Vice President JD Vance told the truth with characteristic bluntness recently when he said, “Just because we were founded by immigrants doesn’t mean that 240 years later, we have to have the dumbest immigration policy in the world.”
He was speaking on CBS’s Sunday talk show Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan about birthright citizenship and President Donald Trump’s order that federal agencies cease issuing citizenship papers to children of illegal immigrants or other foreigners temporarily in the United States.
The issue of birthright citizenship is not clear cut and will doubtless go to the Supreme Court for a clarifying decision. There is a strong case for birthright citizenship but also a strong one against it. As Chuck Cooper and Pete Patterson argued in the Wall Street Journal, granting birthright citizenship to children of illegal immigrants contains a constitutional absurdity; because only born citizens may run for president, it would mean the highest office was open to children of illegal immigrants but blocked to children brought here legally, naturalized, and raised in America, who might even have served in the U.S. military. How can it make sense that such citizens are treated as subordinate, with fewer rights than children born to foreign women with no connection to America other than that they arrived nine months pregnant, broke the law to cross the border, and gave birth?
The legal controversy over birthright citizenship is based on interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which was adopted to entrench the abolition of slavery and ensure that former slaves were always in future recognized as American citizens with all the rights and protections that this status confers on others. But proponents of birthright citizenship often tellingly argue less over the precise and debatable meaning of the 14th Amendment and more on the vaguer, more emotional, less legalistic ground that, as Brennan said, “this is a country founded by immigrants.” It was this statement that Vance was answering when he talked of the dumbest immigration policy in the world.
The fact that Americans all descend from immigrants is cited by the Left’s open borders crowd as a sort of talisman with the magical power to make all complexities and reasonable questions on the subject disappear in a puff of self-righteousness. Noting that we are a nation of immigrants is deployed like the accusation of racism to silence anyone who suggests there is room for debate.
It is this simplistic sentiment that inspires, if that is not too flattering a word, a limitless number of dreary cartoons depicting the Statue of Liberty altered and unfeelingly denying entry to the world’s poor. The cartoonists intend these to deliver an acid rebuke to those who believe immigration is a nuanced issue and that current citizens should have a say in limiting the flow of foreigners into the country.
Those who argue for the dumbest immigration policy want the acceptable limit of polite conversation to exclude suggestions that some immigrants are less desirable than others. They often remind you that during the great immigration surge early in the 20th century, xenophobes said arrivals from southern Europe were undesirable. The implication and often the explicit accusation is that it is racist today to regard mass immigration from the Muslim nations of Africa and the Middle East, for example, as unwelcome and ripe for restriction.
Such arguments are coupled to the assertion that the U.S. is not a blood and soil nation but a country founded on universal principles to which all people can subscribe. This does not, however, fit well into the rest of the Left’s agenda, for it also insists that people arriving from different cultures should not have to integrate or accept those universal principles — should not agree to live by America’s traditional values but should retain their own.
The Left angrily rejects the old-fashioned notion that such people should be stirred into the melting pot and “become” Americans. They insist, against all the evidence, that diversity is our strength.
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“Diversity” here is a deceptive term that erases the huge difference between diversity of race and diversity of culture and values. There would be no problem if America’s people were only racially diverse but united by a common culture. But that is not the case. The Left encourages immigrants, both legal and illegal, to cling to their alien cultures, which are often hostile to America’s foundational ideas. The Left denigrates the host nation and its values to which the foreigners have migrated.
It is often noted on the separate subject of government spending that a nation can have a generous welfare state or an open immigration policy but cannot have both together without courting financial ruin. Likewise, America can have mass immigration or unlimited cultural diversity, but it cannot have both at the same time without inviting division and national decline.