Imagine navigating the intricate pathways of immigration and citizenship in the United States, only to find yourself in uncharted territory. Join me and esteemed legal scholar, Amanda Frost, as we embark on this journey through the complexities of these policies. We uncover the historical evolution of immigration and citizenship, shedding light on the legal and political perspectives that have shaped this contentious debate. Unearth with us how the outcomes of these policies directly impact immigrants and the broader American society, and grasp the implications these issues pose on our nation's identity and future.
Ever wondered why American citizenship is a gray area? It all stems from the lack of a clear definition in the U.S. Constitution. Amanda and I delve into the significant contributions of the Reconstruction Amendments, particularly the 14th Amendment, to the idea of citizenship, revealing the persisting gray areas that continue to challenge the concept of citizenship in the United States. This conversation spotlights contemporary issues with citizenship, highlighting the historical and current attempts to deny citizenship to different groups.
We also about the power of birthright citizenship. We evaluate its significance in the United States, how it compares to other countries, and its influence on our national identity. Amanda stresses the essential role immigrants play in the U.S. workforce, and the need for more accessible legal pathways for immigrants. She also underscores the need for a more positive narrative surrounding immigration, one that values and appreciates the contributions of immigrants to our society. So, tune in, because the future of immigration and citizenship in America is a story you don't want to miss.
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Imagine navigating the intricate pathways of immigration and citizenship in the United States, only to find yourself in uncharted territory. Join me and esteemed legal scholar, Amanda Frost, as we embark on this journey through the complexities of these policies. We uncover the historical evolution of immigration and citizenship, shedding light on the legal and political perspectives that have shaped this contentious debate. Unearth with us how the outcomes of these policies directly impact immigrants and the broader American society, and grasp the implications these issues pose on our nation's identity and future.
Ever wondered why American citizenship is a gray area? It all stems from the lack of a clear definition in the U.S. Constitution. Amanda and I delve into the significant contributions of the Reconstruction Amendments, particularly the 14th Amendment, to the idea of citizenship, revealing the persisting gray areas that continue to challenge the concept of citizenship in the United States. This conversation spotlights contemporary issues with citizenship, highlighting the historical and current attempts to deny citizenship to different groups.
We also about the power of birthright citizenship. We evaluate its significance in the United States, how it compares to other countries, and its influence on our national identity. Amanda stresses the essential role immigrants play in the U.S. workforce, and the need for more accessible legal pathways for immigrants. She also underscores the need for a more positive narrative surrounding immigration, one that values and appreciates the contributions of immigrants to our society. So, tune in, because the future of immigration and citizenship in America is a story you don't want to miss.
-------------------------
Follow Deep Dive:
Instagram
Post.news
YouTube
Email: deepdivewithshawn@gmail.com
**Artwork: Dovi Design
**Music: Joystock
where I see birthright citizenship as being so important and actually kind of unique in the fact that United States has pure birthright citizenship, something that's been abandoned by most of Europe, and it is the case in other countries, in other southern hemisphere countries, that there's birthright citizenship but, it's not the norm.
Amanda:And I think of it as such an important and powerful legal concept in the United States, because what it says is we are all equal at birth. We clean slate it does not matter who your parents are. We don't have titles of mobility, we don't have an aristocracy, we don't have a system that says, if your parents have a certain religion or a certain race or certain ethnicity or certain wealth, that you are better or different or more important than anyone else. No, at birth we are all the same. We are all Americans.
Shawn:Welcome to Deep Dive with me, Shawn C. Fettig with In recent years, the dialogue on immigration and citizenship in the United States has become deeply polarized, reflecting broader divisions within society. The conversations we have about immigration and citizenship oscillate between calls for comprehensive immigration reform, concerns about national security and the pursuit of equity and compassion for those seeking a better life within America's borders. The contours of this debate are shaped by legal, political, economic and social perspectives, making it imperative to understand the nuances that underpin this discourse. At its core, the immigration debate grapples with essential questions about who we are as a nation and what it means to be an American. It raises questions about identity, opportunity, belonging and the preservation of our values and traditions. As the stakes remain high, understanding the complexities of immigration and citizenship is vital to fostering informed and empathetic discussions that can bridge the gap between differing viewpoints.
Shawn:Today, I'm joined by esteemed legal scholar and professor of law at the University of Virginia, Amanda Frost. Amanda is a leading expert in constitutional and immigration law, whose insights have shed light on some of the most pressing legal issues of our time. She's written extensively on the constitutional dimensions of immigration law, providing a nuanced perspective on how the law intersects with the lived experiences of immigrants. She's also the author of a book that guides most of our discussion today you Are Not American Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers. Together we navigate through the historical evolution of immigration and citizenship policies, explore the current state of discourse on these issues and analyze the impact of related policies on the lives of immigrants, the broader American society and their broad implications on our nation's identity and future.
Shawn:If you like this episode, or any episode, give it a like on your favorite podcast platform and or subscribe to the podcast on YouTube and, as always, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments, please feel free to email me at deepdivewithshawn@gmail. com. Let's do a deep dive. Amanda Frost, thanks for being here. How are you?
