A Plan to Renew the Promise of American Life, Plank 2
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Plank 2. Restore consent-based citizenship
Specific Recommendations
2.1. Amend the Immigration Act to restore and affirm the Constitution’s default policy of consent-based citizenship, and thus bring the practice of granting soil-based or birthright citizenship into conformity with the original public meaning of the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Specifically, (1) grant United States citizenship automatically to each of the following descriptions of person, but only to them: (i) the natural child of a U.S. citizen, whether born on U.S. soil or abroad (unless the citizen-parent has never resided in the United States), and (ii) the natural child, born on U.S. soil, of a non-citizen who is a lawful permanent resident in the United States (green card holder) or who is serving honorably in the U.S. armed forces; and (2) cease granting automatic U.S. citizenship to the child, born on U.S. soil, of a tourist or sojourner (visa holder) or unauthorized entrant. Effectuate this policy prospectively, by legislation, without depriving any existing citizen of his or her citizenship. To the extent legally permissible, do it by executive action. If the Supreme Court gets the issue wrong, fix it by legislation, invoking section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, or as a last resort by constitutional amendment.
2.2. To promote undivided loyalty and wholehearted commitment to the well-being of our republic, amend the Nationality Act to disallow and discourage dual citizenship. Automatically withdraw U.S. citizenship from any adult verified as holding dual foreign and American citizenship, if that person, after formal notice and a reasonable grace period, has not relinquished the foreign citizenship. But do not penalize anyone who, for whatever reason, voluntarily renounces his U.S. citizenship. Do not impose citizenship relinquishment fees of any kind.
2.3. Reform U.S. immigration laws to secure the borders, protect national security and the public health, and improve the quality of authorized immigration. Specifically, (1) maximize legal immigration by persons who are likely to assimilate and who can offer useful talents, skills, or backgrounds, (2) halt or greatly reduce immigration by any class of persons who are unlikely to assimilate or whose presence in large numbers would disturb the nation’s social, political, or economic tranquillity, including by reducing immigration from specific countries or regions, and (3) stop impressing employers into the service of our immigration agencies. Instead, (4) build and maintain effective physical barriers to prevent unauthorized border crossings, (5) intercept, detain, and promptly deport unauthorized border crossers and visa overstayers, (6) require temporary visitors to check in with immigration agencies on a regular basis, and (7) indefinitely exclude or detain persons claiming political asylum or refugee status until their claims are finally resolved. In doing these things, take care to safeguard the mental and physical well-being of detainees, especially children.
Comments
The purpose of this plank is to restore and reinvigorate American citizenship in light of our founding principles. It tries to do this in three ways. First, by clarifying the meaning of citizenship. Who is and who is not a citizen is a basic question in any republic. Indeed, ‘the question of citizenship in a nation is of the most vital importance … a precious heritage … an inestimable acquisition.’ /1
Second, by reviving the traditional but seemingly lapsed policy of discouraging dual citizenship, in order to reinvigorate the value of American citizenship and strengthen citizens’ commitment to our country.
And third, by adopting sensible immigration reforms that reflect our founding principles and protect our common interests.
At the intersection of these goals is the contentious issue of birthright citizenship, the automatic granting of citizenship to everyone born on U.S. soil other than the children of foreign diplomats.
The bulk of this discussion will make the case for why we should amend that policy, and why we do not need a constitutional amendment to do so.
We are a nation of immigrants, and we should welcome immigrants, but we should also secure our borders and define who is a citizen in keeping with our national principles and our national interest. This is common sense. No sane nation would do otherwise.
Update January 20, 2025: Today President Trump issued Executive Order 14160, which implements the first recommendation of this plank, more or less, and appears to be based on similar reasoning. The Supreme Court should uphold the order and restore consent-based citizenship. Whether it upholds it or not, Congress should enact the consititutionally correct policy.
Update June 30, 2026: Today a divided Supreme Court struck down the president’s order. The Court got it wrong. Congress, do your job.
Update December 1, 2025: Today U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno, Republican of Ohio, introduced a bill called the Exclusive Citizenship Act, S-3283 (2025), which would implement the dual-citizenship policy recommended in this plank.
The Basic Argument
All men are created equal. That is the starting point of the American experiment. And from it many things logically flow, including the nature of American citizenship.
