Amid today’s loud controversies around immigration, American nationality is actually a vague concept. The law defines citizenship, not nationality, and that is determined by birth on U.S soil, or a heavily administrative process for formal naturalization.
This is an oddly American problem. First, most nations face relatively few people trying to immigrate in. Many others comprise a limited number of ethnic or traditional communities; whatever the formal rules, the question of who belongs has an old, traditional, organic-feeling answer. European nations’ strains in assimilating African and Middle Eastern immigrants have a certain “natural” basis in the ethnic and cultural differences between traditional and incoming populations.
As this blog makes a point of noting, America identified itself as a “People” in 1776, citing only “We,” who hold certain Truths as self-evident, which is to say articles of faith. This creed cites personal rights equally and unalienably endowed in all, and that governments exist to secure those rights. Its content sets the only identifying marker of American nationality, adopted in our founding. The closest thing to an amendment occurred in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments’ stipulation that all persons born or naturalized here are citizens, not to be discriminated by race, color, or prior enslavement. The Amendments actually re-affirmed that non-traditional nature of our national identity.
If American-ness is defined by holding of our creed, of rights and government to secure them, can anyone who truly embraces these Truths be an American? If not why not? If so, how can anyone verify any person’s faith and thus their American-ness? Leaving aside current laws that look to procedures rather than concepts as criteria, what ought to determine who can officially be an American?
From time to time someone offers the idea of admitting immigrants with trade or professional capacities, to support economic development, or at least to keep from importing too many indigent persons. The material motivations are clear, but impose a criterion unrelated to our creedal ethos. Is this nation a club, where existing members say “I’m here, and you can join if you benefit me materially?” Do the rules reflect the club’s charter? In this case, no. If, say, Canada sets priorities among immigrants by a point system, favoring investment and skills, they do not contradict any existential premises of their country. We would.
Of course, existing laws must be enforced, and in-migration that transgresses our existing laws is illegal. Arbitrary though current rules may be, non-enforcement only renders any principle or value behind any rule to meaningless. Any definitions that we may ever adopt will also suffer. What we need to do is formulate a conceptually consistent set of criteria, and then draw up laws that embody them – quite possibly from scratch. Through most of our history, openness to whomever wanted to join us, for whatever reason, worked by implicit ethos of assimilation. Today’s rules were all jerry-rigged regulations, cobbled together by interest-based politics and administrative argument. For America to affirm our founding nature in a disrupted world, we need to draw up something more intentional.
No criteria will yield anything close to perfect answers to those questions, of holding of the Declaration’s creed, or verification of anyone’s fidelity. Most likely, some combination of proxy measures and perhaps testing – a different version of today’s period of legal residence before citizenship – might be in order.
Above all, we need to know what we are looking for, and what we are testing. Compliance with laws and convictions is essential, and if the point of those is clear, compliance may come close to spiritual consistency. It’s not at all easy, but the most important thing is to know why we are hare as a nation.
Common Conviction 