On June 25, the Supreme Court ruled that Haitians and Syrians lawfully residing in this country with Temporary Protected Status can be returned to their troubled homelands.
After the decision, the right-wing political commentator Megyn Kelly said about Haitians:
Go home! Get out! We know our country is better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values! You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it. And half of you people—more than half of you—won’t assimilate. We don’t want you!
Ms. Kelly’s rant represents a widespread and disturbing shift in the justification for the Trump administration’s drive for mass deportation. First, the focus is moving more toward removing legal immigrants in addition to undocumented persons. Second, the justification for removal of legal immigrants is often a raw or more refined version of Ms. Kelly’s appeal to the blood-and-soil story of what the right wing in the United States calls the “heritage American.” Old arguments about obeying the law are on the wane. Now the argument increasingly is that only certain groups of people (the “blood”) are suitable to live on this land (the “soil”) and that only those belonging to those groups are true Americans. This is intellectually refined Trumpism.
The heritage American definition, however, contradicts the founding moral claims of the United States and related universalist claims in Catholic moral doctrine. The Catholic Church in the United States should call out this false, relativist and un-American account of what it means to be an American.
‘If you change the people, you change the culture’
To see what’s wrong with the heritage American story, we don’t have to look far. Like others who argue in this vein, Ms. Kelly traffics in stereotypes that designate whole classes of people as incapable of adopting her version of the real American character.
Often the heritage American crowd doesn’t exactly say that the problem is genetic. But their invocations of race and place and culture only move in one direction: The non-white don’t belong—because of their ethnicity and where they are from and the dependent, needy, bizarre nature of their culture. They are criminals, Trumpian bad hombres; they eat dogs and more.
“If you change the people, you change the culture,” Auron MacIntyre of Blaze Media explained on “The Tucker Carlson Show.” Mr. MacIntyre added that heritage Americans can trace their lineage to those who fought on either side in the Civil War, have an “Anglo-Protestant spirit” and have a “tie to history and to the land.”
In a September 2025 speech, Eric Schmitt, a Republican senator from Missouri, reiterated the importance of what might be called a genetic legacy in the self-discipline he sees as the basis of the American experiment. As he put it: “What makes America exceptional isn’t just that we committed ourselves to the principles of self-government. It’s that we, as a people, were actually capable of living them.”
A foundational problem: ‘All men are created equal’
The heritage American story has a foundational problem: the fact that the Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal….”
Moreover, in his 1858 “Electric Cord” speech, Abraham Lincoln made clear that acceptance of the “five words” of the Declaration by right made immigrants Americans and even descendants of the founding generation: “[Immigrants] feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men…and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration.”
If immigrants from around the world are inherently incapable of the self-discipline at the basis of self-government, then how can those immigrants be considered as “created equal”? Instead, in the heritage American tale, these immigrants have an instinct for vice or criminality that signals their unequal creation.
But the idea of unequal creation contradicts Christian doctrine. It also contradicts the clear, founding commitments of the country. One way to respond to these contradictions is drawn from the broader streams of the anti-liberalism of the contemporary right. In this way of putting things, so-called heritage Americans say that the United States is not only a creedal nation but is also a “particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life,” as Vice President JD Vance said in a speech at the Claremont Institute in 2025.
The problem today, this line of argument goes, is that contemporary immigrants to the United States adhere to a globalist liberalism, one that invites everyone to accept the principle that all persons are created equal but that asks nothing more of anyone beyond the do-your-own atomism of globalist liberal monoculture. There’s no need to learn a language, honor a history or join in a virtuous way of life worthy of a nation-founding pioneer.
Moreover, beyond what globalist liberalism doesn’t ask of immigrants is what it does ask: To apply the “five words” of the Declaration in a civilization-threatening indictment of the things like enslavement and genocide that figured so prominently in the birth of the nation. As Senator Schmitt said: “If America was a universal proposition, then everything we inherited from our specific Western heritage had to be abolished. So the statues came down. The names are changed.”
The flaws of blood-and-soil nationalism
This wild hyperbole and reductive accounts of Western culture are signs of the weakness of such arguments. But the bigger problem is that blood-and-soil nationalisms have always had to figure out a way to dispense with universal truths like “all men are created equal.” The universal truths get in the way of the self-enclosed nationalisms.
Writing in the Catholic journal Esprit in the early 1930s amid the rise of Nazism, the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas showed that the commitment to the body, genetics and martial brawn at the heart of German blood-and-soil nationalism could be sustained only by rejecting truth claims pertaining to the dignity and equality of others. The consequence of such a rejection was an inevitable lapsing into the logic of force. To be sure, along the way of imposing such logic, the rhetoric of truth and freedom was retained. But such words no longer had meanings secured by objective truth. Instead, they became ways of expressing the desire to dominate others.
Levinas reminds us from history why blood-and-soil nationalism is wrong. Himself a survivor of the Holocaust, he lived through the terrible consequences of what he analyzed so accurately in 1934 in the early stages of Nazi rule. Other reminders of the flaws in blood-and-soil nationalism are more recent.
Pope Francis rejected the same logic when he called out JD Vance for saying that the ordo amoris in Catholic moral doctrine accepted the proposition that we only need to love our distant neighbors like migrants if we have enough love left in the tank after we’ve loved our family, friends and nearby neighbors. For Francis, Mr. Vance’s version of the ordo was a permission slip to disregard the inalienable and equal dignity of migrants and the exigency of their need, and thus to arbitrarily and forcibly remove many from the country. “What is built on the basis of force,” Francis said, “and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”
The primary good we distribute is membership
The moral philosopher Michael Walzer has said that the primary good we distribute to each other is membership in a political community. What Catholic moral thought can especially do in the face of such questions of membership is to lay down a moral baseline that cannot be compromised: the inalienable and equal dignity of every migrant.
That baseline doesn’t mean that every migrant must become a member. But it requires that the equal dignity and equal human rights of every migrant be recognized and respected as they are considered for membership. The common good demands no less. Such a requirement stands as a contradiction to the heritage American story.
Such a requirement also brings us back to reflecting upon the founding principles of this country, as Pope Leo XIV invited all Americans to do when on July 3 he received the Liberty Medal from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. To say that heritage Americans alone are “capable of living” the principles of self-government, as Senator Schmitt suggested in his speech, is tantamount to a betrayal of those very principles. The self-evidence of the “rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” signals their universal quality: The Declaration is stating that everyone has such rights.
Moreover, these natural, or human, rights were never an abstract ideal hovering above history. These rights led us to make history and rebel against the “injuries and usurpations” of established British rule. American history teaches us that these rights are a promissory note that must be cashed anew by every generation. This is the living heritage that makes us great. Today, we must show that we are capable of living it.
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