Recovering the Conditions for American Renewal
Underneath the issue of birthright citizenship lies weighty and existential questions. Is America a singular people, and do we have a self-determined identity? If so, who are we? Are we defined by traditional ties of blood and land, or are we bound in spirit by the morals, principles, and precepts we hold in common? Is America primarily an open and global society, or closed and provincial? Are there some people who are not welcome here or who simply do not belong or cannot assimilate? If children born in America to illegal aliens are not citizens, then what is it that makes a person an American citizen? To answer that last question, it is imperative that we first address the former queries.
In our haste as conservatives to back President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship and in providing outstanding historical, legal, and constitutional analyses of the issue, we might lose sight of something: we should defend birthright citizenship—at least, we should defend a certain kind of birthright citizenship. I contend that Trump’s executive order righty brings to an end territorial birthright citizenship but that in its stead, the New Right must vigorously defend what I call political birthright citizenship.
What do I mean? Political birthright citizenship is the view that children born to citizens (whether natural born or naturalized) should automatically be granted American citizenship. This contention may seem obvious and uncontroversial: who doesn’t believe that children born to citizens aren’t automatically citizens? No one, I presume. Yet my purpose in stating the obvious is to raise the problem that the political theory that conservatives often defend as the political theory that undergirds the American founding cannot, in fact, sustain this common view and practice. Thus, while not abandoning this theory, we must expand upon it in order to explain and preserve the historic (and good) practice of political birthright citizenship that has long sustained us and made America great and successful.
Social Compact and the Problems with Bare Consent
If ius sanguinis or physical geography do not automatically confer citizenship (or subjectship, as under the common law), then what does? The common answer from conservatives is consent. Under social compact theory, those who voluntarily consent to join a political society become its citizens. This movement from the state of nature to civil society is one that creates the body politic and its fundamental law (i.e., the Constitution), and thus also citizenship and its boundaries, liberties, rights, and privileges. Children born to citizens consent when they reach voting age and first participate in electoral politics. Foreign-born naturalized citizens consent to the American social compact when they swear the naturalization oath of allegiance.
Since neither lawful residents who overstay their visas nor illegal aliens who break the law in entering the country illegally have properly consented by following the rules for gaining citizenship, they are not citizens and can justly be deported. This is what citizenship means: to consent to the laws of the land (and especially to the highest law, the Constitution) and to follow the rules in becoming a citizen. If you do this, you will be granted the full spectrum of the rights, privileges, liberties, and immunities of American citizenship.
There are three problems with this approach. First, it cannot explain why we automatically confer citizenship to natural-born children of citizens. Second, it allows for absurd counterfactual scenarios that all Americans ought to reject. Third, it does not accurately describe actual American immigration policy for the first one hundred and seventy-five years of America’s national history.
The Problem of Natural-Born Children
To begin with, the children of citizens, if consent is what makes someone a citizen, then why do we automatically confer citizenship upon children who cannot consent? The ready answer to this is two-fold, and both answers are Lockean: first, children have not yet developed reason in order to rationally consent, and thus, they are under the guardianship and decision-making of their adult parents until an appropriate age. Second, children can be said to tacitly consent to the laws of the land where they grow up and live. If this continues after the “age of consent” (in America, eighteen years old), then this counts as a form of willing consent.
The second point goes hand-in-glove with another element of social compact theory, the right of repatriation, or the right to remove oneself from the social compact and join another nation. If the child, after turning eighteen, continues to tacitly consent and also does not intentionally seek to repatriate themselves, then the civil government can assume that they are willing participants in the social compact and, thus, citizens in good standing.
My response to this Lockean account of citizenship is partly logical, partly Humean. If consent is truly what makes someone a citizen, then children of citizens should not be granted citizenship at birth; instead, they should be granted a type of proto-citizenship, or temporary and provisional citizenship, with the expectation that some explicitly voluntary requirement once the child reaches the age of consent will permanently seal their full citizenship. Yet America has never had this practice, nor has she explicitly required anything from children once they become adults.
