Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.
Last year the Trump administration designated Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) as a terrorist group allowing the military to carry out strikes against it and its leadership, but the massive drug cartel across the border understands the weaknesses of our system all too well.
That’s why its new leader has American citizenship.
Law enforcement, intelligence agencies and the military will have to jump through all sorts of legal hoops to spy on, target or take out Juan Carlos Valencia Gonzalez, who has a $5 million bounty on his head, but the best protection in the world because he was born in California.
The new cartel leader’s drug dealing Mexican parents had a baby in America. That child became a Mexican citizen who runs a Mexican drug cartel that the government has designated as being at war with the United States, and yet we can’t simply remove his citizenship.
And targeting the cartel boss without removing his citizenship will set off wails from Democrats and the Tucker Carlson wing of the GOP who still whine that the United States took out Anwar Al-Awlaki, the head of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni operation, a sworn enemy of America, who happened to be born here when his father, a grad student, was in New Mexico on a Fullbright scholarship.
Americans of a century ago would have been baffled that foreign enemy leaders who happened to be born to foreign nationals in this country were somehow immune to being killed in battle or that their citizenship couldn’t be quickly and easily removed. Back then most of our modern problems were unthinkable because committing treason, aligning with any foreign government, including joining its army or voting in its elections, marrying a foreigner or just returning to your home country meant denaturalization. (As did dodging the draft or deserting from the military.)
Had the common sense provisions of the Expatriation Act of 1907 or even the milder Nationality Act of 1940 been in force today, we wouldn’t have the farce of cartel and terrorist leaders who still hold our citizenship, active traitors with citizenship, ‘refugees’ who spend most of their time back home or a Somali senator linked to fraud who is still voting in Minnesota elections.
Under these provisions, Bill Clinton would have lost his citizenship and the’ refugees’ and ‘migrants’ who maintain homes abroad, the women who marry foreign nationals for cash to give them citizenship, and the anchor baby would be as extinct as the dodo.
Unfortunately a series of poorly grounded Supreme Court decisions unconstitutionally seized the powers of the executive and legislative branches to withdraw citizenship on most grounds based on a misreading of the notoriously poorly written Fourteenth Amendment.
The Warren Court’s deliberate misreading of the Fourteenth Amendment’s awkward attempt to define all black people as citizens “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power… are declared to be citizens” somehow trumped the clear language of Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 that Congress has the power “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization”. In a series of bad decisions, Supreme Court rulings argued that serving in a foreign military, desertion, marrying foreigners, voting abroad did not merit denaturalization.
These rulings relied on now widely discredited premises, such as defining the Constitution’s ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ term as being anything that the justices disapproved of, and “evolving standards of decency” which allowed judges to redefine the law to fit liberal mores. These abuses of judicial activism that reached their peak during the Warren Court also gutted the constitutional powers of Congress and made denaturalization a dead letter in the law.
By the time Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez held that a Mexican born in the United States who returned to Mexico to avoid military service couldn’t be stripped of his citizenship because it violated his due process, denaturalization was a dead letter that could hardly be utilized except for naturalization fraud by immigrants who had lied about not committing war crimes abroad.
This was not strictly true because the provisions punishing treason or allegiance to an enemy power with denaturalization are theoretically still in effect, but administrations haven’t had the stomach to try them out. The Trump administration may be willing to take on ‘treason citizenship’ and a more conservative Supreme Court may be willing to overturn Earl Warren.
Indeed even the Fourteenth Amendment had emphasized “not subject to any foreign power”.
Both the left and the right tend to misunderstand ‘birthright citizenship’. The Fourteenth Amendment’s accidental introduction of the foreign concept into American law helped demolish citizenship as a meaningful participatory act rather than the involuntary one it was elsewhere.
‘Birthright citizenship’ is neither an immigrant ideal nor ‘magic dirt’. Rather it was the principle of ‘Jus Soli’ or ‘Right of the Soil’ which, in British law, was limited by those “born under the obedience, power, faith, ligealty or ligeance of the King”. America’s Founding principles were highly skeptical of both notions that were rooted in monarchial, rather than republican principles.
Monarchy made everyone born under the jurisdiction and sovereignty of the Crown into a ‘subject’. Allegiance to the Crown was not voluntary the way that it was in America. That was why the Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, labored to defend the right of ‘expatriation’ which still remains the only unquestioned form of denaturalization.
The American Revolution was predicated on the idea of citizenship as a voluntary action rather than an involuntary compact created by a place of birth. The growing intrusion of ‘Jus Soli’ began with the Fourteenth Amendment which, rather than quickly naturalizing freed black slaves, clumsily made everyone born here and “not subject to any foreign power” citizens.
By the late 19th century, the Supreme Court had begun dismantling any meaningful limitations on citizenship with United States v. Wong Kim Ark embracing the British notion that the sovereignty under which a child was born made him a citizen. But if sovereignty makes a child a citizen, then Anwar Al-Awlaki and Juan Carlos Valencia Gonzalez are fully American.
And that’s not only absurd: it’s national suicide.
The prototype for American citizenship is neither ‘Jus Solis’ nor the ‘Sovereignty of the Crown’, but the concluding words of the Declaration of Independence in which we “pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”. A nation built on anything else is either a tyranny or an absurdity. Some on the left and the right now argue for tyranny or absurdity.
Birthright citizenship is not a liberal idea, but an illiberal one. It was liberal only relative to the even more illiberal idea that citizenship came from personal allegiance to a monarch. America was based on neither tyranny nor absurdity, but a voluntary community of mutual allegiance that it is possible to join and to withdraw from, and to be tossed out of and barred from for disloyalty.
Past Supreme Court decisions reversed the tyrannical one-way allegiance of monarchy and instead replaced it with a one-way allegiance in which the state was obligated to do everything for the citizen, but nothing at all was required from the citizen. Not even allegiance. Even asking them not to run terrorist organizations and drug cartels at war with America is asking too much.
No nation can survive on such principles.
America is not a monarchy or a tyranny and there are legitimate concerns about giving the state the easy power to strip away citizenship, but if citizenship can’t even be removed from the people who pledge allegiance to Al Qaeda and ISIS then, to paraphrase Kennedy, what does it ask of us to do for our country and what does it even mean beyond a set of legal complications?
The only pathway to reviving America is to make citizenship into a meaningful act of allegiance, not an accident of birth. Immigration in this regard is not the problem, immigration without allegiance is the real crisis, but so is the citizenship without allegiance of the likes of Bill Ayers of the ‘Weather Underground’ who can trace his ancestry back to John Ayer who came to this country from England in 1635 and was one of original settlers of some of the Puritan towns.
America needs to exercise the traditional ability it once had to make citizenship meaningful by also making it selective, controlling immigration, ending the automatic grants of citizenship for happenstance births and once again making citizenship conditional on ongoing allegiance.
Anything else is not citizenship: it’s a national death wish.