Citizenship is defined in our Constitution, in the Fourteenth Amendment. The words used to define it establish a limited form of birthright citizenship. If you’re born on American soil, you are an American citizen, provided you are also ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States. But over the past half-century, a legal consensus has formed around an interpretation of that phrase, ‘subject to the the jurisdiction,’ that is extreme and harmful.
On one side of the debate is what I’ll call the common law interpretation. It holds that the language of the Citizenship Clause carries over almost entirely from English common law and thus should be interpreted according to that tradition, with the result that anyone born on our soil is automatically a U.S. citizen, with the narrow exception of the children of foreign sovereigns, diplomats, and occupiers.
On the other side is what I’ll call the natural law interpretation. It holds that common law is not the source of our law in this area, although we do continue to use terms and concepts borrowed from that tradition. Rather, the words ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ mean ‘owing complete political allegiance.’ Therefore, the Clause excludes, not just foreign sovereigns, diplomats, and occupiers, but also foreign tourists, sojourners, and unlawful entrants.
The natural law interpretation beats the common law interpretation on both the legal and practical levels.
Unlike the common law interpretation, it makes sense for a republic, and has the benefit of also producing sound, sensible public policy results. The common law interpretation produces results that are frankly nutso.
In a republic founded on the principle that all men are created equal, citizenship must be based on consent, meaning the mutual and reciprocal consent of the individual and of the government. This is fundamental.
The common law version of birthright citizenship rejects consent as the basis of citizenship, because the common law in this area is ultimately based on feudalism.
Birthright citizenship is based on the feudalist principle that anyone born in the king’s realm is the king’s subject, regardless of the citizenship of his or her parents, with exceptions only for a very small subset of foreigners, namely, sovereigns, diplomats, and occupiers. Subjectship arises from the principle of perpetual allegiance, the idea that you owe the king a debt of gratitude for his protection, in the form of your perpetual subjection, which may only be absolved at his pleasure.
Such a policy may or may not be a good idea, but it is not rooted in consent.
Feudal law is rooted in obligation, the obligation of a vassal to his lord. It arises from a form of land ownership. The vassal holds his land in feud or fief from his lord in exchange for service or labor. In England, historically, the polite fiction was that the king owned all the land in the kingdom. Everyone was, as it were, his tenant. Birth on his land made you his vassal. You owed him your allegiance, since you are under his protection. And on the other side of the coin, if you renounce your citizenship without the king’s permission, you commit treason.
With the American Revolution, the nature of citizenship changed because it had to. Our constitutional principles had changed. We threw off monarchy and became a republic. In a republic, citizens are free and equal. Notions of subjectship and perpetual allegiance are out of place.
Natural law assumes freedom. We are free to change our citizenship, regardless of what the government thinks, so long as we are competent adults. This is why, from the very beginning, American law has had no penalty for renouncing one’s citizenship. It’s not a crime, it is a right. An inalienable right.
Now, to be fully accurate, the actual practice of most nations involves a mixture of the two ideas of soil-based and consent-based citizenship. Pure birthright citizenship of the English feudal variety is no longer followed anywhere, to my knowledge, not even in England. And as I’ve said, our Constitution does recognize a limited form of birthright citizenship.
But here’s the thing. Most nations lean toward the natural law. Only a minority of nations rely on something like the common law. And strangely, over the past half century, we in the United States, of all people, have basically elevated and enshrined the feudal interpretation, for no obvious or compelling reason. And it has wreaked havoc.
Even in colonial times, there were exceptions to the common law approach. British colonists in North America adapted the common law to local circumstances. For example, the children of slaves were not automatically granted citizenship. Nor were the children of free blacks. Nor were the children of Native Americans. Indeed, American Indians were never regarded as citizens, as a general rule, even when they were born within the limits of the colony. They were treated as foreigners, while blacks were generally treated as something like permanent resident aliens at best.
After the Revolution, citizenship policy remained under the control of the former colonies, now states. Their practices did not change much on the surface. National citizenship in the British empire became national citizenship in the American republic. And while Congress was granted a new power to provide a uniform rule of naturalization binding on all the states, citizenship in the new nation still followed state citizenship, not the other way around. You had to be a citizen of a state before you could be a citizen of the United States. It was not Congress but the states who decided who is and is not a citizen.
Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, the Constitution did not define U.S. citizenship. It did, however, employ some basic terms found in the common law, such as ‘naturalized’ and ‘natural born.’ A naturalized citizen is a foreigner or non-citizen who has acquired citizenship through a legal process. A ‘natural born’ citizen is one whose citizenship comes to him by birth, rather than through naturalization. From the beginning, it was not the soil on which you were born that mattered. What mattered was the citizenship of your parents.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 provided that
‘the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond Sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born Citizens, provided that the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States.’
Under this rule, a child born abroad to a citizen-parent is equally as ‘natural born’ as a child born to a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil. The child is not ‘automatically naturalized.’ He is ‘natural born’ from the start. He acquires his citizenship from his parent, not the soil.
In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment changed American citizenship policy, but not its underlying principles. The first sentence of the Amendment, the Citizenship Clause, 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.’
What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means the job of deciding who is and is not a citizen now belongs to the national government, not the states. And more importantly, it defines citizenship in the actual text of the Constitution. The Amendment sticks with the familiar term, ‘born or naturalized in the United States.’ Thus, it clearly recognizes a form of birthright citizenship. But it is not the feudal or common law form. It is an American, republican form, a form that connects citizenship to allegiance (‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’), but does not make the obligation of allegiance perpetual. Renouncing one’s citizenship is not a crime. It is a right. In short, citizenship is granted automatically to everyone born on U.S. soil to American parents. Both soil and parentage are part of the formula.
Ah, but who are American parents? They are parents who owe their political allegiance to the United States. They are ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ Including naturalized citizens.
The Amendment makes citizens of freed slaves and free blacks. And indeed, that was the primary reason the Amendment was proposed. The drafters wanted to overturn Dred Scott (1857) in the wake of Emancipation and to secure the rights of black Americans against the hostile policies of the former slave states.
The Clause’s drafters made clear during the 1866 congressional debates that the Clause extends citizenship to lawful permanent residents, aliens who, although foreign nationals, have their permanent legal residence within the limits of the United States.
Importantly, the Clause ends with the words, ‘and of the State wherein they reside.’ Tourists and unlawful entrants do not ‘reside.’
Curiously, ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ does not include Native Americans. Or to be more precise, it does not include Native Americans who have not been offered and accepted U.S. citizenship. Nowadays, there are no Native Americans who fit that description; they are all U.S. citizens. But in the 1860s, there were many who were not. And they fit the description of permanent resident aliens. They were born on U.S. soil and generally subject to local law like everyone else. Yet the Amendment has always been understood to not make citizens of Native Americans. Why? Because they owe their political allegiance to their tribe. Legally speaking, an American Indian tribe is a foreign power. Therefore, unlike American blacks, American Indians are excluded from American birthright citizenship. The framers of the Clause were clear on this point.
Now we come to the hard cases: temporary foreign visitors and illegal aliens. Are they included? The text does not specifically mention them. The congressional debate transcripts are frustratingly quiet about them, verging on silence. But the answer is they are excluded, just like American Indians, and for the same reason. They are not politically ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States.
While frustrating, the debates’ silence is understandable, since the concept of ‘illegal alien’ barely existed in 1866. Our borders were essentially open. The states generally encouraged free and open immigration.
It is only in 1875, after the Amendment’s ratification, that general restrictions begin to come in, on the national level, and the concept of an ‘illegal alien’ comes into view. In that year, Congress barred aliens from entering the United States who were convicts or prostitutes.
It’s true temporary visitors are subject to the ‘jurisdiction’ of the United States in the limited sense that they must obey our laws while here. Englishmen must drive on the right. But that does not make them subject to our political jurisdiction.
England is, for an Englishman, what an Indian tribe is for an Indian: his political home, the place of his full or primary allegiance.
So why do the common law advocates claim that ‘subject to our jurisdiction’ means, and has always meant, merely ‘subject to our laws’ in the ordinary sense? They hang their whole case for it on two legal pegs: a nonbinding dictum penned by Justice Gray in the 1898 Supreme Court ruling in Wong Kim Ark, and a sentence uttered by Senator Jacob Howard in the 1866 congressional debate transcript.
Both those pegs are weak. Neither can hold the weight of the historical evidence. Read carefully, both the ruling and the transcript leave the default policy of consent-based citizenship undisturbed.