Amanda:Thank you for having me.
Shawn:I'm excited to talk to you today for a handful of reasons, but two that are top of mind are first, my spouse is an immigrant and finished that process and became a citizen last year, and through that process it became I don't know what's the word frighteningly clear that citizenship in the United States is not particularly self-evident, even for those of us that might have grown up as citizens, and that if an official of the United States believes that, for instance, I'm not a citizen at some critical juncture, like a port of call, they could really make my life hell. And second, immigration and citizenship are increasingly hot topics in our politics. This week alone, another federal judge struck down DACA, which is the pathway for dreamers, again throwing that process in the future for these folks into question. And some politicians and candidates for federal office have made it clear that they want to do away with birthright citizenship, you know, which begs the question of if they can do that. So I'm confident that here today, you and I can solve all of these issues once and for all.
Shawn:So let's get to it. Looking forward to it. In your book you are not American. You tell the stories of individuals that have been denied American citizenship in some form or another, since essentially, the inception of the country. I think you start with Dred Scott, but let me start off with a question that I've taken for granted, maybe you have as well. But are we confident that we know what citizenship is in the United States?
Amanda:No, I guess, is the short answer, and the longer answer is you know, there's the legal status of being a citizen, and I'll talk about that more in a minute. There's also the question of what does that mean to be a citizen? What are the rights that accompany that status? And that is also a gray area in US law. So those two questions I think go hand in hand in both this book and in these questions that you've been asking about the meaning of citizenship.
Amanda:So you know, we'll start with the fact that as a nation we did not define citizenship in the US Constitution. It was initially absent from that Constitution drafted in 1787. And they did use the word. The framers of that Constitution did use the word citizen at time to describe, for example, who was eligible to be president, you had to be a natural born citizen. Or to be a senator or member of the House of Representatives you also had to have citizenship for a certain number of years.
Amanda:But the term was not defined and it was actually one of the many flashpoints in our history as we led up to the Civil War, because there was a question, an open question for some, about whether free black people living in the United States were citizens, and that was a hard fought question that ended with Dred Scott and the Supreme Court's declaration that no black person, slave or free, could ever be a citizen of the United States, which was at the time as well. You know, throughout history has been viewed as well. They got it wrong. There was a lot of indication that maybe the framers did think free black people were meant to be citizens. For example, some voted to ratify the Constitution, so it would be somewhat shocking to think that document denied them citizenship. But there was a lot of obviously controversy over that question and this, and it was part of the controversy over slavery, which of course brought us to a civil war. And then the reconstruction amendments that followed, where we fought, and then the reconstruction amendments that followed, where we finally defined citizenship.
Shawn:I'm having a hard time even putting this into words, because this comes through in your research, in your book. But it just seems so odd to me that it's not more clear in the Constitution what it means to be a citizen, primarily because so many things that matter to how we operate within the country and then, I suppose, by extension, how the country itself operates really hinges on citizenship.
Amanda:Yeah, so I agree with that.
Amanda:But I will say that reconstruction where sort of my last answer left off, I think did provide some significant answers to your questions. Not all of them, but it brought us significantly closer to having a sense that of who is a citizen, of course, which is now fairly clear, we'll talk but also what accompanies citizenship, what it means to be a citizen. So the first sentence of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which is one of those Reconstruction Amendments it was added in 1868. And it finally defined citizenship for our nation and it says, quote all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction there, of our citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. So that established what we call birthright citizenship. If you're born on US soil, regardless of your parents, race or religion or ethnicity or immigration status, you are a citizen, also, as you're, to the story, of your spouse, now a citizen because naturalized, and that's protected by the 14th Amendment. But then, in addition, your question is sort of like well, what does it mean to be a citizen?
Shawn:Is it just a label?
Amanda:with no content. Well, the 14th Amendment goes on to talk about really important concepts that shape our understanding of the United States today, things like equal protection, or all to be treated equally under law and due process of law, where we're not to lose our rights and property without procedural protections. So that 14th Amendment as a whole, I think, gave content to the idea of citizenship, which is most important in egalitarian concept. We are all equal and there's a certain core set of rights that can't be denied us. That doesn't answer all the questions. Voting remain contested, women were always citizens and yet couldn't vote until 1920 under the US Constitution. So there is certainly debate about the contours of citizenship, but the 14th Amendment started answering those questions in a very significant way.
Shawn:So in you are not American not all the stories but most of them kind of identifying these gray areas after reconstruction, right. So after the 14th Amendment, or considering the 14th Amendment as having solved a lot of these questions, there were still some of these gray areas and you talk about them in the book. You just mentioned some. What are some gray areas now that potentially could be tested?
