by liberal japonicus
I'm sure everyone who hangs out here realizes that this isn't going to be the place where we do try to cover every moronic proposal/action by the Orange Turd. (though if anyone has something that they want to opine on as a front page post, let me know) However, given my history and where I am, the whole question of tossing out birthright citizenship is one draws my attention.
My grandparents from my father's side immigrated from Japan to Hawai'i in 1899 and 1903 respectively. They were ineligible for citizenship according to the 1922 Supreme Court case Ozawa v. U.S. which ruled that Issei were "aliens ineligible to citizenship", not that they tried to become US citizens. Previous to that, it was governed by the Naturalization Act of 1906, which said that only 'free white persons' were eligible. Previous to that, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 forbade Chinese from naturalizing. There is a very intriguing set of records in the National Archive related to this:
Declarations of intention, 1887-1909 (2 volumes, less than 1 cubic foot.) These declarations of intention by about 20 Chinese nationals renouncing allegiance and fidelity to Kuang Hsu, Emperor of China, provide only each individual's name, signature, nationality, and filing date. They are noteworthy because they were filed during the period when the Chinese exclusion laws prohibited the naturalization of Chinese, yet the U.S. district court in Marquette accepted them. They were filed in the rather remote Upper Peninsula of Michigan, suggesting that a certain number of Chinese were residing in the region. Finding aids include a list of declaration numbers, names, and filing dates.
As for my family, there is a lot of family gossip about what went on. The oldest uncle was, as was the custom, sent back to school in Japan (an experience which he did not enjoy) Given the Japanese education system of the time, it was only elementary school, but it did give him fluency in Japanese. These nisei were referred to as kibei and fortunately, he came back before the beginning of the war, thus avoiding being conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army. However, ones who were in Japan after 7 Dec were conscripted, which highlights the vagaries of citizenship. The oldest uncle was the only one to go back, and the other children stayed in Hawai'i. My father said that pre-war, the whole brood went to the Japanese embassy to renounce allegiance to Japanese emperor before the war, but other aunts and uncles say they have no memory of that. Also, when I went to apply for my Japanese citizenship, it was discovered that there was a family register for my grandmother in Okinawa, which led to a lot of interesting stuff. As best as I can make out, my grandmother had apparently reapplied to be placed on the family register in Japan when she visited relatives in Okinawa. (Japanese citizenship is based on a family register system, called a koseki, which creates its own complications). It's a mystery how she would have done that, but a stubborn old woman back when the bureaucracy was all pen and paper could probably get something done.
Another family story is that after the fall of Okinawa, Japanese prisoners of war were brought to Hawai'i and some of them were family relatives who were imprisoned where they were already holding selected Japanese-Americans. Again, the family story has my grandmother making food to take to them, which was passed through the barbed wire fences. This is another unbelievable story, but the Japanese POWs were kept in Honouliuli Internment camp, which was already holding selected Japanese-Americans (it had to be selected, because of the labor needs of the island economy, to have interned all the Japanese-Americans in Hawai'i would have ground everything to a halt, so only selected leaders who were deemed to be threats were kept there), so I imagine that there was already a system for people on the outside to bring packages to prisoners. I did met one of those relatives in Okinawa who was taken prisoner as a 15 year old and he confirmed that, though his strongest memory was being doused with DDT powder on arrival. If it were now, one can imagine a twitter or instagram video taken as evidence of 'material aid and comfort to an enemy of the state'.
On the other side, my mother was a naturalized citizen, immigrating from England in the 50's. My mother's mother was first married to an American who worked in India and died of scarlet fever and the decision was made to send my mom's step-brother to the states to live with his father's relatives. I don't know about his citizenship, but he joined the USAF and was a navigator on a B-17 in the 306th Bomb Group which was lost (the events were part of prelude of the story dramatized in the Gregory Peck war movie Twelve O'Clock High). Because of his death, my grandfather was in touch with one of his regular crewmates (he had volunteered to join a different crew on his final mission to try and accumulate 25 missions for rotation) who sponsored my grandfather, grandmother and my mother to come to the States. There was also my uncle, a child from my grandfather's previous marriage, but he a lung removed as a result of flying in a Liberator crew and he was told he couldn't immigrate with my grandparents and my mother because his health was considered precarious, so he stayed in the UK (and lived to the age of 90). Would the inability of the whole family to come over have been held up as suspect? If my mom's family had really wanted to come, wouldn't they all have come?