Admittedly, the majority opinion in Wong does embrace the common law view. It claims the phrase, ‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ means merely ‘and subject to the laws thereof,’ in the sense of ordinary local law.
But both the holding and the opinion only speak to the question of whether the child of a permanent resident alien parent is entitled to birthright citizenship. Permanent resident aliens are of course subject to our laws because they ‘reside’ here. But Wong says nothing about those who do not ‘reside’ here: foreign tourists, sojourners, unlawful entrants. Those latter groups are untreated in the opinion and not encompassed within the holding.
Even the common law advocates admit this much. They just prefer to assume that those foreigners, too, are entitled to birthright citizenship, because, in their view, the English common law as described in Calvin’s Case (1608) has been constitutionalized via the Fourteenth Amendment.
Let’s go back to the constitutional text. If ‘jurisdiction’ and ‘laws’ are interchangeable, then ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ is either redundant of ‘born or naturalized in the United States’ or alternatively it is so sweeping that it must go well beyond the small, traditional set of exceptions (foreign sovereigns, diplomats, and occupiers). And if it is meant to be sweeping, then it must include Native Americans. Yet the drafters were very explicit in asserting that it does not include Native Americans. If it is redundant, why is there? Why would the Constitution say the same thing twice, in the same place? The answer is it wouldn’t. And if it’s meant to be sweeping, why would it not include American Indians? And if it excludes American Indians, why would it also not exclude English tourists and surreptitious Mexican border-crossers and so on?
The natural reading of ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ is that it modifies and narrows ‘born or naturalized.’ And the most logical interpretation of ‘jurisdiction’ is complete political jurisdiction, full or primary allegiance.
By the way, temporary foreign visitors are not subject to all our laws. We do not ask a foreigner, while visiting his relatives in America, to pay income tax. We don’t require a foreigner here on a business trip to report for jury duty or register for the draft. Why? Because he is here only temporarily. He is politically subject to a foreign power. We cannot make him a U.S. citizen without his consent. And he cannot make U.S. citizens of his children, born on our soil, without our consent.
As I mentioned, the Clause says citizens of the United States are also citizens ‘of the State wherein they reside.’ Surely, this means legal residence or what the lawyers call ‘domicile,’ the place where you exercise your political rights. A tourist or unlawful entrant does not ‘reside’ in a state, in that political sense. If he did, then we would naturally put him on the local tax, voter, jury, and militia rolls. But we don’t.
If ‘jurisdiction’ excludes only foreign sovereigns, diplomats, and occupiers, then why not say so explicitly? And if the answer is ‘Because those exceptions have always been recognized in English common law and thus need no mention,’ then why bother to make an exception at all? Why bother to add the seemingly superfluous phrase, ‘and subject to the jurisdiction’?
The answer is: To exclude American Indians.
Because if Indians are not excluded in some explicit way, they are included, and the drafters did not want to include them. They wanted to exclude them. And they did exclude them, with the phrase ‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ And in doing so, they used language broad enough to exclude all foreigners other than permanent resident aliens.
In short, they chose language that includes permanent resident aliens but excludes Indians and other foreigners (including foreign sovereigns, diplomats, and occupiers).
What distinguishes permanent resident aliens from other foreigners? Residence and allegiance.
The common law advocates cannot have it both ways. Either ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ is redundant or it is not. If it is redundant, the children of Indians are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. And if it is not redundant, the children of temporary sojourners and unlawful entrants are not citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment.
There is no way around this.
Okay, now let’s look at that second peg.
A key fact weighing in favor of the natural law view is the Civil Rights Act of 1866. It was penned by the same men who penned the Fourteenth Amendment and at almost the same time. It came into effect two months before the debates on the Fourteenth Amendment began. The Amendment was proposed primarily to place the Civil Rights Act in the Constitution, beyond the reach of future congresses. Additionally, concerns had been raised that the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, was not a sufficient basis for enacting a federal civil rights law. The first substantive sentence of the Civil Rights Act declares:
‘All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.’
Aha! ‘And not subject to any foreign power.’ What do you know! There it is, right in front of us.