Amanda:Yes, and, by the way, just to talk about the book for one second, in terms of the interest of listeners, the book is primarily the legal history we're talking about here today. It's primarily told through stories of individuals because I feel like that's a powerful mechanism to convey information and also I felt that their stories were fascinating and the people involved were extraordinary. So the book is primarily told through stories rather than through some recitation of the law. But you asked about what are the gray areas today. So first of all, I should say back in the past there was, despite the clear language of the 14th Amendment saying all persons born in the United States were citizens, there was still an effort by the US government, even 30 years after that provision was added to the Constitution, to deny citizenship to the children of Chinese immigrants. There was extraordinary anti-Chinese animus at the end of the 19th century in the United States and the US government argued before the Supreme Court that the children of non-citizens were not themselves birthright citizens, even if they were born in the US. And they made that argument broadly because they had to, based on the language of the 14th Amendment. But it was clear the target was the children of Chinese immigrants and the argument was extraordinary it would have stripped citizenship from hundreds of thousands of people who were voting and holding office and thinking of themselves as full citizens because they'd been born in the United States. So the US government lost that case. It was a close case but they lost it in 1898. It was pretty clear. It's holding. It said all persons born in the United States are citizens. That's universal.
Amanda:There are a couple of minor exceptions, and the exceptions come from this language, of the provision I read to you which talks about you're a citizen if you're subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, and that's a caveat that was put in there to exclude two groups from birthright citizenship. One are the children of diplomats, and that makes perfect sense. If the French ambassador has a child on US soil while serving as ambassador, no one wants that child to be automatically a US citizen without the choice of that family. And then the second exception and it's clear from the legislative history of this provision was for Native Americans. So children were born within tribes. They're born outside of the tribe, even if their parents are Native American, their citizens. But if they're born within the tribe, within that separate sovereign and tribes have sovereignty in the United States. They're a separate nation and they're not automatically birthright citizens. I should say that today, all persons weren't to within Indian tribes are US citizens at birth, by statute, but the 14th Amendment's Birthright Citizenship Clause does not automatically grant them citizenship.
Shawn:So those are the two exceptions.
Amanda:You asked about the gray areas. Today Some people say that that language, that exception for people who are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, means that the children of undocumented immigrants and some people who go even more than that and say any immigrant who's not a citizen are not birthright citizens. That argument is at odds with, I'd say, the text of the 14th Amendment, with the legislative history of the 14th Amendment and the original understanding, as well as with the Supreme Court's decision in 1898 that I was mentioning earlier. And that's because the children of undocumented immigrants and undocumented immigrants themselves are very much subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. They have to follow all the laws. If you're an undocumented immigrant or the child of one, and you're speeding or you commit a crime or you shoot somebody, you are fully subject to US law and you have to obey the law and you can do the last if you don't.
Amanda:Diplomats and Native American, those living within the tribal system, are subject to different laws. They're diplomatic immunity, there's tribal sovereignty and tribal courts. So that's a real distinction there. That means that argument that people who are the children of undocumented immigrants aren't subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, To me it's obviously wrong, but nonetheless people keep making it Donald Trump, the Santas, others so obviously we have to keep addressing it. But in my view there's interesting and close constitutional questions. This is not one of them.
Shawn:You mentioned that Native American folks born in the United States are US citizens by statute. So there's this constitutional language in the 14th Amendment that ostensibly clarifies citizenship and who's subject to it, and then there are statutes that play around on the fringes at helping to kind of clarify further. But statutes can be repealed. Congress themselves could do that. I suppose the president could sign an executive order. Is it true then that Native American folks could be stripped of citizenship just by statute?
Amanda:Yeah, First I'll just say an executive order cannot overrule a statute. There are times when Congress has given the executive authority to issue an order that would modify a statutory requirement. But when Congress hasn't done that, the executive can't, through a unilateral executive order, say a statute isn't valid or doesn't apply. The executive alone could not take away birthright citizenship for Native Americans. But Congress certainly could, and by amending the law, repealing the law. That might seem very troubling. I don't see anyone arguing for that. I don't think it's a huge danger.
Amanda:But I will say that the 14th Amendment itself, the framers of that amendment were well aware that a future Congress might want to change what they were doing. They were a group that was trying to establish end cast in America, establish racial equality, and they were well aware they might not prevail, might not last, and of course they didn't. We saw a regression very shortly after that first reconstruction era, starting in the late 1870s. They put it in the Constitution to protect it. Birthright citizenship They'd already put it in a statute, but they knew that wasn't good enough, so they put it in the Constitution. Yes, you're right, Native Americans could potentially lose their citizenship if Congress were to amend or repeal that law. For that reason it might be troubling I will say as I said, but I don't see anyone arguing for that Second to some degree.
Amanda:the initial Congress's decision not to include Native Americans in birthright citizenship was a respectful decision, not a racist decision.
Amanda:There's some mixed evidence and of course Native Americans have suffered enormously to cure out US history. But the concern was we don't want to make a separate sovereign living within our nation but separately sovereign and controlling their own borders and their own laws automatic citizens if they don't want to be. Basically so there was a sense of respect and care and consideration given to Native Americans behind that decision to accept them from automatic birthright citizenship. We may be today in a different era, such that if we could easily amend our Constitution and we cannot, but if we could easily do it, maybe we would add it back in Native Americans. Just to clarify that for the future.
