LTE: Birthright Citizenship
Published on October 31st, 2014
Letter to the Editor
Paul Nachman
October 31, 2014
As seen in:
The LA Times
To the editor: Your editorial on birthright citizenship goes off the rails in many directions, including with the weary trope that America is “a nation of immigrants.” Even after four decades of renewed mass immigration, 87% of us are native-born citizens, thus not “immigrants” in any sense.
Surely members of the editorial board know this, so maybe they meant that America was founded by immigrants. But that’s wrong, too: The U.S. was created by settlers (colonists), while immigrants are those who move to a polity that’s already a going concern.
It’s true that America has seen a lot of immigration, but that isn’t central to the country’s attractive character, which is dominated by the Anglo-Protestant culture of those settlers, as Harvard’s Samuel Huntington showed.
Regarding the children of illegal immigrants, Investor’s Business Daily had it right in 2005: “Becoming a U.S. citizen should require more than your mother successfully sneaking past the U.S. Border Patrol.”
Paul Nachman, Bozeman, Mont.
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