The Amendment, of course, uses a different phrase to get at the same idea. The drafters were asked about the exact meaning of the phrase, ‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ They answered with phrases like
- ‘subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof,’
- ‘fully and completely subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,’
- ‘subject to our jurisdiction in the sense of owing allegiance solely to the United States,’
- ‘a full and complete jurisdiction,’
- ‘the same jurisdiction in extent and quality as applies to every citizen of the United States now,’
- ‘not owing allegiance to anyone else,’ and
- ‘not subject to any foreign power’ — the very phrase they used in the Civil Rights Act.
Incidentally, they reenacted the Civil Rights Act in 1870, two years after the Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified, as part of the Enforcement Act, including the phrase ‘and not subject to any foreign power,’ unchanged. Which means that they saw no difference, despite the different wording, between the citizenship clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act. The Fourteenth Amendment did not amend and overrule the Civil Rights Act. It reiterated and constitutionalized it, using slightly different language.
And here, finally, is our second weak peg: a sentence uttered by Senator Jacob Howard, the actual draftsman of the Citizenship Clause. It appears in the transcript of the 1866 congressional floor debate thus:
‘Every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.’ (Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1st Session, p. 2890.)
Is Howard speaking here only about foreign diplomats? Or is he listing three separate groups: foreigners, aliens, and foreign diplomats? The more reasonable interpretation is that he is rattling off a list. The burden of proof, I think, is on those who say otherwise.
The peg is weak — indeed, it breaks — because of what Congress did half a century later, in 1924, when it offered citizenship to all American Indians. If ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ means only ‘subject to the laws,’ then Native Americans were all made citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment. Congress would only offer them citizenship if the Fourteenth Amendment had not made them citizens.
This explains why ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ is not mere surplusage. It is there for a reason. It is there for to exclude all persons who owe their political allegiance to a foreign power. And that includes more than just foreign sovereign, diplomats, and occupiers.
In 1866, there was still a category of persons known as an ‘Indians not taxed,’ meaning Indians who were not citizens and who resided on reservations, beyond the limits of federal taxation. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 explicitly excludes them from birthright citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment does the same thing implicitly.
(The main reason the Amendment drops the phrase ‘Indians not taxed’ is that the drafters realized that there might be Indians who were U.S. citizens who, for some reason, were not taxed, for example, because they had no property. The phrase would not suffice for the purpose of defining citizenship.)
Why would the Clause treat foreign sojourners and unlawful entrants differently, and one might say better, than Native Americans? It doesn’t. The burden is on those who say it does.
So, what exactly does the Clause mean with respect to lawful permanent residents? The question comes up several times in the congressional debate, and the drafters answer clearly: They are included. The children of permanent resident aliens enjoy birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.
This seems strange, since resident aliens are foreign nationals. Wouldn’t the more natural reading be that, like American Indians, they are excluded? And yet the drafters say over and over again that they are included. I think the answer is they viewed permanent resident aliens are quasi citizens. And rightly so. While Indians owe their immediate political allegiance to their tribe, permanent resident aliens have effectively transferred their allegiance to the United States by choosing to reside in it permanently and make themselves subject to things like taxes and militia duty. Permanent resident aliens are basically citizens in everything but the right to vote.
And here’s the kicker, the argument that I think finally knocks both those pegs, and the whole common law interpretation, right to the ground. Since 1776, Americans have been free to renounce their citizenship without incurring the charge of treason. If English feudal principles remained in force, then that liberal practice would be an exception to the common law, and not a minor one. It is the sort of exception that shows the rule is not a rule. It shows that the protection-allegiance relationship is not, in fact, the basis of our citizenship law.
To sum up, the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment confers birthright citizenship based, not just on soil, but rather on a combination of soil and political allegiance. And those who say otherwise bear the burden of proof.
To be sure, the natural law argument does not forbid a broader form of birthright citizenship, as a policy matter. Congress could adopt a broader policy, if it wished. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment creates a floor, not a ceiling. Indeed, Congress has power to expand the circle of citizenship, either through its power of naturalization or its treaty power. It has done so on more than one occasion. But it has never lifted a finger to offer birthright citizenship to temporary foreign visitors. It has merely allowed that policy to grow up weed-like in the shade of Wong, uncontested.
It’s time to prune. Any questions that arise in our citizenship law should be considered in the light of the natural law principles of the Declaration of Independence. Any close question should be resolved in favor of those principles.