Amanda:But, as I said, I'm happy to say that it does not seem like anyone is trying to prevent Native Americans from full citizenship. Everyone else is protected by the 14th Amendment.
Shawn:So implicit in some of the work that you've done is that some people are in and others are out. When it comes to citizenship, or refining what citizenship is there, we do take for granted that some people are innately citizens, and that remains unquestioned, while others are questioned or assumed to be non-citizens or that it could be stripped from them. For some, the burden of proof seems to be on the state and for others, the burden of proof seems to be on the individual. So can you help me understand how this is played out in American history? Who's typically in and why, and then who's typically out and why?
Amanda:Yes, so that was one of the reasons that inspired me to write the book, which is I kept. Well, I initially had thought oh, once you're a citizen, you're safe. I work with immigrants.
Amanda:I'm an immigration lawyer as well as an immigration professor and I think a lot about immigration a lot and I know that when you have any non-citizen status you're not safe in the sense that you may be deported, even if you're a green card holder for certain kinds of conduct, even speech at times. So I was well aware of that. I had thought oh well, once you're a citizen, whether you're naturalized or you're born a citizen, either way you are fully protected and you could never be deported and you could never lose that status. I thought, and I was wrong and that's what inspired me to write the book, because I delved into this history and learned these amazing stories. So whose citizenship was attempted to be stripped or stripped from them? And then you ask, and then you know who's citizenship is fragile, let's put it that way who maybe is assumed to be a non-citizen and then has to prove it to the government? So I'll start with a little bit of a history and then I'll end with today. So, in terms of historically, we see time after time Congress or the executive and sometimes the general public attempting to deny citizenship, the fact that women, by federal statute, between 1907 and into the early 1930s women native, born or naturalized, it doesn't matter who married a non-citizen automatically lost their citizenship, meaning they could be deported. They could be barred from reentering the United States.
Amanda:After women won the right to vote in 1920, these women who'd lost their citizenship lost that right to vote. And in fact the woman I profile in the book, ethel McKenzie, had been a leader in the fight for citizenship for women in California. She helped to win that right for California's women who California allowed women to vote about 10 years before the Constitution guaranteed that right for all women. But when Ethel McKenzie went to vote she was denied the right to vote because she was told you're not a citizen because she'd married a Scottish, a man from Scotland who hadn't naturalized. That's just one example of the women who lost citizenship based on this provision in our law. It went up to the Supreme Court. Mckenzie Challenges 9-0. The court ruled against her and they kind of scolded her.
Shawn:They said well, you made the choice to marry a non-citizen.
Amanda:that's your problem. And you've chosen to lose your citizenship, which that's a real concern, because you are allowed under federal law to expatriate yourself, to renounce your citizenship. You're free to do that as an American. You have to jump to the june hoops and prove it, but you can do that. But the court and Congress would seem to be saying we're going to decide that you have effectively renounced your citizenship based on conduct which you didn't mean to lose it, but we decide that's good enough to lose citizenship, and marrying a non-citizen was one example, just for women, I should add.
Amanda:Us citizen men married non-citizens kept their citizenship, so obviously that's one group right. Women were not considered separate citizens from their husbands. Their citizenship was considered to be derivative of the husbands and in fact I bet you had people had one passport in the name of the man that women would travel under and it was part of the general legal concept called Coverture, where women did not have an independent legal existence when they were married. They couldn't take on, they couldn't contract, they couldn't collect wages, they couldn't. Their husband could take their wages, they couldn't hold property separately, etc. So it was part of this Coverture system that was dying out. But this citizenship provision or citizenship stripping provision I've described in federal law was an example of how that worked.
Shawn:So that's, one group Other groups.
Amanda:I follow through the book. It's very much based on race as well as xenophobia. So, for example, japanese Americans, the children of Japanese immigrants born in the US, were nonetheless rounded up and put in.
Shawn:We tend to say internment camps, but I think the right term is prisons.
Amanda:There was watchtowers and guards and barbed wire and they were not free to leave. And then they were coerced into renouncing their citizenship. Towards the end of the war about 6,000 people did that and happily they fought and got it back with the help of some really incredible lawyers who fought to the nail to help them get their citizenship back, and the US government apologized and eventually paid reparations to this group. So that's another example. But moving forward to today and there's several other examples in the book, including people who were naturalized citizens and were viewed as associated with the Communist Party or the Red Scare fighting for labor rights those people were denaturalized and deported based on their speech.
Amanda:But moving to today, today there is less formal citizenship stripping, so there's not a statue that would say you lose your citizenship if you marry a non-citizen or if you engage in certain kinds of speech or you have a certain kind of ideological predisposition. But there is what I would call de facto citizenship stripping, where people who live near the southern border and especially, almost always non-white people living near the southern border their citizenship is questioned in a way that you know I'm a white person walking around the mid-Atlantic or the northeast, knowing questions.
