The Plot Against Citizenship

The 14th Amendment in Danger

In The New York Times yesterday was another one of those stomach-churning articles you grow accustomed to in our benighted era: “Trump Confirms Plans to Use the Military to Assist in Mass Deportations.” This was once the stuff of nightmares, the worst-case scenario fantasizing of hysterical liberals back in 2016. Now, it’s just the news: “President-elect Donald J. Trump confirmed on Monday that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military in some form to assist in his plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.” The plan involves the construction of “vast holding facilities,” in other words, camps. But for me the most disturbing part is buried deep in the article, “And the team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.”

Just so we understand the stakes, birthright citizenship is a Constitutional right, it is enshrined in the 14th Amendment, and it has been unambiguously upheld by the Supreme Court since 1898 with United States vs. Wong Kim Ark. You cannot “end it” without suspending the Constitution. In essence, that is what they are planning to do. The administration will try to frame this as a method to dissuade “anchor babies,” but their ambitions are much broader. Back in 2018, Michael Anton, shortly out of his White House job, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post entitled “Citizenship shouldn't be a birthright.” Here’s what he argues inside: “It falls, then, to Trump. An executive order could specify to federal agencies that the children of noncitizens are not citizens. Such an order would, of course, immediately be challenged in the courts...Judges faithful to their oaths will have no choice but to agree with him. Birthright citizenship was a mistake whose time has gone.” This is not the action of a regime loyal to the constitutional order. No, this is a radical move: an attempt to rewrite the Constitution from on high and then hope that it will be rubberstamped by a loyal judiciary.

Since it’s difficult to get people to care very much about the formal aspects of politics even when they go to the heart of our system, let’s also consider the substance here: This is a means to carry out the Trumpist ideological program: to nullify the citizenship of internal enemies at will and to shape the very composition of the country. They want to decide who gets to be an American. This will also include expanded attempts to denaturalize American citizens. Of course, all of this will be presented in terms of an emergency expedient, and that’s how they will count on getting mass consent. People will shrug and go, “Well, those migrants really are a problem…” Even some former resist libs on MSNBC might furrow their brows and wonder aloud if this might not be the responsible move of a decisive statesman who has committed himself to deal with a national emergency. And so an exception is made. And then another. Then another. Then, either by dramatic coup or slow degradation, the state of exception becomes the rule. Make no mistake, this is the core of their entire worldview: There are a lot of people out there they just don’t consider to be real Americans. Are you one of them?