Columnist Jason Zhao explores the history of American identity.
Credit: Weining DingIf I were born today, I wouldn’t be American.
On Jan. 20, 1968, Wharton graduate and President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” In short, the order prohibits children of immigrants with temporary or no documentation who were born in the United States from receiving American citizenship. The fact that these 500 words could have changed almost everything about my life had they been issued 20 years earlier has been weighing on me all week. In 2004, one of those shifty “birth tourists” — my mother studying to be a mechanical engineer on a temporary student visa — brought me into the world in Austin. Under Trump’s new policy, I would most likely now be living 7,000 miles away — speaking a different language, attending a different university, and having never known the country I call home.
I could devote this article to the children who could be born stateless under the policy, without identification or a passport, meaning they legally don’t exist — a Kafkaesque nightmare. I could write about how the policy creates a permanent underclass that lives in the United States but has no rights, similar to many Black people before the 14th Amendment was ratified. I could give you the same list of immigrant achievements and Emma Lazarus poems that are always offered up, like thoughts and prayers after a mass shooting, whenever our government tramples yet another fundamental right because it also protects immigrants.
But I won’t. Instead, I want to get at the heart of the issue, the real question posed by this executive order, and the poisonous ideology that spawned it: What does it mean to be American?
Try for a second to find a good answer to that question. Speaking English fluently? Thirty million people within our borders don’t meet that requirement, and billions outside do — maybe it’s time for us to annex Australia. Believing in Christianity? Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and Ernest Hemingway did not. Sharing faith in democracy and capitalism? Among current Americans, 24% are ambivalent about the former, 43% the latter. Hard, right?
Don’t worry, you are not the first person to struggle with how to define what it means to be “American.” The question predates the founding of the United States and countless groups have attempted to answer it since. The Pilgrims believed that the United States was their New Jerusalem, belonging only to those who shared their specific interpretation of Christianity. The native inhabitants of the area disagreed and were systematically starved, sickened, and massacred for it. The British Empire believed it meant loyalty to the Crown, and waged what is often considered the first global conflict to ensure that loyalty was theirs instead of belonging to the French or Spanish. The framers of the Constitution believed it meant only free, white men, eventually leading to the deadliest war in American history.
Every bar this country has attempted to set, every fence it has tried to erect around “true Americans,” has eventually been torn down. The Pilgrims excluded Anglicans. The Anglican British excluded other Protestants (our own Ben Franklin believed Germans were too stupid and dark-skinned to be American). The Protestant United States excluded Catholics. The Protestants and Catholics excluded Asian, Jewish, African, and Latin Americans. Each and every time, decades of pogroms, riots, and wars were needed for us to realize our mistake and redraw the line.
So, how about we stop drawing one? Birthright citizenship is not some far-left stretch goal — it is the bare minimum for a nation in which membership has always been impossible to define by identity or status.
I will note that birthright citizenship is unlikely to be struck down — the right could not be more clearly stated by the 14th Amendment, and 22 states have already challenged Trump’s executive order, stopping its implementation for now. Senior U.S. District Court Judge John Coughenour, who was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan, called the order “blatantly unconstitutional” when he blocked it last month. Nevertheless, “unlikely” is not the same as “impossible,” especially under a Supreme Court fully convinced that Trump speaks with the voice of God. While still constrained by popular opinion, the Roberts court has struck down long-established precedents with glee in recent years, eliminating Chevron deference, affirmative action in higher education, and, of course, the right to abortion. It’s far from guaranteed that birthright citizenship won’t be next.
If it is, let me pour one out here for the exceptional United States. A United States without color or creed. A United States as the shining city upon a hill. A United States as a dream so powerful that our worst enemies believed in it. A nation in which we are born free. We’ve never quite lived up to this ideal, but before Jan. 20, we at least tried.
Without birthright citizenship, we are just another nation, another arbitrary circle in the sand with 11 aircraft carriers.
JASON ZHAO is a Wharton junior studying finance and computer science. His email is jaszhao@wharton.upenn.edu.
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