Amanda:I don't carry a citizenship document with me. I don't have my passport or my birth certificate. No one questions my citizenship, but people who live near the southern border. They actually are asked, stopped and asked to prove their citizenship.
Amanda:If they're crossing back into the United States they can have their passports questioned, and I described this in the last chapter of the book and some people have been detained and deported, not in huge numbers, but there's a scholar who's studied this who says about 1% of the population in immigration and customs enforcement attention at any time are citizens. We have to try to prove that before they can be released, which is pretty shocking and amounts to thousands of people a year. So this is an ongoing problem and it relates to it. When a customs and border official looks at a person, do they think of this person as a citizen? What goes into that calculation? And of course, the color of the skin is a huge part of that, and maybe how they dress where they speak Spanish all of these things that should not be markers of citizenship and yet nonetheless are.
Shawn:You've mentioned kind of our contemporary discourse and it's hard not to evaluate the conversations that we're having today. I mentioned that we have some politicians that are discussing ways to curb or maybe do away with birthright citizenship. Other politicians have implemented policies, especially like you mentioned at the southern border, that make life hard for maybe non-traditional US citizens, so maybe Hispanic folks or folks of color, folks that don't speak English. So it's hard not to see this contemporary situation and then layer that against the history. Can we draw any corollaries to the history of citizenship and the work that you've done? That would help us understand the discourse that we're having today, what some of those common themes are and then maybe could help us understand how this might play out.
Amanda:Yes, and I was going to say that I think of citizenship as, and birthright citizenship in particular, as an extraordinarily important aspect of US law that goes far beyond just conveyinga particular legal status on a child. It's very symbolic of who we are as Americans and birthright citizenship I think of as an American invention. Now there was birthright or what they called use solely citizenship in England that we sort of inherited. People argue, but what was in place in England at the birth of the United States 1776, was really subject to shit. That is, if you're born on English territory, you owe loyalty to the king, which is not what we have today in the United States. It's certainly not what we're about as a country and where I see birthright citizenship as being so important and actually kind of unique in the fact that United States has pure birthright citizenship, something that's been abandoned by most of Europe, and it is the case in other countries, in other southern hemisphere countries, that there's birthright citizenship but, it's not the norm.
Amanda:And I think of it as such an important and powerful legal concept in the United States, because what it says is we are all equal at birth. We claim sleep. It does not matter who your parents are.
Amanda:We don't have titles of mobility, we don't have an aristocracy, we don't have a system that says if your parents have a certain religion or a certain race or certain ethnicity or certain wealth, that you are better or different or more important than anyone else. No, at birth we are all the same. We are all Americans. That's a very powerful concept. It links up with the Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment as well. It's very different, as I've said, from what England had, which was, well, you're born all equally subject to the king. I guess there's a quality there, but it's not the American version, and so I think of birthright citizenship as this really symbolically important as well as the legally important concept in US law. It's part of what it makes America the country it is today.
Amanda:What makes Americans we're born here consider themselves part and parcel of this country, and we've actually been better than Europe at integrating immigrants and the children of immigrants into this nation. And I think part of that is because we do have pure birthright citizenship, with no questions asked. Once a child is born in the US, there's nothing else they have to do for automatically citizens. I think that's been very important in terms of our ability to integrate newcomers into the nation, which we've done better than just about any other country. So that's the uplifting aspect of this story. And I'll also say I was curious to see this when I was looking at polls of what Americans know about our constitution and it's always like shockingly little right, like they can't name the three branches of government and things like that, but like something close to 90% of Americans knew that if you're born in the United States, you're American automatically, and in fact I will say until I was in my early 20s I thought that was the role for the whole world and I was like shocked to learn that wasn't the role, because I had so absorbed it as someone grew up here that being born in the country gave you citizenship. So I think that's a really important part of who we are as a nation. And yes, we are struggling still today when we see some presidential candidates and some members of Congress say we should get rid of birthright citizenship and they make the incorrect argument they could do it by statute or executive order. But even just to question it at all is troubling. But I think that's part of our ongoing debate about who we are as a nation.
Amanda:We're a bit schizophrenic. We embrace immigration and think of ourselves as a country of immigrants, even though we also had a time and some very strong xenophobic responses to newcomers. We see it again and again, but the end of the story is a positive one. I mean, I started off by talking about anti-Chinese animus. Certainly there's discrimination against Asian Americans today, but when we think about our debates over immigration, I don't hear people saying well, we really regret all the Chinese immigrants who built the transcontinental railroad, who mined the gold and the coal and the precious metals, who built the West right. They were part of the building up of the frontier and whose children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren now thrive in this country today. People now debate like oh, do we have too many people coming from Guatemala or Honduras or Venezuela or Haiti. But you don't hear them saying and that's a real problem we had all those Chinese immigrants. Same, by the way, for Ireland.