While one is granted the right to vote upon turning eighteen, voting is neither required nor is there any follow-up by the government to see if natural-born children of citizens truly desire to be citizens of America. Many of these children, in fact, may never vote in their life; they may have been taught toxic ideologies in college and have come to hate America and protest for Hamas on their luxury university campuses. Yet the American government—and the theory of social compact—requires us to recognize them as full citizens of America—equal in citizenship as devoted Americans who love this country, who eagerly participate in electoral politics, and whose family heritages go back 400 years. Something is wrong with this picture.
The solution is not to deny the first group of misanthropes American citizenship nor to impose provisional citizenship until they can pass a civics test and prove their loyalty like naturalized immigrants. No, the solution is to inculcate within them a love of their own from their youth, to teach them what is true about their people and history, and to instill in them the habits and virtues to allow them to both preserve America’s identity while also making her a better place. To do this, however, requires defeating a home-grown self-hatred and anti-culture while at the same time recovering America’s beautiful heritage.
The irony in our immigration law is that we currently require more from naturalized foreigners who become citizens than natural-born citizens. The foreign-born naturalized citizen may know more about the Declaration and Constitution and American history and civics than the natural-born citizen, and they have intentionally and voluntarily entered into a consensual agreement to be a citizen, whereas the natural-born citizen has not. Under a pure social contract theory of consent, we should, in fact, consider naturalized foreigners to be more American than native-born citizens! Yet we do not. Indeed, the opposite is almost always the case: while naturalized foreign citizens are equal citizens in the eyes of the law, to everyone else’s eyes, they are still considered unassimilated foreigners by natural-born citizens whose roots in this country run deep. There’s a reason why conventional wisdom holds that successful assimilation by immigrants to a new country takes at least three generations.
My second, Humean response, follows Hume’s well-known criticism of Locke’s idea of tacit consent. Tacit consent is not consent at all when the alternative option presented to a person is highly undesirable or damaging. Claiming that children who, upon turning eighteen and becoming rational adults, decide to stay in America and do not repatriate are, by that fact, making a positive, uncoerced, and voluntary decision to join the American national compact is rife with problems. First, it is not a decision to stay because virtually no eighteen-year-old is looking to flee their country unless they are dealing with severe persecution, had an abusive childhood and want to start over elsewhere, or developed an unnatural hatred for their own country. Instead, it is expected they will stay and make the best of it. This expectation comes from their parents and family, friends, neighbors, authority figures, and, most importantly, themselves. No eighteen-year-old I know of is earnestly presented with this option by his parents or the authorities.
Second, consent is a voluntary agreement to do something. But for most people, “voluntary expatriation” is a kind of suicide: it is permanently cutting oneself off from one’s family, religion, language, customs, land, friends, inheritance, and way of life. Claiming that adults who didn’t voluntarily expatriate themselves, therefore tacitly “consented” by staying in their homeland instead of committing cultural suicide is akin to the burglar claiming he’s innocent because his victim voluntarily turned over his wallet when a loaded gun was held to his head. Hume’s vivid picture of the Lockean “option” of tacit consent cannot be forgotten:
Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives, from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.
The third problem with tacit consent is that while the American founders read Locke and quoted him often, they rarely speak of tacit consent. They seemed to intuitively see that Locke was straining to make the social compact go further than it could. The founders were happy to employ the state of nature and consent of the governed as good (and normative) explanations for the creation of a new body politic and civil government, but when it came time to assess what “for our posterity” meant, they maintained the more traditional, Humean approach of citizen birthright inheritance.
Absurd Counterfactuals
The second argument against bare consent takes the form of a hypothetical. According to a consent-only based understanding of citizenship, the following could happen and would have to be considered legitimate. Let us envision a generation of natural-born Americans who, upon reaching adulthood, all decided to simultaneously expatriate themselves. Having been brought up on anti-racist books, DEI policies, and racial and gender identity politics, this generation came to believe that America was the most wicked country in the history of nations. Her problems were unfixable, her history and people unredeemable; to stay and work and live in America would be to become complicit in her crimes against humanity. Accordingly, an entire generation of Americans—85 million strong—voluntarily renounce their birthright citizenship and relocate outside the United States. According to a pure form of social compact theory, this would be a natural right and an acceptable outcome of government by consent.
