don’t set my standards. This one does. The 14th Amendment does. If we’re ready to Goebbelize our amendments’ language, then we’re no longer who we pretend to be. Might as well be China.
Pogo says
Thank you.
Endless dark money says
Deport Marco Rubio !
RD says
China is an enemy of the US. They are sending expecting mother’s here for a month to have a kid and then go back to China. This has already happened thousands of times. China is building an army of so called American citizens that will eventually work to take the country down. At least just stop the practice now and dont worry about those that already have been given citizenship. Stop the bleeding now.