Amanda:People forget that between 1845 and 1852, it's a very short period of time, two million people from Ireland came to the United States one quarter of the population and they came to the United States and thrived eventually in the United States, and so that's another group that I think is a good example of we had debates over this, but when we look back, do we regret these immigrants? No, they built our country.
Shawn:So you touched on something that I found somewhat interesting, as I'd been learning about this myself.
Shawn:So you said in your early 20s was when you first learned that birthright citizenship was relatively unique to the United States.
Shawn:For me, it was just in the last couple of years that I was aware of the fact that birthright citizenship was limited to very few countries and that actually our immigration policy in and of itself is much more small L liberal than a lot of other countries like Europe or Australia and New Zealand, et cetera. But there are two aspects of it that I think are distinct. There's the process by which someone becomes a citizen, in that sense, a message as to what our values are. You outlined the values of birthright citizenship and why that makes us unique and why that's powerful. But then there's also, I think, what has to go hand in hand with that is how we talk about that policy or how we implement that policy or how that informs how we make policy. I feel that's where we fail in the United States. While we have this policy of birthright citizenship, I don't think that we necessarily embrace that. It feels to me as if it's ripe for political gamesmanship, in a way that if we truly embraced this as a value, we wouldn't be doing.
Amanda:I guess that's why I feel like we need to talk about the value underlying birthright citizenship and the reason why it's such a positive aspect of our nation's history and our nation's law today. Eric Foner, this great historian of the Reconstruction Era. He wrote this terrific op-ed and now, a few years ago, in response to these debates about birthright citizenship, where he said this is the good kind of American exceptionalism, meaning this is something that is fairly unique to us, not completely, as I've said, but the kind of difference that makes us powerful and good and something to be proud of as a nation.
Amanda:And so I think we have to get that word out, perhaps better than we have, but I don't feel it's completely lacking in our discourse. I think, as I said, we're a little bit schizophrenic. So I think people would agree.
Amanda:America is a nation of immigrants.
Amanda:We've taken three-fifths of the world's immigrants over the course of this 100-year period. Lesser today, but throughout the end of the 19th to the end of the 20th century we were a huge receiving country. Today other countries have a higher foreign-born population, including Australia and Canada, but nonetheless we continue to take new immigrants and to embrace them and to integrate them better than most countries do, in part because of birthright citizenship and in part because of naturalization, which I know you're now familiar with, already based on your family, and that's another process that we do fairly liberally. You have to live in the United States for five years as a Green Card holder, or three if you're married to a citizen, because the idea is you're more quickly integrated. And then you have to have a certain level of English and a certain knowledge of US civics, more than most Americans have, I think most native-born Americans have. But the process, while not easy, involves some paperwork and some fees. It's also easy enough that people naturalize at the rate of about a million people a year, and then, they vote.
Amanda:By the way, they vote in higher numbers than the native-born population, and that's another very powerful and, I think, positive aspect of our system. We open citizenship up and make it available to our newcomers in a way that some countries don't. You can never be a citizen, even if you look in the country most of your life with a legal status. So again, that's a positive part of the story that I don't want to be lost. Yes, the discourse is not all with positive around any of this, and that's why I think we just need to keep having conversations. We can never let the ball drop and assume that everyone agrees. We have to constantly remind people of the powerful positive benefits, and part of doing so is telling people about this history and saying, look, do we regret these immigrants of the past? No, and look at your own family's history.
Amanda:And I went to a conference where the topic was a book that was put together by a bunch of different contributors all of the different ways in which Europeans had arrived from the United States illegally, because there were laws that said in the past, you couldn't come as a contract laborer, you couldn't come if you had a certain kind of disease or a certain level of poverty and so many people, if you look back, have ancestors who violated immigration laws to get here and to this idea that most of us here were the law abiding people and our ancestors follow the law and everybody else violated the law is itself false and I think the narrative will be. I guess my answer to this problematic narrative is more education and more information.
Shawn:So I guess I want to ask a stark question, simply because it seems to be a big part of our political discourse today, which is birthright citizenship, what it means to be a citizen who should be allowed to be in the country regardless of citizenship. And I'm trying to distinguish between what is essentially political rhetoric, or if there are people or communities that should really be concerned about their citizenship status or their potential status in the United States.
Amanda:Yeah Well, I will say, during the Trump administration, the naturalized citizens were under attack in a way that I had not, had not been the case for many decades. So I'll give you a little bit of history here.