At the same time, an equal number of young immigrants from the subcontinent of India decide to legally immigrate to America. Following the law, they become naturalized as American citizens at record numbers such that in a few short years, there has been a generational exchange as natural-born American citizens are replaced by legal Indian immigrants. Additionally, these Indians are high-performing geniuses, extremely hard-working, innovative, and entrepreneurial types who love America and shrug off the accusations of racism, colonialism, patriarchy, xenophobia, and the like. In other words, these Indian immigrants are, for all purposes, an upgrade from the natural-born citizens who had just left.
If consent is the only thing that makes an American an American, then there is little reason to object to such a scenario. Of course, such a thing would never happen. Yet if a pure theory of consent, when followed to its logical conclusions, leads to absurdities or outcomes repugnant to the spirit and sensibility of Americans, then we should be suspect of it. The rest of this article will explain the necessary heritage—the ethnic, religious, and moral conditions—that our founders believed in and upon which their understanding of the consent of the governed was built.
The Ethnic, Religious, and Moral Conditions at the Founding
The third problem with a solely consent-based understanding of citizenship is that the historical record and practice in America refutes this explanation. The founders certainly believed in social compact and the consent of the governed. But that is not all they believed in. They also believed that certain necessary conditions had to be met for republicanism and consent to work and not backfire or descend into mob rule or majority tyranny. In short, these conditions involved ethnic, religious, and moral considerations that gave the American people a particularly homogenous character that was predominantly provincial; but it was also open to sensible immigration with the expectation of assimilation and ingrafting to the dominant host culture and way of life.
Ethnic Homogeneity
The Preamble of the U.S. Constitution famously declares that the people of the United States were establishing their new nation for “ourselves and our posterity.” What did they mean by posterity? Did they mean the inhabitants of the world or whoever decided to immigrate to America? No. They meant their children, their children’s children, and the generations after them. The founders established the new American nation primarily for their descendants, those bound to them by the ties of consanguinity.
America’s ethnos is Anglo-Saxon, which, in the American context, became Anglo-American. The early colonies were all founded by the English (the Dutch settled Manhattan as New Amsterdam before being captured by the English in 1664), having been funded by English companies or proprietors under royal charters. The majority of the colonists themselves were English, and as the generations passed, descended from the English. There were other ethnic groups present in America, of course, most sizably Germans. Much of this was due to increases in immigration in the eighteenth century, which historians have carefully documented. By 1790, the white American ethnic scene was the following across all the states: from the British Isles, 59.7% were English, 4.3% Welsh, and 21.6% were Scottish (5.3%), Irish (5.8%), or Scotch-Irish (10.5%), for a total of 85.6%. From the European continent, 8.9% were German, 3.1% Dutch, 2.1% French, and 0.3% Swedish. Thus, 94.5% of all white Americans in 1790 were descendants of the peoples of the British Isles and Germany.
While this does not neatly map onto the Anglo-Saxon heritage (the Irish, Welsh, and Scottish did not consider themselves Anglos, and the English and Scottish had a long history of violent conflict), in America, the peoples of the British Isles would have found more in common with each other than not. This anticipates a common objection: that the English, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Germans, and French did not view themselves as being part of a “common culture.” Instead, they had their own histories, languages, political organizations, regional geographies, religions, and customs. And they had fought many brutal wars of conquest against each other. The attempt by Americans today to label these groups “British” or “European” or “Anglo-Saxon” is an ahistorical and anachronistic homogenizing tendency that erases differences for the sake of a mythical common past.
There are two responses to this. First, similarities and differences between these people groups can be viewed absolutely or relatively. From an absolute and geographically circumscribed perspective that looks only at the English versus the Scots, or the Irish versus the Welsh, or the Germans versus the English, yes, each viewed themselves as a distinct and independent people, who, even though there was significant civilizational interaction, still considered themselves to be separate and independent. My argument does not deny this. On the other hand, from a relative and geographically universal perspective, the people from the British Isles and northwest Europe shared far more in common with each other than with the people and cultures of Russia, southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Latin and South America, or Asia. It is from this latter, larger perspective that we are able to view the British and Europeans as a common culture—or at least entertain the possibility that they could make a common culture in America.
