It's The Constitution, Stupid

Heather Cox Richardson writes a "Letter from an American" every day.  She is a historian, and the letter tells the story of that day from a historian's perspective.  

Yesterday's letter was a scholarly smackdown of our President's* Executive Order abolishing birthright citizenship, which makes all children born on US soil automatically, and forever, US citizens.  The very short version?  It's in the Constitution, dummy.  Fourteenth Amendment.  And then further bolstered by a Supreme Court decision in 1898:  U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark.  A man with Chinese parents was born in the US, returned to China to visit, and was denied re-entry to the US, because at the time everybody hated the Chinese.**  SCOTUS said he was a US citizen simply by virtue of being born in the US.

Richardson begins her letter with the deportation, yesterday, of three children, ages 3, 4 and 7 - one of whom has Stage 4 cancer and was deported without her medications - whose mother showed up for a routine immigration proceedings meeting and was sent back to Honduras with her children - all of whom were US citizens by birthright.  She goes into some detail, but I just want to throw something through a window.

To show us how far we've come - or, more accurately, how far we've fallen - there is this, at the end of her letter:

“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

“We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

Guess who said that?  Anybody?

Ronald Reagan.  On his last day in office.

* - Charles Pierce, a great American gadfly who has been writing about US Presidents for a long time, always puts that asterisk after "President" when referring to Trump.  This is a sports records and statistics thing - when a season is interrupted by strike, or COVID, or whatever, the records pertaining to that season all have an asterisk next to them, meaning that they are incomplete, and probably meaningless and useless in understanding the wider context.

** - ...who were arguably responsible for the successful completion of the transcontinental railway twenty years before, but now were excess to requirements.