She ends up framing the core argument thus: "After all, none of us born here did anything to deserve our citizenship. On what moral grounds can we deny others rights, privileges and opportunities that we did not earn ourselves?"
The immigration issue ends up blurring what is really the core issue. My family has been in America since before the Founding. In every generation it has paid its taxes, fought its wars, built its infrastructure, elected its officers, served in its institutions. That's why I deserve citizenship.
Others families came later but have similarly been involved. Some were imported as slaves, and deserve citizenship partly in recompense for that. Other families crossed the seas and joined America afterwards, and earned for their children a place among us.
Someone new, from somewhere else, has no similar claim. There is another road -- migration -- that is sometimes open according to particular rules. I agree some of those rules don't make sense: for example, I don't think it's sensible to extend citizenship to a child whose parents have no established connection to the nation, just because they happen to be on US soil at the time of birth.
Citizenship is earned, though, and it is deserved. It is just as sensible to defend the rights, privileges, and opportunities of your fellow citizens as it is to defend the interests of your family members. Indeed, as Aristotle points out, the polity is an outgrowth of the families that came together to form it. It is our country in the same way that it is our family.
The rights that are particular to citizenship have that status because they are part of governance. We defend everyone's freedom of speech or thought because those are human rights that everyone should have. The right to vote or to serve on a jury is about how Americans govern themselves, and that is American business. It belongs to those of us who have earned it, because we are part of the families that came together to form the nation.
On what moral grounds can we deny others rights, privileges and opportunities that we did not earn ourselves?" I bet that many of the NYT readers agreeing with that proposition would be most reluctant to apply it to alumni preferences in college admissions.
ReplyDeleteI think that the idea of citizenship is very difficult for progressives because it entails a created difference between human beings that allows for unequal treatment
ReplyDeleteI think progressive have little difficulty embracing labor unions, which creates a difference between employees in an open shop that allows for unequal treatment. And to the extent that any progressives DO feel such a difficulty, they'd propose a solution reinstating a closed shop.
"After all, none of us born here did anything to deserve our citizenship. On what moral grounds can we deny others rights, privileges and opportunities that we did not earn ourselves?"
ReplyDeleteHow many immigrants is the writer willing to take into her household?
To try to reason with a progressive by logical steps is futile...
ReplyDeleteLike Grim's, my family has been here since before the founding.
Some were killed shortly thereafter by Indians. One a lone survivor, 3 years old. Hid under her dead mothers skirts until found by a rescue party. A thin branch on the family tree. They fought the French, the British, the Germans, the Germans again, and the Japanese, and the Vietnamese (for some inscrutable reason),
and mostly, they fought the land.
A Nation is a Nation as long as people are willing to kill to defend it. All the philosophy in the world and heavens will not avail otherwise.
...they'd propose a solution reinstating a closed shop.
ReplyDeleteWell yes, of course. Just as the solution here is to eliminate citizenship so that everyone can enjoy the same status with the government as the alien. The point I was trying to convey there at the end is that citizenship is fundamental to self-governance: because it's ours, we have the right to shape it. Take that away, and we all stand naked before the institutional power over which we have no rights of ownership.
A Nation is a Nation as long as people are willing to kill to defend it. All the philosophy in the world and heavens will not avail otherwise.
ReplyDeleteLex victoriam, as we were recently discussing.
Locke drew very sharp and catastrophic distinctions between those who were members of the social compact and those who were not.
ReplyDeleteI guess he wasn't much of a progressive, or even liberal, after all. If we apply the progressives retrograde logic.
Eric Hines
I am aware that I did nothing to earn my citizenship. Other people paid expensively over the centuries for me to have it. She does not realise that what she is actually saying is "That gift cannot be bestowed in that way after all. I like some other way better." Well, fine. Make the case, then. But don't obscure the hidden issues.
ReplyDeleteIt is parallel to Obama's "You didn't build that," meaning that you had help from lots of others. That's true, so far as it goes, except that those others are mostly dead now and few of them did much of it through the federal government. Until recently, even government involvement was mostly local.
That is the message behind this, that it is the government, pretending to be "all of us" that can bestow the good things in life, and parents, communities, churches, clubs, neighborhoods, and other small armies must be gradually moved to the side.
I think it's their commitment to globalism / cosmopolitanism. They've been trying to erase borders and nations since before I was born and replace them with international governments like the UN, which they would like to have more power and national governments less. The EU was a result of this ideology, and they'd like to do it here and eventually everywhere.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the argument that we didn't earn it goes equally well for life. None of us earned life; it was a gift from God and our parents. So, by her reasoning, murder would be okay then, right?
ReplyDeleteI am reminded of the Gerald Gardner adaptation of a photograph of President Carter and Chinese head Deng Xiao Peng. Carter: "China should permit the exit of its citizens." Deng Xiao Peng: "How many hundreds of millions do you want?"
ReplyDeleteIt is parallel to Obama's "You didn't build that," meaning that you had help from lots of others.
ReplyDeleteThe parallel extends beyond that. In fact, we did "build that;" it was us private citizens directly or us private citizens through our private enterprises who did the building, and it was us private citizens directly or us private citizens through our private enterprises who paid for the building with our tax remittances. All government did was broker some of the deals.
So it is with our citizen status. We earned that, albeit with help from some of our fellows and/or ancestors. All government did was, sometimes, bestow citizenship on outsiders who met our criteria for the status--and thereby earned it.
Eric Hines
IF her dream came true and if no one has earned it, then everyone is entitled to it, then it becomes worthless. Of what value is that approach?
ReplyDeleteObviously, if everyone is entitled or no one is, there’s no reason to exclude the masses of migrants — or to disallow them from voting.
DeleteWhich, to be clear, is the real point. These arguments are presented as moral calls for decency. What they really are is a move to take away your power as a citizen to self-govern, and to subject you to the loss of your power over your own community and country. In the wake of that, the administrators expect to rule over everyone "equally."
ReplyDelete