America’s Children: Protecting the rights of those born on U.S. soil

Not since the “Americanization” movement of the first quarter of the 20th century has the United States given the integration of its immigrants the kind of sustained policy attention it deserves. At its best, that movement sought to promote citizenship, to assure that government agencies addressed the specific needs of immigrants and to teach them English, U.S. history and civic skills. These goals need to be revisited, particularly since Congress failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform this year.

It would be reckless to assume that a diverse and growing population of 37 million immigrants will be incorporated easily or automatically into our national life. The United States’ historic genius at integrating immigrants has been rooted in a relatively open job market, a participatory political system, strong mediating institutions (including family) and a legal framework that extends its core rights and protections to “persons,” not only to U.S. citizens. The essential ingredient, however, has been the conviction of successive waves of immigrants that they can become full members of the United States. By contrast, many European nations have developed formal immigrant “integration” policies and extend generous social safety nets to immigrants, but the children and grandchildren of many of these immigrants do not feel either that they belong or that they can become full and equal French or German or Dutch citizens.

What Is a Nation?

How immigrants see the United States depends largely on how the United States views them and how it conceives of itself, and those attitudes are changeable. At present, two visions of nationhood vie for primacy in the U.S. immigration debate. Civic nationalism does not deny the role of history, tradition and culture in forging ties among citizens, but it views national membership primarily in terms of shared civic values and political institutions. This vision resonates with immigrants and others who see the United States as a “creedal” nation. According to one of our most cherished national myths, people from throughout the world have fled poverty and persecution to find a home in a nation that asks in return only that they be good and loyal citizens. In gratitude, these immigrants have put aside their other differences to build a nation that offers hope to a bitterly divided world.

Ethnic or ethnocultural nationalism, by contrast, views nations as distinct peoples connected most deeply by inherited characteristics like race, religion, history and language. This vision does not dismiss the importance of shared civic goals and beliefs, but regards concepts like rights, freedom and equality as mere noble abstractions that do not sufficiently bind citizens to one another and to their nation. This paradigm might itself be dismissed as an abstraction that fails to capture the U.S. experience. Its proponents would do away with the primacy given to family unity in U.S. immigration law. In their view family-based immigration has led to the admission of large numbers of immigrnats who threaten to dilute, if not overwhem, U.S. “Western” culture. These cultural differences can be overstated. Religious faith, a commitment to family, hard work and patriotism—which many see as core features of U.S. culture—likewise characterize immigrant communities. The great wave of immigrants from 1890 to 1916 faced similar criticism, primarily because of their countries of origin (mostly Southern and Eastern Europe) and their faith (mostly Catholic), which U.S. nativists attacked as alien and incompatible with democratic values.

Targeting Birthright Citizenship

The main policy ethnocultural nationalists opppose is the granting of birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented persons. Some who would restrict immigrants cynically refer to such children as “anchor babies,” although such children cannot petition for their family members to join them in the United States until they themselves become adults. On the one hand, the opposition to birthright citizenship seems to contradict the primacy that ethnocultural nationalists give to U.S. history and tradition in defining membership. In fact, most of these children will never have another culture, heritage or tradition than what they acquire in the United States. On the other hand, it stands to reason that if you want to perpetuate a distinct people, you would want to deny citizenship to children who lack the inherited characteristics you value. The Fourteenth Amendment, which many who would restrict the number of immigrants trivialize as an immigration loophole, presents a formidable obstacle to such a denial. Its first sentence reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This language reversed the infamous This article appears in September 24 2007.