The second response to the objection picks up on that very idea: that America’s common ethnic heritage was, in many ways, formed in America. While Old World divisions (ethnic, religious, cultural) and long-standing conflicts did not magically disappear when the English, Scots, Irish, and Germans migrated here, a new life in the New World made it possible to forge a common way of life. This could happen because America was not a melting pot or multicultural free-for-all. The American colonies were British in law and customs, and a majority of the colonists themselves were British. The dominant British culture forced other minority groups to assimilate into it in order to live peaceably in America.
This is especially the case since by the 1790s, the 1707 Acts of Union (which united the kingdoms of England and Scotland) was almost a century past. Few people from the British Isles who immigrated to America in the eighteenth century wouldn’t have been able to speak English or practice any religion besides Christianity. Thus, “Anglo-America” is sufficient to refer to both the peoples of the British Isles and the English-German heritage of Anglo-Saxony as they existed in America, understanding that this grouping is imperfect. Regardless, by the end of the eighteenth century, all voluntary immigration and natural population increases among white inhabitants in the New American Republic were 100% from the British Isles and northwestern Europe (of the 3.9 million inhabitants in America in 1790, 3.1 million were from European descent; almost 700,000, or 17.8% of the population, were black slaves).
This tight-knit ethnic homogeneity was taken for granted by the founders, if not actively extolled and encouraged. We are all familiar with John Jay’s comments in Federalist 2 describing Americans as “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, … [and] very similar in their manners and customs.” James Madison, in Federalist 14, spoke of the “kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens,” and George Washington, in his Farewell Address in 1796, praised the American people for having “the same Religion, Manners, Habits & Political Principles.” Even the Declaration of Independence speaks of America’s “British brethren” and appeals to “the ties of our common kindred” and to the “voice of justice and consanguinity” as to the rightness of independence. While the founders were forced to ground their ancient rights and liberties in an appeal to universal truths (natural law, natural rights, etc.), they still conceived and spoke of themselves as being predominantly British in origin and way of life.
Out of the Anglo-American ethnicity came a common way of life: a common language (English) by which to conduct politics and business; a common religion (Christianity) and the belief in a monotheistic God, the immortality of the soul, and a future state of rewards and punishments; a common moral code of rights and duties based upon Christian teachings; common political principles based upon English constitutional and common law (with unique reforms introduced by the U.S. Constitution); common political and social institutions that create a thick web of public trust; and a thousand common customs, habits, and ways of life that made union among the states and the creation of a single nation possible in the first place.
An important question arises at this point about the normative nature of historical realities. While few historians, scholars, or lawyers would deny that America in the late eighteenth century evinced the ethnic composition, religious and moral characteristics, and constitutional habits and legacies described above, many deny that these ultimately matter. What really matters for good government and a flourishing American civilization are the right principles and values. These, not incidentally, are universal or are at least capable of being universally known and practiced by all peoples. Thus, America is, at heart, an open and universalist political project founded upon transcultural principles of natural right and justice that make it possible for all people all over the world to become American if they, too, adopt these principles as their own. As such, America is supposedly a “propositional nation.”
While this objection is true in the abstract, it misses key insights. Ask yourself: where else in world history has a civilization practiced government by the consent of the governed through representatives in a deliberative assembly that denied the absolute power of the monarch, accorded their citizens the right to trial by jury and other legal privileges, protected the property rights of the common man, believed in and legislated religious tolerance and liberty, and preached the right and duty of revolution in the face of political tyranny? Any one of these would be rare; the combination of them in the same constitution and body politic is remarkable. From the 1760s through the 1780s the American colonists said sincerely and with one voice that the English constitution was the very best in the world. In their own constitution-making, the Americans did not reject the English Constitution—they sought to improve it. Why did England have all of these salutary political qualities by the late seventeenth century and not Russia or Spain or Egypt or China? It wasn’t due to the existence of universal justice or natural rights, nor to man’s ability to know these. No, the unlikely but fortunate coalescence of these political beliefs and habits was due to the qualities of the British people, their morals and religion, and their particular history of political struggle and military conflict.
