A visit to the Statue of Liberty the day after the Supreme Court narrowly ruled to preserve birthright citizenship in the United States proved a simultaneously inspiring and disquieting experience. Swirling around me were visitors from around the world and across the nation.

I could hear American regional, British, Australian and Caribbean accents and among the other tourists and perhaps new U.S. residents and citizens coming to see Lady Liberty for the first time, I heard Italian, German, French, Urdu, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages and any number of colorful variants of Spanish.

Diversity is nothing to be feared, Paulist Father René Constanza assured me as we walked among the happy people standing before Lady Liberty. It is one of the nation’s great strengths.

“Diversity magnifies us as a people,” he said. “It doesn’t diminish us.” Just take a brief gander at the first-generation and naturalized Americans on the U.S. World Cup soccer team, stirring hearts and raising hope across the country this week, he suggested.

Angling for a shot of Lady Liberty
Angling for a shot of Lady Liberty Credit: Kevin Clarke

Of course, he is correct, I thought, surveying the mosaic of humanity around me and wishing some of my fellow Americans could be here to view this embodiment of an essential and unique quality of American life. So many of us seem to have profoundly lost the hope and the confidence in the worth and power of the immigrant experience that used to unite us.

I had joined the Paulist-sponsored America 250 Pilgrimage for Immigrants that morning, a walk that took us from Mass at Our Lady of Victory church near Wall Street to this final stop in prayer before the Statue of Liberty (See our full report on the pilgrimage).

Planned well in advance of the Supreme Court’s decision, the pilgrimage magnified the importance of this historic moment and the ironies adjacent to it.

There was nothing theoretical about the current national conflict over identity and immigration to Father Constanza. “​​I am an immigrant,” he said. And years after his arrival in the United States from Belize, “I said yes to the Holy Spirit, working in me, through the call to become a priest with the Paulist fathers.”

“I made that commitment to follow where the Spirit was leading,” he said, “and I think of all the [immigrant] people who are also following the Holy Spirit’s direction in seeking a better life for their families, for their wives, for their children. They’re also making that pilgrimage here.”

Among this group of people from all over the world, smiling, pointing out sites on the New York skyline, laughing and snapping picture after picture of themselves and family members posing in front of Lady Liberty, Father Constanza added: “I think of all those who are marginalized right now just because we’re immigrants.”

The Supreme Court decision was reassuring, but these days it does not feel particularly safe in America to be of immigrant stock. “What’s scary is that three justices thought this is something that we shouldn’t have,” he said.

The America 250 Pilgrimage’s small expression of American optimism and hope that morning had been accompanied by my bewildered scanning of the bizarre and near hysterical response to the court’s birthright decision. The ruling had overturned a wrongheaded executive order seeking to redefine citizenship, but it merely confirmed what has been the practice for 140 years. On the interwebs, though, my fellow Americans were losing their minds.

Though most Americans still keep the faith about the value of immigration—nearly 80 percent view it as a good thing for the country—some secular and Christian social media heads like Matt Walsh and Sean Davis saw the end of the world in the court’s ruling. They carried on about a new constitutional crisis or demanded that Congress step in to legislatively overrule the Supreme Court; they warned that the scourge of “birth tourism” and “anchor babies” had to be addressed by measures as insane as sterilizing tourists, closing even harder a border that is just about completely closed and, if all else fails, dissolving the union.

Stephen Miller, adding a new entry to his Bond villain screen test portfolio, was out on Fox News foretelling “demographic destruction” and the end of U.S. civilization as we know it, declaring an unholy war on our contemporary generation of immigrants, asylum seekers and resettled refugees. But these loathed, abandoned and temper-tossed who have landed on America’s 21st-century shores from Haiti, Syria, across Africa and Latin America are escaping the same turmoil and despair that brought waves of Irish, Italian, German, Hungarian and other immigrants before them.

These are the people he dismisses as members of the third world, “bringing third world conditions” to America, despite research that finds over and over again that the opposite is true—that refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and other newcomers take unwanted jobs and create new ones, that they reinvigorate the communities where they locate, that they are essential sources of new energy and creativity and basic smarts in the United States.

Haven’t we heard all these things said before about immigrants? Haven’t all the hateful prognosticians of the past proved false?

In our times the loose talk about anchor babies and birth tourism promote corrosive misunderstanding and suspicions about immigrant families. The Migration Policy Institute reports that based on U.S. Census data “up to 26,000 babies born in the United States annually could be attributed to birth tourism—a tiny fraction of the more than 3.5 million U.S. births yearly.” By other estimates the civilization-ending phenomenon depicted on social media reflects .03 percent of all U.S. births.

And while anchor infants have been the baby bogeymen of conservative America for decades, having a child born in America does not meaningfully accelerate a parent’s residency or citizenship status. It remains a hard slog to formalize residency or enter the United States as a legal immigrant. A U.S. born child can indeed petition to have their parents become citizens—when they turn 21!

In fact, Georgetown University researchers report, a child’s citizenship status “does nothing to improve her parents’ immigration status in the U.S.”

“The parents remain subject to deportation and any other legal consequences of their illegal status despite having a citizen child.”

And worse outcomes, including family separation, can be the result of the “anchor” baby phenomenon, which can leave immigrant parents deciding what to do with their U.S.-born children, leave them with family members, surrender them to the U.S. foster care system or take them back to the awful conditions in the home nations they fled in the first place. None of those outcomes is particularly merciful or necessary.

Reflecting on it all at the base of the Statue of Liberty with Ellis Island and the Brooklyn waterfront where my grandfather first worked as a New York immigrant in 1925 in view, I wondered what my immigrant grandparents would make of the debate.

They came to America for a new life and new opportunities, escaping abject poverty and civil war, and yes, to start families here. Did that make my parents anchor babies? A mere second-generation American, can I be counted among the “heritage Americans” who are apparently the only people who can lay claim to the promise of this new land? And if so, why? Because of the color of my skin?

Why are we even forced to wonder about all this?

Paulist Father Bruce Nieli, a child of Sicilian and German immigrants, had that morning read the Gospel from Matthew of the harrowing refugee journey of Joseph, Mary and Jesus into Egypt to escape Herod and then to Nazareth, a town where Joseph hoped to avoid any official scrutiny of his young family by Herod’s son Archelaus. How that story speaks to migrating and refugee families generation after generation.

Like this Holy family, “we are,” together, “a holy family,” Father Neili said, adding, his voice rising: “E pluribus unum.”

“From many,” he paused, then swatting his hand on the lectern, “one!”

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).