THE ATTACK ON BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP
Donald Trump isn’t a lawyer, but he has lots of ideas for new laws. He has proposed to outlaw politicians’ use of teleprompters. He has pledged that he would tell Ford that it couldn’t move a plant to Mexico. But Mr. Trump’s most notable legal proposal is the elimination of birthright citizenship, under which anyone born on American soil is automatically an American.
Several of Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals have echoed his position. And whether or not the Constitution is ever reinterpreted or amended in that direction, the debate raises fascinating questions about what America is — and what America means.
When it comes to granting unconditional birthright citizenship, the United States and Canada are alone in the industrialized world: North American exceptionalism, you can call it.
Birthright citizenship applies to a range of newborns who would not get local citizenship elsewhere — the children of legal immigrants, of undocumented immigrants, of tourists, and of parents who come to the United States with the express purpose of minting an American.
Setting aside the legal question for a moment, this blanket invitation to American citizenship has enormous cultural force. It loudly communicates a brash idea: Citizenship, here at least, does not depend on parentage, blood, history, folkways. If you’re here at the moment of your crowning, then you are an American.
Now, many Americans who are not white, including this writer, can tell you their “Where are you from?” stories. People, sometimes well meaning and sometimes not, will ask that question, treating your skin color as invitation enough. But I can report that, just as often, someone will jump in before I have a chance to answer and say, “He was born in Ohio!” Birthright citizenship gives them that retort.
In Europe, it’s different. I have always found it jarring to encounter people born and raised in, say, Switzerland, who are denied its citizenship and still considered Algerians or Turks. In Europe, more than in the United States, worldly people, faced with my Indian skin, reflexively laud my “ancient,” “beautiful” origins, which is heartier praise than Cleveland usually gets from Europeans.
Birthright citizenship in America is part of something larger: The American longing to sever from history, to be a place of new beginnings. It reflects, as Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote the other day in The Week, “the Enlightenment-driven belief, over and against the feudalism that prevailed in most places in Europe, that citizenship depended on a social contract, not a bloodline.”
Yet critics argue birthright citizenship has outlived its usefulness. “Automatic citizenship, once an important mechanism for the assimilation of immigrants and the strengthening of the American nation, has become a tool for its dissolution,”Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, has written.
The conservative writer Reihan Salamhas proposed amending the Constitution to require newborns to have at least one parent who is an American citizen or a lawful permanent resident in order to gain citizenship. One fear animating the debate is that automatic citizenship is easily gamed. And there are plenty of tales of people who game it — like that of the Taiwan-born entrepreneurs who charge $14,750 to whisk Chinese women, at seven months pregnant, into “baby care centers” in California.
There is also no small amount of racism wafting through portions of the movement to eliminate birthright citizenship: The worry, as old as time, of a country passing into new, different hands. The fear is that not changing the law will change America irrevocably.
The law’s defenders say the same about eliminating it: It would make America like too many other places, where history and blood matter too much.
(GIRIDHARADAS, Anand. NYTIMES, 01 set. 2015, Disponível: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/us/politics/the-attack-on-birthrightcitizenship.html , Acesso em: 1 de setembro de 2015)
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