The Conditions of Republican Government
The founders were consciously aware of the fact that republican self-government—the rule of law, participation by the people, good rule through wise and virtuous representatives—does not spontaneously pop into existence. Its occurrence is rare, its preservation precarious; certain conditions had to be met and maintained for republicanism to be possible. Some of those commonalities were taken for granted, such as the English language (except by some, like Noah Webster, who wrote extensively about the political and social nature of language). Other conditions were explicitly named, notably the need for a moral and virtuous people. This is because republicanism demands a collective understanding of the purposes and ends of civil government (which are moral), and patient deliberation on the part of the people and their representatives of how to best achieve those ends through collective political action. If the people are immoral and vicious, they will become a passionate mob or elect a despot; they will then have to be ruled as the slavish people they are to prevent them from destroying themselves and their state.
The founders had a simple formula that they repeated many times: republicanism requires virtue, and the people cannot be virtuous without religion. For example, Article III of the Declaration of Rights of Massachusetts’s 1780 constitution proclaims that
As the happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government essentially depend upon piety, religion, and morality, and as these cannot be generally diffused through a community but by the institution of the public worship of God and of the public instructions in piety, religion, and morality: Therefore, … the people of this commonwealth have a right to invest their legislature with power to authorize and require … the several towns, parishes, precincts, and other bodies-politic or religious societies to make suitable provision … for the institution of the public worship of God and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality…
While “religion” was continually evoked in the late eighteenth century, what the founding generation meant by it was Christianity (and even more narrowly, Protestantism). There is abundant evidence that the American people at the time were self-consciously Christian and sought to preserve their Christian faith both privately and publicly. While some scholars have tried to claim that America at this time was “unchurched” and essentially secular, their research has been refuted. America was a deeply religious society in the eighteenth century: up to 70% of the population regularly attended church, and of the 3,228 religious congregations in 1776, 98.1% were Protestant denominations, 2.1% were Catholic (comprised of 56 parishes), and only 0.2% were Jewish (5 synagogues). In his 1833 commentaries on the U.S. Constitution, Joseph Story asserted that
There will probably be found few persons in this, or any other Christian country, who would deliberately contend, that it was unreasonable, or unjust to foster and encourage the Christian religion generally, as a matter of sound policy, as well as of revealed truth. In fact, every American colony, from its foundation down to the revolution, with the exception of Rhode Island, (if, indeed, that state be an exception) did openly, by the whole course of its laws and institutions, support and sustain, in some form, the Christian religion; and almost invariably gave a peculiar sanction to some of its fundamental doctrines. And this has continued to be the case in some of the states down to the present period, with-out the slightest suspicion, that it was against the principles of public law, or republican liberty (Vol. III, §1867, p. 724).
The conditions of Christian piety, religion, and morality—as well as the political beliefs and institutions supporting representative legislative assemblies, property and jury rights, and religious liberty—were the result of cultural and civilizational habits intentionally cultivated over hundreds of years. The founders understood what today’s international liberal leaders do not: you cannot take a people without the collective memory or practice of republican government and impose democracy, liberty, and rights upon them. Likewise, you cannot bring such people to America and expect them suddenly to turn into virtuous republican citizens.
The uncompromising truth is that most people in the world are not fit for America. Those immigrants who can be integrated must be carefully selected and screened and then aggressively assimilated over multiple generations. This means that immigration law ought not to let in too many immigrants at once and, if necessary, place a moratorium on immigration to allow those here to fully assimilate (as much as possible). This is, in fact, how American immigration law was constructed and implemented for America’s first two centuries.
Immigration, 1790-1965
Early Immigration Law
These were the “posterity” the founding generation bequeathed their nation to as an inheritance: an ethnically homogeneous Anglo-American people who spoke English, were practicing Christians, and had a common understanding of the importance of virtue, its rights and obligations as well as the ways of life and daily habits necessary to sustain virtue and good government among the citizenry. These things consequently shaped primary education and literacy in early America, the exercise of state “police” powers, moral legislation, and case law in the Early Republic, and the values that undergirded virtuous business practices conducive toward a healthy body politic.
It is important to stress two things about immigration at the time of the founding: first, the founders were generally pro-immigration, mostly because America had vast tracts of open land that needed to be tamed and cultivated for productive life; and second, despite this welcoming posture, the founders had strict qualifications for what immigrants could become American. These qualifications were basically meant to force immigrants to assimilate to the dominant Anglo-American identity.
