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发帖数: 5309 | 1 It’s time to fulfill the promise of citizenship
By Hidetaka Hirota and Natalia Molina
This year we marked the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment in a strange
way: with an assault on the idea of citizenship that is at the amendment’s
core.
In June, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that it had
launched a denaturalization task force to revoke the citizenship of and
deport “people who should not have been naturalized.” A more aggressive
attack against citizenship came a few weeks ago, when Michael Anton, a
former national security official in the Trump administration, claimed in an
op-ed in The Washington Post that U.S.-born children of undocumented
immigrants should not be conferred birthright citizenship under the 14th
Amendment, since, in his view, these children do not rightfully belong to
the United States.
These attacks on citizenship are the latest chapter in the long history of
the denial of citizenship in this country. While the Supreme Court upheld
denials of citizenship based on race, first and most famously in the 1857
Dred Scott decision, which denied African Americans citizenship, nativist
public officials have also used their discretionary powers to disregard the
citizenship of other groups as well.
The experiences of Irish Americans in the 19th century and Mexican Americans
in the 20th century demonstrate the fragility of citizenship rights, as
well as the ways nativist and racist ideas have long been used to attempt to
undermine them. Narrowing the scope of birthright citizenship is less about
shifting patterns of immigration and more about allowing prejudice and
intolerance to run loose. And in the end, the triumph of a nativist
political agenda hurts all citizens.
The Irish were the first immigrant group that faced challenges to
citizenship. As “free white persons,” the Irish could become citizens
under the Naturalization Act of 1790. Also, unlike African Americans, the
birthright citizenship of Irish Americans was never legally questioned.
Nonetheless, despite meeting the legal qualifications for citizenship, the
Irish faced significant barriers to being accepted by the United States in
the mid-19th century. The mass arrival of impoverished Irish Catholics
fleeing the potato famine provoked an outburst of anti-Irish nativism.
Besides disparaging the Catholic faith predominant among the Irish,
nativists expressed disdain for the immigrants’ poverty, dismissing Irish
men and women as lazy welfare abusers.
In Massachusetts, the legislature developed state laws to deport foreign-
born paupers back to Europe. Just like undocumented immigrants today, the
Irish poor were categorized as people who had no right to public benefits or
even residence in the country.
Massachusetts’s deportation law technically applied only to noncitizens,
but at the height of anti-Irish nativism during the 1850s, state officials
used it to expel even citizens of Irish descent. In May 1855, Massachusetts
officials seized and deported Mary Williams, an Irish-born woman, to
Liverpool from a state almshouse. Banished with Williams was her American-
born daughter Bridget.
Naturalized adult citizens, such as Irish-born Hugh Carroll, were also
targeted. Carroll was expelled from Fitchburg, Mass., “across the seas for
the crime of being poor,” reported an Irish American newspaper. Though he
was a citizen, the law failed to protect him.
The nativists who controlled the Massachusetts legislature maintained that
the law had been enforced “with all proper humanity and discretion” and
that “there is no room for the operation of any improper motives or
unreasonable severity.” But their ability to pass such a law and enforce it
was a byproduct of the lack of explicit federal protection.
Indeed, before the 14th Amendment established the constitutional definition
of national citizenship in 1868, the rights and privileges of American
citizens remained undefined and fragile. In such a situation, nativist local
officials felt little obligation to follow the formal guidelines for
deportation, easily disregarding the citizenship of destitute Irish
Americans, who they believed belonged in Ireland rather than the United
States.
Prejudice also drove officials and nativists to treat Mexican Americans as
noncitizens despite their legal status as citizens.
After the Mexican-American War (1846-48), the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
extended U.S. citizenship to Mexicans living in the ceded territory,
something not afforded to any other nonwhite group at the time. But this was
only a political concession. While Mexicans were legally citizens, many
white Americans, from politicians to ordinary people, simply ignored this
legal dictate. They did not believe Mexican Americans to be citizens because
of their indigenous blood. Political leaders fought the legal
classification of Mexicans by claiming they were neither white nor black,
but in a “race of their own.”
Even the 14th Amendment failed to protect Mexican Americans from continued
assaults on their citizenship in the 20th century. The Great Depression
exposed how vulnerable Mexican Americans’ citizenship was. During that time
, mixed-status Mexican American families were subject to “repatriation”
programs, both voluntary and involuntary, and the citizenship rights of
thousands of American-born children were routinely ignored as they were
deported, sometimes forcibly, along with their families.
The reason for expulsion? Many had simply received some kind of charity or
assistance — like seeking treatment in a public hospital or getting
assistance to pay for a child’s funeral expenses. Like the Irish immigrants
before them, they, too, were expelled for the crime of being poor — a
notable difference from mixed-status European families, for whom only a
criminal record could warrant deportation.
In 1935, when Congress introduced bills meant to prevent immigrants of “
good moral character” and with no criminal offenses from being separated
from their families, it was clear that the legislation was only intended to
offer a path to citizenship for European immigrants. The congressional
hearing featured only cases of all-white or European families; no Mexican or
Asian families were included. One senator argued that it was inhumane to
send immigrants back to Germany or the Soviet Union given the political
situations in those countries. Another described a Canadian mother who had
entered the country legally with her baby in her arms but had not registered
the child, who was thus now deemed “illegal” and would have to be
deported.
The 14th Amendment established national citizenship for African Americans
and anyone born in the United States, serving as a bulwark against attempts
to encroach on the citizenship of racial minorities. And yet, nativism and
racism have long invalidated citizenship rights in practical terms, from
Wong Kim Ark, an American born to Chinese immigrant parents who was barred
from reentering the United States in 1895, to the tens of thousands of
Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II.
Nativist policymakers target everyone: the native-born, the naturalized and
the undocumented alike, and so we need to ensure that all are protected from
nativist and racist coercions.
If we hold that the 14th Amendment excludes from citizenship the U.S.-born
children of citizens from other countries, we also deny citizenship to tens
of thousands of people of European parentage who have been considered
citizens of the United States. Weakening this core provision of our
Constitution weakens it for everyone, not just those who are deemed “less
worthy” at a given moment in history.
We must protect this core American principle. The citizenship we save may
just be our own. | s******r
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