John Derbyshire tackles Linda Chavez’s NY Post op/ed:
We have changed our collective mind about all sorts of things that our Constitution and laws once allowed—most notably slavery, of course. Perhaps we should change our minds about this. Is birthright citizenship a good thing for us today, or not? What are the arguments for it, as benefiting the U.S.A. and U.S. citizens? May we hear them, please?
Let’s hope we don’t need a Civil War to sort this one out.
At the time the 14th Amendment passed, there was considerable debate regarding groups that would be equivalent to today’s illegal immigrants, though the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants did not apply because no laws restricted immigration then.
Sen. Edgar Cowan, D-Pa., railed against those whose citizenship might be affirmed under the new amendment, calling for “expelling a certain number of people who invade her borders; who owe to her no allegiance; . . . who pay no taxes; who never perform military service; who do nothing, in fact, which becomes the citizen, and perform none of the duties which devolve upon him.”
Sound familiar? But he wasn’t talking about Mexicans. “I mean the Gypsies,” he said.
If that’s what he meant, I must say, Sen. Cowan was talking good sense.
Another Cowan diatribe sounds eerily prescient of Trump’s warnings: “There is a race in contact with this country which, in all characteristics except that of simply making fierce war, is not only our equal, but perhaps our superior.”
This will be baffling to readers unfamiliar with 19th-century American anxieties. Why doesn’t she tell us which race Sen. Cowan meant? Is it over-suspicious of me to think that perhaps she left the race unidentified so that some subset of her readers would take the Senator’s remarks to have been anti-Semitic?
In fact Sen. Cowan clarified his meaning in his next sentence: “I mean the yellow race; the Mongol race.” He was expressing the common and perfectly reasonable fear that our Pacific coast, under-populated and remote from the centers of American civilization, would succumb to a mass influx from China, then populous at the Malthusian limit and in the throes of late-dynastic turmoil.
(Note that Sen. Cowan’s fears were founded in part on the belief that East Asians were “perhaps our superior.” A little later he says: “Of their industry, their skill, and their pertinacity in all worldly affairs, nobody can doubt.” The same fear of admitting great numbers of a superior race shows up in the congressional debates on Japanese exclusion in the 1920s. Racist? I guess so; but surely not “supremacist.”)
… Trump is dead wrong on birthright citizenship, and Republicans shouldn’t follow him down the rabbit hole.
Once again: If birthright citizenship is a good thing for our nation today, let’s hear the arguments.
If the legal/constitutional position is what Ms Chavez says it is, but no longer the right policy for our country, let’s change it, as other nations have done: Australia (2007), New Zealand (2005), Ireland (2005), France (1993), …
COMMENTS TO JOHN DERBYSHIRE:
* Anyone who is successful in a socio-political system that can be objectively viewed with suspicion, e.g. Latin America, the Middle East, Southern Europe, Russia, the Balkans, Subsaharan Africa and identitarian hustlers in the West, warrants suspicion. They’ve learned the techniques used to get on top. If you succeed in a highly corrupt environment, you surely didn’t get there squeaky clean or tainted no matter what your individual worth.
The problem is American whites just aren’t equipped to deal with it. Yes, we yell. Yes we also use public shaming as a socially conditioning technique. Yes we have white collar corruption. But let’s be honest, we have nothing on those cultures in which mistrust and amoral familism have permeated public life for centuries. Those same Americans who will scream at a politician at a Tea Party townhall will stand in line at any business and pay their taxes.
Why deal with that pathological crap if we can avoid it? The US has its own pathologies and they are numerous and pervasive, but that doesn’t mean should import others. And just because reform has been possible in the past with groups who came from corrupt societies, doesn’t mean it will always work.
I agree with liberals and leftists that the Constitution should reflect changing realities. I’d also say that the Declaration of Independence was hopelessly naive, written by a young, dreamy Virginian subject to flights of fancy, even if he could turn a fancy phrase. He was simultaneously one of the greatest minds our nation ever produced, whose ideas are models for us all, and a dangerous fool who should have never been allowed within twenty feet of pen or paper.
…Corruption indices, poverty as indicator of corruption and poor leadership, anthropological studies that indicate if a society is plagued by extreme misogyny, low levels of trust, amoral familism or tribal/clan nepotism. Of the list I gave, YOU give me an example of ONE of country that is by any objective standard mostly liberal with a transparent government and whose indigenous cultures are committed to impartial meritocracy.
Who said “white” America? That’s your little addition, channeling Professor Ignatiev, are you? Indeed Latin America has been historically ruled (or misruled) by a white or almost white elite. Eastern Europeans are white.
Naive, yes. The Declaration of Independence should have been very specific. It should have used specific language limiting its claims to the American community as was. We could have incorporated later arrivals, but we would have much more control over the rate of incorporation and the terms on which they joined without being charged with hypocrisy and our indigenous leftist elements and cheap labor lobbies and war-mongerers would not have had such a strong propagandistic tool.
But that’s Jefferson for you. All high-minded ideas, but not concerned with minor details. That fool committed us to all sorts of crap with his “all men.” Same goes for the 14th Amendment. It should have been much clearer and more specific, i.e. “we hereby grant citizenship to former slaves, who were held by in the territories of the US, excluding former slaves from foreign territories (e.g. West Indians like Louis Farrakhan, Colin Powell or Eric Holder), and their descendants.”