Early immigration law had four major qualifications: residency, character, loyalty, and ethnicity. The residency requirement oscillated between five and fourteen years early on, but public law soon settled on five years as the minimum time a legal immigrant must live in America before applying for citizenship. The explicit reason for this, said the founders, was to allow the immigrant time to leave behind the un-American foreign attachments they might have (whether slavish or aristocratic) and integrate into American life and culture. The character requirement was basically a morality test, for it required immigrants to prove that they had “behaved as a man of good moral character” during their five-year probationary period. Before being granted citizenship, they had to prove before a judge in any common law court that they possessed such an outstanding character.
Loyalty meant demonstrating and swearing fealty to the U.S. Constitution and everything it meant, assumed, and implied. Above all, this meant immigrants had to sever all ties of loyalty to foreign governments. The founders were concerned with foreign intrigue and subversive persons or forces that might undermine and weaken constitutional government here. Finally, the ethnic requirement shows up in immigration being restricted to “free white persons.” Modern scholars obsessed with race, class, and gender immediately read this as evidence of racism, yet it is not. The racial differences and disagreements in America could not be resolved through statutory naturalization law, so no lawmakers tried. Since black slaves were denied citizenship at the time (they occupied an intermediate category of “denizen,” or non-citizen lawful residents), immigration was restricted to those places where Americans had originally come from: England, the British Isles, and northwestern Europe.
None of the above citizenship qualifications were required of the natural-born children of citizens. The founders assumed that citizens already possessed these qualities and would teach them to their children, thus preparing them to be good American citizens. America thus understood and embodied their natural political birthright. The naturalization qualifications cohered with and supported the Anglo-American ethnic identity, its English language, Christian religion and morality, and commitment to a virtuous constitutionalism. While consent certainly played a role at each stage, it is too one-dimensional to reduce citizenship to mere consent. Much more was going on that is readily discovered when one asks what was being consented to and why.
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Immigration
Immigration in the nineteenth century continued to heavily favor immigrants from this part of the Old World in order to maintain a homogenous population and social harmony. This doesn’t mean there weren’t tensions, which there were, especially when Irish Catholics came to America in greater numbers after the potato famine in the 1840s. Yet when immigrants began arriving in greater numbers from southern and eastern Europe toward the end of the century, some lawmakers expressed concern. The concern was not that Slavic immigrants couldn’t become Americans; they could, and many did as they were grafted into the dominant Anglo-American identity. The problem was that certain negative characteristics were closely associated with particular people groups and regions of the world, and immigration law was failing to control for this. For example, in 1891, Representative Henry Cabot Lodge reported that Austrian immigrants frequently attempted to escape military service, Bohemia laborers were illiterate and ignorant and were “violent ultra-socialists,” and southern Italians were known for their “brigandage” (i.e., gangs and mafia). On the other hand, immigrants from the United Kingdom, Germany, and Scandinavia were industrious and skilled laborers who obeyed the law and were willing to assimilate.
What was true in the 1890s was also believed in the 1790s and practiced well into the 1960s: English and northwestern European immigrants were considered to be the gold standard by which all other immigrants were measured. Contra multiculturalism, all cultures and peoples were not considered equal. Some people were more fit for American life and self-government than others—namely, those closest to and most conformable to the Anglo-American moral, religious, political, and conventional traditions that had made America who she was. This was not merely because this way of life was ours but because it had proven to be the best. From Anglo-America came the kind of people capable of virtue, religious devotion, and self-restraint, industry and innovation, honesty and selflessness, loyal to home and hearth, and endowed with a public spirit capable of directing the ship of state through times of both prosperity and tribulation.
The current debate over birthright citizenship stems from the language of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. While the technicalities of the clause matter, what many scholars miss is the original genesis and purpose of the Amendment: to grant citizenship to blacks who had since been freed. After almost two hundred and fifty years of existence in America—as indentured servants, bounded slaves, freemen, and denizens—blacks were finally going to be fully engrafted into the American civic body politic. They had no other political ties or loyalties despite how much they had suffered and were resentful of how America had treated them; they were fully “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” the American civil government. Thus, they and their children would now be accorded citizenship. While black Americans by the late nineteenth century had developed their own unique subcultures, they were no longer exclusively African. They were African-Americans, having undergone centuries of (forced) assimilation. In many respects, they were Anglo-African-Americans. Of course, the history of the integration of blacks into mainstream American life was both a difficult success and a mitigated failure, a task that is still ongoing.