Our presumption should be freedom.
How Should We Reform Immigration?
What should our day-to-day immigration policies look like? First, let’s remind ourselves why those laws have become controversial. For the past half-century and more, there has been a growing wave of illegal immigration and birth tourism, a wave that has increasingly disrupted our domestic tranquillity, both economic and political. And it has not been addressed. Our laws have not been enforced. It is having negative effects on our communities and welfare systems. It is disrupting job markets. It is distorting our politics. It is affecting the census and thus the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives and votes in the Electoral College. To confront it, I think we should not only enforce but reform our immigration laws to promote assimilation and keep out criminals, enemies, and the like. We should not close our gates. We should have a wide door, and a high wall. Welcome the stranger, but don’t go overboard. In addition to the three specific recommendations of this plank, I would deport illegal aliens currently residing among us. Yes, all of them. Does that mean we must round everyone up in mass raids? No. It means we must deport those who are caught violating our laws. The rest will leave voluntarily, once they see the deportation policy being enforced, which incidentally is current law. Some will turn around and seek naturalization, which in many cases will be a good and welcome thing. Does it mean we must separate children from their parents? No. Families can remain together voluntarily, in their own country. Now, as for that wide door. I think we should expand legal immigration as soon as the public clearly supports doing so, if only for national security reasons. A growing population can defend itself more easily than a shrinking one. But it should be a population wholeheartedly committed to the country and its well-being. This is why we should discourage dual citizenship. Now, since at present, a slight majority of Americans would prefer to reduce legal immigration, political prudence would suggest that we leave it at its current level for the time being, and only change it to follow a clear shift in public opinion. But at all events, we should change the nature of immigration: we should favor immigrants who are likely to assimilate. We should give first preference to people from within our own civilization, in the sense of Samuel Huntington’s famous book on that topic — I mean people from Europe and the nations most influenced by Europe. As a practical matter, it means more immigrants from historically Christian nations (and not just those in Europe) and Israel, and fewer from Muslim and other states that are not culturally western, regardless of their race or specific religion. This approach should not be viewed as a rejection of other cultures, but rather as an affirmation of our own. Democracy and equal rights and the rule of law are precious and fragile. We weaken them at our peril. Race is immaterial in this context. And to a large extent, so is an individual’s personal religious affiliation or commitments. What matters is cultural and political compatibility and likelihood of assimilating. Just to be absolutely clear: We should not exclude people based on their race or their religion. But we should prefer people who are likely to become culturally American. To be more specific, I mean only that we should exclude people whose political principles are incompatible with our own. I am thinking of people who openly reject democracy and support some form of despotism — neo-nazis, communists, radical Islamists, sharia law enthusiasts, and others of that ilk. And I’d include absolute monarchists on the list, too. If it were within my power, I would never let any such anti-democrats come into the country permanently. I would not let them come into the country at all, except briefly as tourists or diplomats. And to minimize the risk of their entering, I’d err on the side of minimizing immigration from the places most likely to produce such people. Finally, until we get illegal immigration under control, we should reconsider our liberal policy of allowing chain migration, that is, prioritizing family members of green card holders in the legal immigration queue. Oh, and one more thing. I’d end federal welfare programs because, in their current form, they are a magnet. Instead, we should adopt policies that strengthen the nation’s economic health (as with this plan), so there are plenty of good jobs for all, including immigrants. No one would suffer needless privation. The states would provide public assistance to those who need it, as they always have. But Congress would and should get out of that business, which it had no right to get into and in which it adds no unique or indispensable value. If we did all these things, the benefits would be clear and substantial: Illegal immigration would shrink to a trickle, the economy would be healthier, and we’d have a greater measure of domestic tranquillity — a stronger sense of national brotherhood ‘from sea to shining sea.’ Importantly, it would be a brotherhood based, not on religion or race, but rather on our ancient civic faith — our common creed — that all men are created equal.
Note
1/ U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 1898, Justice Fuller dissenting.
Constitutional Amendments
This plank does not require any constitutional amendments, unless the Supreme Court proves recalcitrant, in which case we may need a constitutional amendment clarifying our citizenship policy based on the principle of mutual consent.
Benefits
Permanently resolves the U.S. immigration crisis.
Promotes political peace and domestic tranquillity.
Revised 23 September 2017
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