Yes, I know that the ideas to follow are extremely unlikely… but they’re not impossible. If the SAVE Act is passed, then Democrats’ outsized influence in government will be reduced. If the census is then restricted to counting verified legally present individuals instead of “estimated” warm bodies, Democrats will take another hit (they’d take even more if the census were limited to actual citizens). Without the gears of government stuck in perpetual gridlock, Things Could Actually Happen. Which means it all starts here:
Here’s my proposal: Second-class citizenship.
Hear me out:
When America was young and was only comprised of states abutting the Atlantic Ocean, we had need of many more bodies than we had, both to build out self-sustaining American Experiment and to expand westward. It made sense, then, to grant citizenship to foreign-born residents on the same terms as those born on this continent; after all, everyone in the colonies technically had had non-U.S. citizenship up until the moment that British forces said, “Fine,” and went home.
Now, we’re at a level of population that we don’t need extra people to help fill in the empty areas, and a level of prosperity that entices people to come to reap the rewards not of ambition, but of simply being here. Too many people relocate to the U.S., and are even granted citizenship, without a commitment to assimilating and being an American. Just in this past week, we’ve seen two people of foreign extraction and mindset but technical U.S. citizenship engage in a (fortunately bungled) Islamist-motivated terrorist attack that shows that, whatever their papers said, they weren’t actual Americans where it counted.
Currently, denaturalization (the revocation of naturalized citizenship) only takes place either when fraud is proven in their naturalization proceedings (say, hypothetically, someone who married her own brother for immigration purposes) or when the person demonstrates allegiance to a foreign power by swearing allegiance, serving in a military in conflict with the U.S., etc. I propose that it be made easier.
So. The first step, and the hardest, would be to amend the Constitution thus:
Notwithstanding the provisions of the 14th Amendment, children born of parents who are not legally present in the United States shall not be granted citizenship without naturalization. Congress shall be empowered to determine the vesting of the rights and privileges of citizenship for naturalized citizens.
With that in place so that the courts cannot strike down the legislation that follows on constitutional grounds, the following gets enacted:
- Naturalized citizens who are convicted of a violent felony may be denaturalized and deported to their origin countries or their immediately prior nation of residence.
- U.S.-born persons whose two parents were legally present but not naturalized citizens at the time of birth and who are convicted of a violent felony may be denaturalized and deported to their parents’ origin countries or immediately prior nation of residence.
- Naturalized citizens, or persons born of non-naturalized parents, are ineligible for federal elected office.
The point of this, I hope you can see, is to withhold or withdraw citizenship from those to whom, in hindsight, granting citizenship was a mistake, and to limit foreign allegiance among those holding elected office in the U.S. It is a provisional citizenship status in which they still can vote, hold property, collect Social Security, etc., but doesn’t doom us to regarding unassimilated detriments as “just as American as you or I.”
Discuss.