The phrase “hyphenated American” ought to offend the sensibilities of every man who still treasures liberty and reveres the Republic bequeathed to us by men whose loyalty was not split, whose identity was not double-minded, and whose allegiance was undivided.

To hyphenate “American” is to dilute it. It is to fracture the firm foundation upon which our constitutional Republic was laid. It is to offer loyalty on a layaway plan, with full payment postponed until cultural comfort and capitulation have been achieved.

Let me be perfectly plain: To become an American is not merely to find a new address — it is to make an oath to a new allegiance. It is not to bring one’s culture in tow, demanding it be accepted, celebrated, and prioritized. It is to acknowledge the superior strength and moral clarity of the American experiment, and to offer yourself to it in return for the opportunities it affords. If that strikes the reader as harsh, then I submit he has failed to grasp the mutual exchange at the heart of true and principled immigration.

There is nothing wrong with immigrants coming to America — provided they come to become Americans. Not African-Americans; not Asian-Americans; not Mexican-Americans. Just Americans.

In generations past, people sailed to these shores not to multiply their grievances but to multiply their gratitude. They exchanged the bondage of the old world for the blessings of the new. They accepted that to take part in the American promise required accepting the American premise — that this is a land built not on bloodline or tribe, but on the bold and revolutionary idea that government exists to secure God-given rights, not to grant them.

That idea, fellow patriot, has its roots not in Nairobi, not in Pyongyang, not in Caracas, not in Beijing, and not in Baghdad. It was born in Jerusalem, refined in Athens and Rome, tested in London, and made nearly perfect in Philadelphia.

To come to this country and demand its people abandon their history, their heritage, their heroes, and their habits is not immigration. It is colonization. It is conquest, veiled in the rhetoric of diversity and equity, but animated by the darker desires of retribution and redistribution.

If the first act of an immigrant is to spit on the floor of the house that welcomed him, then he is not a guest, but a vandal.

There is a new and destructive philosophy being pushed with the zeal of a crusade and the chaos of a revolution: the notion that immigrants are entitled to a better life at the expense of the society they enter. That they may disregard, demean, and even destroy the customs and creeds that made America a magnet for the weary and oppressed in the first place. That the past must be burned to warm their own present.

But this is not just suicidal — it is civilizational suicide.

It is akin to a man escaping the fire of his own house, then sneaking into a neighbor’s home and setting the couch ablaze to protest the smoke from his own ruin. You do not repay refuge with rebellion. You do not honor liberty by importing tyranny.

Let me say it bluntly: If you come to this country determined to reject the philosophical underpinnings of American government — individual liberty, natural rights, the rule of law, limited government, and the separation of powers — you have not come to join the Republic, but to undo it.

The United States is not perfect. No country composed of fallen men ever has been. But let’s dispense with the arrogant ignorance that allows newcomers — or even third-generation children of immigrants — to scoff at the principles upon which America was founded, while simultaneously enjoying their fruits.

The liberty you mock is the same liberty that gives you the right to speak.

The system you denounce is the same system that gives you due process.

The flag you burn is the same banner that brought tears of gratitude to your grandparents’ eyes as they first sighted the coastline of their new homeland.

America owes the world nothing. And certainly not an apology. We owe only an example — an example of ordered liberty, of constitutional government, and of a people capable of uniting under principles rather than dividing under prefixes.

When Teddy Roosevelt said, “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism,” he was not making a nativist point. He was making a nationalist one; he was not denigrating immigration but defending integration.

He continued: “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin … would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

That is precisely where we are. Balkanization masquerading as multiculturalism. Chaos baptized as compassion.

The irony is that in fleeing corruption, war, and poverty, too many immigrants are dragging with them the very ideologies and attitudes that produced those hellish conditions.

Marxism. Statism. Tribalism. Envy. Grievance. These are not traditions to be “respected” or “included” — they are cancers to be cauterized.

And yet, our ruling elites encourage the infection. They prefer the hyphen because a hyphen divides, and a divided people are, as history so repeatedly warns, easily ruled.

We once insisted — rightly — that those who sought refuge on our shores conform to the principles that made this nation worth fleeing to. Now, in a grotesque inversion of sanity, we are told that the nation must bow, bend, and betray itself — or face the violent uprisings and culturally cannibalistic vengeance of those who demand everything yet offer nothing.

What a pathetic reversal. What a suicidal inversion.

If the principles of 1776 are not suitable to the recent arrivals, then perhaps those arrivals should have stayed where those principles do not prevail.

To tear down Washington and Jefferson in order to erect statues of foreign demagogues is not merely bad taste — it is sedition against the soul of America.

There was once an unspoken understanding: that to be welcomed into this land of liberty, one had to live liberty — work hard, worship freely, obey the law, raise your children to love the country that took you in.

That understanding is gone. And in its place is a new, toxic contract: America gives you everything; you give America nothing — except scorn, suspicion, and sanctimony.

But a society cannot survive on one-sided contracts. The social contract is not a suicide pact. It is a covenant. And like all covenants, it requires fidelity and consequences for breaching its clauses.

We are reaching the end of our ability to absorb the unassimilated. Our borders are not only being crossed by bodies, but by ideologies that are wholly incompatible with the American mind.

You cannot pour poison into the bloodstream and expect vitality.

You cannot despise the scaffolding of Western Civilization and hope the structure will stand.

Let this article serve as a line in the sand. No more apologies and no more hyphens. No more deference to those who have come not to live as Americans, but to live off of Americans.

We must reclaim our identity — not as a multicultural theme park, but as a constitutional Republic. One people. One language. One creed. E Pluribus Unum — not E Pluribus Plurimum.

If you come here, come ready to contribute — not to conquer. Come to be changed by America, not to change America. And if you will not do that, then, as the Founders might say, you are free to remove to a country more agreeable to your customs.

But you will not burn our home and call it justice.

Not on our watch.