Amanda:First, naturalization, that process by which a non-citizen, someone foreign born, comes to the US and gets a legal immigration status and then becomes a citizen. As I've just explained, it's a fairly easy process not that it's super easy for each individual, but it's a process under US law that is more lenient and more accepting of citizens than many countries. But starting in the sort of red scare eras of the 1930s and the 1950s, the United States government was attacking the citizenship and stripping citizenship and deporting people that it saw as political enemies, who were naturalized citizens. So labor leaders Harry Bridges is the focal point of this chapter of the book and he was this extraordinary labor leader. He was a longshoreman and harbor worker and he helped bring together that group and fight for more protections in the workplace. They were overworked and in very dangerous conditions and he was extraordinary. But he was also, of course, a target as a result of this by the government and by these powerful industries that he was seeking to fight on behalf of the workers that he represented. And the government tried to deport him three times and he had two Supreme Court cases on this and he managed to win and prevail on the day in the United States. But it was a close question. And he about 22,000 people were deported from the United States during this period the red scare era based on their speech, because they were naturalized citizens. And the government said well, you're a naturalized citizen, but now you're talking, you're associated with the Communist Party and you're a labor leader, and we think what you're doing and saying is it odds with having an allegiance to the United States? So we're going to go back say you lied when you swore allegiance to the United States, strip you of your citizenship and expel you. And that happened to 22,000 people.
Amanda:So fast forward to the Trump administration. Well, maybe I'll say fast forward to 1967, when the Supreme Court said no, you cannot keep doing this. If your citizenship is protected in the Constitution, you must stop. That was a case called Afri-Universus Rust. So then, for about 50 years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, citizenship stripping was extraordinarily rare. 10, 11, 12 people a year would be denaturalized and they tended to be former Nazi prison guards or leaders who had lied about what they'd been doing during the Second World War when they came to the US and got citizenship, and they were pretty bad actors. So they lost their citizenship, but very few other people. However, when Trump took office, it was part and parcel of their policy.
Shawn:It was very explicit.
Amanda:And the government started. They set up a naturalization, a denaturalization office in Los Angeles, staffed it at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and started investigating 700,000 naturalized citizens, trying to determine whether there was some problem in their naturalization application such that they could lose citizenship and be deported. And so I would say for naturalized citizens, during that era, it was certainly a sense for everyone that they could be at risk and they shouldn't bring themselves to the attention of the government. Mollysha Gessen, a New Yorker reporter, wrote about this. She's a naturalized citizen and that ended with the Trump administration ending. But who knows what the future will hold, and we saw what the Trump administration did when Trump was president. If he's president again, I assume it will restart.
Shawn:So it seems in the United States that immigration and I guess by extension to some degree is citizenship has just become a normal part of our election cycle, a normal part of our political discourse. Do you have any suggestions for how we could settle the remaining ambiguity of citizenship in the United States?
Amanda:Well, I'll first say and this is something I say like the first day of my immigration class to my law students is I think immigration deserves to be part of the political discourse. It is a huge question for the future of our nation what our immigration policy will be. And, as I tell my students, one quarter of the population in the United States today are either immigrants that's about 14% of the population, not people who are born far and born or and then another the rest are other children of immigrants. So one quarter of the families that are here in the United States today are families built by our immigration law and our immigration system, and we remake ourselves every generation with our immigration laws and policies. So I'm very comfortable with immigration and citizenship policy being a big part of our political discourse. I am very uncomfortable with the rhetoric around it of invasion, of fear, of threat, of the the frankly inhumane methods of responding to the crisis of the southern border, and I think it is a crisis at times. Anyway, it's a little better right now. So I'm very uncomfortable with many aspects of the discourse, but I do think it deserves to be a significant part of the conversation. I'll also point out and I have a chart but we're audio here so I'll just explain it.
Amanda:The United States has had sort of larger and number percentage of far and born a roastery. The percentage of far and born was closed as 15% in the 1920s when we saw a really strong response by Congress and, at that point, extremely racist response and xenophobic response to immigration in laws that were enacted in the 1920s. We're close to 14 or 15% immigration today again, and that's partly why I think it's such a part, a big part, of our conversation. So I think it deserves to be part of the conversation. How do we make it a more positive part of the conversation, one based on reality, reality that immigrants are more law abiding than citizens. The reality that immigrants are essential to our workforce. Not only do they do legal immigrants, which we don't talk about enough extraordinary, important work, both skilled and unskilled labor, but in addition, the undocumented immigrants we claim not to want. They are more than 70%, maybe even 80% of the people that harvest the crops in the United States are undocumented immigrants.
Amanda:So, first of all, if we got rid of them all tomorrow, which we cannot do who would starve? Second, those are US citizens and US corporations that are hiring them and violation of immigration laws, and they're doing it because our government really looks the other way. It almost never enforces immigration law against citizens who hire undocumented immigrants, and for good reason. We need them, so that needs to be part of this conversation.
Amanda:The idea that we actually need this labor and we need to change our immigration system to allow these people to come legally to the United States to work, because we want them here and we benefit from them. Who would be in?
Amanda:chaos and, as I said, would risk starvation if we didn't have them. So we need to figure out a way in which Congress responds which is not done for decades due to the sclerotic nature of Congress by enacting laws that give more legal pathways to come to the United States than are existing today, and have a more positive conversation about the benefits of immigrants. And I think there needs to be restrictions I would not open the borders to everyone without limit and what those limits should be and then human enforcement methods. Those are my sort of key points that we need to address as a nation to have a more positive conversation about immigration. Not that we shouldn't have that conversation, not that it shouldn't be part of our discourse, but it needs to be framed in terms of reality, facts and the positive role immigrants play in our nation.