By the early twentieth century, lawmakers became alarmed at the large numbers of immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe. This wave of immigrants is known as the Ellis Islanders, named after the immigration processing center on the Hudson River (between New York and New Jersey) that operated between 1892-1954. These immigrants included many Russians and Jews escaping pogroms and the Russo-Japanese War conscription, Italians fleeing poverty, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks and Greeks, and some non-Europeans from Syria, Turkey, and Armenia. Millions came to America during this era. The result was that Congress overwhelmingly passed a restrictive immigration act in 1917 (the Burnett or Literacy Act) over President Wilson’s veto that imposed literacy requirements upon immigrants, banned contracted labor, barred Asia-Pacific immigrants, and set a myriad of characterological and behavioral minimums for new arrivals (prohibited were alcoholics, criminals, convicts, idiots, imbeciles, those with contagious diseases, and so forth).
This then led to the famous 1924 immigration law (Johnson-Reed Act) that established quotas on who could come to America: the quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States per the 1890 census (Asians were completely excluded). The result was that immigrants from the British Isles and Western Europe were favored, while immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were limited. Immigration numbers into the United States dropped dramatically after 1924 and stayed low until the 1960s. This forty-year ‘pause’ in immigration allowed for assimilation over two generations. It also helped rebalance the historic emphasis upon immigrants from Britain and Western Europe, such that by the time of the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that did away with the quota system and indiscriminately opened immigration to the world, 89% of Americans could trace their ancestry to England and Europe.
Today, however, immigrants from Europe are a minority of all immigrants to America: huge numbers now come from Asia, Africa, Mexico, the Caribbean, and other Latin and South American countries. The point in briefly recounting America’s immigration history is that from 1790 until 1965, America’s immigration policies were self-consciously Anglo-American. They excluded non-Europeans, and within Europe, they emphasized and privileged those from Britain and western Europe. Both the American people and their political representatives understood the political necessity and common good of preserving an ethnically homogenous American people that was open to immigrants outside that ethnic group, but under strict conditions and upon the supposition that they would assimilate to the dominant ethnos and way of life.
With the countercultural and revolutionary generation that took hold of America in the 1960s and 1970s, however, this older understanding and approach was jettisoned for a global, diverse, and multicultural creed. This development is what led to birthright citizenship being granted to children of illegal immigrants and the phenomenon of anchor babies. To end such birthright citizenship (as we should), we must also return to a pre-1965 immigration strategy, otherwise, we leave in place the conditions that created the unhealthy birthright citizenship practices widely accepted today.
Kernel and Husks
Even at the height of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigrants were never more than 15% of the population. This is a large amount of immigrants for a country, but a nation can handle such numbers if she is confident in her own identity and purpose and if she works hard to assimilate these newcomers into the dominant ethnic group. Yet for America to be America, the Anglo-American ethnos must remain dominant and preeminent—a conviction that is in peril and decline today.
Many will still object at this point and raise the following counterargument: while it is true historically that America’s heritage was found in the British and northwest European peoples, and in their political and legal traditions, their language, religion, customs, and ways of life, that particular ethnicity is no longer necessary nor desirable for America to flourish. It is not necessary because many people from all over the world have successfully been enculturated into the Anglo-American tradition, and they are capable of sustaining it even if immigrants into America now predominantly come from the global south and east. Additionally, it is not desirable because England and Europe are a declining civilization, their people degenerate and are no longer capable of the constitutional liberties Americans cherish. For America to favor immigrants from the U.K. or Europe would be to only hasten global despotism and America’s demise.
This argument operates on the assumption that cultural identity and ethnicity are separable. While the former is essential, the second is accidental; the former is the kernel, and the latter is the husk. While initially, the kernel and husk grow up together to make the complete fruit, later, once the fruit has ripened, the husk can be peeled away and discarded, and the kernel relished. Likewise, the husk of British-European ethnicity is no longer necessary for America to enjoy the kernel of British-European cultural success.
For example, Asian or Indian immigrants can learn English, they can convert to Christianity, the can adopt constitutional government, common law legal principles, and jury trials. The British and European ethnic groups did their job by laying down and preserving a way of life in America that, once deeply established, can be adopted by anyone from anywhere in the world. Not only is this possible, but it is necessary for American civilization and liberty to survive and flourish. The founders were right that not everyone was capable of virtuous, republican government; the problem is this now applies to the British and Europeans, leaving Americans no choice but to look elsewhere to find new peoples capable of self-government (most likely high achieving Asian and Indian immigrants).
An adequate response to this objection would be first to raise the duty and virtue of filial piety. It is true that British and European degeneracy and decline represent a great challenge for America. Europe has not only allowed its civilization to crumble, but its ruling classes have succumbed to an anti-culture: a national misanthropy, an embrace of globalism and multiculturalism, and the importation of millions of foreigners that are helping to erase and terraform the historic peoples and traditions of Europe and the United Kingdom.
Yet despite all that Europe and England have suffered over the long twentieth century, she is still our mother, and we owe her allegiance and gratitude until the end. As J. D. Vance recently noted, Europe is the cradle of Western and Christian civilization, and regardless of the many troubling recent developments (religious secularization, open border policies, suppression of speech, jailing dissenters, canceling of elections, etc.), all is not yet lost. Right-wing political movements are gaining adherents and momentum; England and Europe’s ruling class is slowly losing its grasp on power and propaganda; the people of Europe are poised to once again assert themselves and reclaim their homelands. While such a picture may be too rosy, America still has many friends in Europe whom we have a duty to help and to love. That means preserving our own British and European heritage.
A second reason why America should not be hasty to abandon her British and European birthright is because the Anglo-American heritage cannot be preserved any other way. If Europe dies, America must carry her spirit, memories, and greatest achievements within her own people. Despite successful assimilation into America by many peoples from other parts of the world, assimilation is only as successful as the confidence asserted by the dominant culture. Everyone knows (although no one wants to admit) that if by 2100, America was majority Asian, or majority African, or majority Hispanic, or majority Indian, then it would no longer be America. We would be a different country, a different people, a different ethnicity, religion, and culture.
As much as other non-European cultures might want to become Anglo-American, they are incapable of completely leaving their own heritage and customs behind. For example, many Indian immigrants bring Hinduism with them, as well as parasitic nepotism. Even if they were to become fluent in English, genuinely convert to Christianity, fully embrace constitutional and common law, and defend America’s legal system, in a thousand-and-one unspoken ways, Anglo-American traditions would be compromised, customs changed, and America transformed to reflect those non-European peoples. On the other hand, if America were to remain a majority British-European nation (even while accepting and assimilating other peoples are reasonably low rates), everyone instinctively realizes that she would be America—because this is an essential part of America’s national and cultural identity.
Conclusion
Preserving our American birthright will not be easy. There are close to 30 million illegal aliens in the country who need to be deported, and millions more anchor babies, immigrant workers gaming the system, and students overstaying their visas. For America to return to a pre-1965 Hart-Celler immigration policy that overwhelmingly draws immigrants from Britain and Europe while placing strict quotas on other foreign nationals will be difficult to achieve, not least of all because European immigrants now would have to be carefully vetted for compatibility with the American way of life.
Beyond policy, however, we must convince Americans to abandon creedalism and propositional nationhood that is so beloved by immigrants outside the Anglo-American ethnicity. Unfortunately, too many falsely believe that the only alternative to universal idealism is a form of racist, white nationalist ‘blood and soil’ ideology. This is a false dilemma; one ginned up by modern liberals and globalists seeking to use America’s racist past to scare her out of claiming any genuinely British or European ethnic identity and inheritance.
The most important thing American immigration policy can do is to rightly discern what our American heritage and birthright is and the posterity for whom the founders established this nation, and with wisdom and prudence seek to preserve both as much as is humanly possible. This is our right and our duty. It means bringing territorial birthright citizenship to an end and perhaps imposing a complete moratorium on all legal immigration for a generation or longer. If this is what it takes to save America, then so be it.
Image Credit: A flag of the American Know Nothing Political Party, Active from c.1840-1860