Shawn:So I want to ask you something, a question that you posed early in the book. You Are Not American. After having done all this research and having written this book and given so much thought to this, what does it mean to be an American?
Amanda:Yeah, that is such a good question and I'm writing a second book on birthright citizenship and the birth of birthright citizenship and what that provision of our Constitution added in 1868, how I feel that helped us realize and understand who we are as Americans. So for me it's about equality and about every generation begins anew without the baggage of their past, of their history, of their lineage, without being part of an aristocracy or part of an underclass. It's part and parcel of having an ending cast in America. Birthright citizenship is essentially that idea that we are all equal at birth, that we all should have these same opportunities, that we are all one nation, without regard to lineage. Now, of course, do I think we've accomplished that in reality? No, of course not. Every is a child born in the United States always given the same opportunities as every other child? Of course not. I'm not claiming we've achieved that, but that principle, that founding ideal, which I think is the ideal of the Declaration of Independence, right, we all men are created equal. Obviously, the author of that, thomas Jefferson, was enslaving people and we were not living up to that ideal.
Amanda:But the Reconstruction Congress tried to incorporate that principle into the Constitution in the 14th Amendment, particularly in the birthright citizenship clause, and by saying we're all born in the US and we're all equal, it established the idea of American is not ethnocentrum, it's not. Well, we're my parents American, or am I of the race that is considered American? Or am I of the religion that is considered American? No, it's. Were you born within the territorial boundary and are you in the United States at birth, then you are as American as everybody else, and to me, that is the key principle.
Amanda:It's the principle that led us to, in part, separate from England and establish our own nation. It was. We're not going to be subjects with this idea of a ruling king. We are going to govern ourselves, with the people themselves, each generation electing their government, picking their government and being. It's we, the people in the Constitution, who control the government, and that's part of saying, and all the people are equal here. So to me, it's this really sort of thrilling and idealistic provision of our Constitution that we just need to do a better job living up to.
Shawn:Okay, final question. You ready for it?
Amanda:Yeah.
Shawn:What's something interesting you've been reading, watching, listening to or doing lately.
Amanda:Wow, can I give more than one answer?
Shawn:Yes, please do.
Amanda:A fabulous book for people who are interested in the topic of this podcast today would be that I've been reading is how to Hide an Empire, which is a book, and I should know the name of the author off the top of my head in my do not, but it's a book that really blew my mind and was such a fascinating book about the history of the United States as an empire, but it's sort of refusing to acknowledge its role as being a colonizer and imperialist.
Amanda:And it's a fascinating tour of US history up to today, including sort of discussions of all these territories like Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands and Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and all of this fascinating history and then leading up to today in the way in which English is like the hegemonic language and we established the technology that the world uses, and so I really recommend that book as a sort of mind blowing book. But it's something I'm doing that's interesting but I'm terrible at is I'm trying to learn to play bluegrass tunes on the film. I'm enjoying that task because it takes me out of my head.
Shawn:Oh, that's so fun.
Amanda:Well, I'm living in the South. Now I'm in Charlottesville for the, having moved from DC, so I decided to embrace the culture here.
Shawn:Have you ever played an instrument before?
Amanda:I did play the violin growing up.
Shawn:I call it the fiddle now because, okay, right, so I play the violin, but you wouldn't know it.
Amanda:But listen to me. I find, as someone who thinks and writes and reads a lot, it's nice to have a physical task as a physicality to it and it's very absorbing. So it's like kind of my meditation you can't be thinking about anything but trying to do what you're doing. If you do it.
Shawn:Amanda, thanks for the conversation. I really enjoyed it.
Amanda:Thank you for having me.
Shawn:Immigration and, by some extension, citizenship how we obtain it and how we keep it is deeply entrenched in the American ethos. It's been a cornerstone of our nation's success and resilience. It's a beacon that draws dreamers and innovators and seekers of freedom from every corner of the globe. The United States has thrived, evolved and prospered due to the contributions of generations of immigrants who brought their unique cultures and talents and aspirations to our shores.
Shawn:Immigration, in practice and concept, is full of challenges and tensions that show up in the ways we talk about it, debate it, structure and implement policy related to it, and this highlights why it's so important and difficult to strike a balance between compassion and security, inclusion and sovereignty.
Shawn:But amidst the debates and disagreements, one unifying truth remains Immigration and American citizenship are parts of our collective identity. They're a symbol of hope, opportunity and the human spirit's indomitable will to transcend borders in pursuit of a better life. So I want to leave you with this. I urge all of us to consider Amanda's words and remember that the story of immigration in America is a story of triumph over adversity, of resilience in the face of uncertainty and of unity in the midst of diversity. We should strive for a future where the discourse on immigration and American citizenship is tempered by empathy and understanding, where we honor the values that define us and continue to extend our welcoming embrace to those yearning for a chance to be part of the American Dream. Alright, check back soon for another episode of Deep Dive Chat. Soon, folks.