I tell these stories because it seems to me that there tons of points in time where both my father's and mother's 'intention' of become an American can be questioned. Without the simple mechanism of jus soli, where citizenship is granted to those who were born in the country, you've can easily poke and prod to find a reason to find a reason why my parent's citizenship is suspect, and so to question my citizenship. Josh Marshall, I think, made a parallel point (If anyone can find that article, I'd be grateful) that birthright citizenship is a remarkable way to simplify record keeping and makes things more efficient. If someone's birth is recorded as being in the US, they are a citizen. And therein lies the rub.
When MAGA types were claiming that Obama wasn't a citizen, they had to construct a conspiracy of mysteriously forged documents/dual citizenship claims and people in high places actively changing records to allow Obama to be a US citizenship. If you think about it, you can see how eliminating birthright citizenship would allow people to raise questions ore easily. Obama was born in Hawai'i to Stanley Ann Dunham, an American citizen and Barack Obama, Sr., from Kenya. Would birthright citizenship extend through both the paternal and maternal lines? Rather than spinning out more and more elaborate conspiracy theories, you can simply take up the question in the courts.
There is a tenor to the reporting that focuses on how impossible the cancellation of birthright citizenship is. (Here and here) Others focus on the paradoxical nature of the order.
The Trump administration’s legal argument seems to hinge on the idea that children who are born in America to parents who are here unlawfully or on temporary status are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. What do you make of that argument?
Okay, if that were literally true, then they couldn’t be deported, right? In other words, the ordinary way in which everybody understands “subject to the jurisdiction” is you’re subject to the law and legal authority. And everybody agrees if you’re here illegally, you’re subject to the law. You can be deported. So, what are they trying to say? They’re trying to say, “Well, it doesn’t really mean that.” It means something else, which somehow means something about whether your parents are here legally or not. So, that’s the part where it kind of falls down.
Trump's Executive Order, with the NewSpeak name of Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, limits it to 30 days from the date of the order, but that is just a number. I think a lot of the reportage minimizes the chances of it happening, but I think that is founded within people who don't have any problem or questions with their citizenship/identity, not realizing how insubstantial the framework that undergirds our citizenships really is.
During my undergraduate study, a book that made a huge impact on me was Richard Rubenstein's The Cunning of History. The inspiration for the novel Sophie's Choice, one of the key points he highlighted was that what the Nazis did in the Holocaust was all done with strict attention to the legal framework.
The situation of the Ukrainian with a Polish passport would have changed drastically had the Polish government suddenly canceled his citizenship. He would have become a man without a country and, as such, without any meaningful human rights whatsoever. In the twenties and thirties denaturalization and denationalization were increasingly used by governments as ways of getting rid of citizens they deemed undesirable. One of the first large groups to suffer denationalization were the White Russian opponents of the Bolshevik regime who escaped to the West. Approxi- mately one million five hundred thousand Russians were deprived of their citizenship by the Soviet government in the aftermath of the revolution and the civil war period. In the civil wars of the twentieth century, there has been little if any reconciliation between opposing sides. Expulsion and extermination have often been the preferred methods of the victors in dealing with the losing side. The denationalized White Russians were followed by the Spanish republicans, the Armenians and, of course, the Jews.
[...]
Neither the apatrides nor the German political prisoners were outlaws because of any crime they had committed, but because their status had been altered by their country's civil service or police bureaucracy. They had been deprived of all political status by bureaucratic definition. As such, they had become superfluous men. Those apatrides in the detention camps were among the living dead. Sooner or later, most of the living dead were destined to join that vast company Gil Eliot has called "the nation of the dead," the millions who perished by large-scale human violence in this bloodiest of centuries. What made the apatrides superfluous was no lack of ability, intelligence, or potential social usefulness. There were gifted physicians, lawyers, scholars, and technicians among them. Nevertheless, in most instances no established political community had any use for the legitimate employment of their gifts. This was especially true of the Jewish refugees, but they were by no means alone.
Before World War II, the number of stateless persons increased with every passing year. Statesmen and police officials were agreed that a solution to the problem had to be found. The stateless could neither be assimilated nor, in most cases, expelled. International conferences on the "refugee problem" were held, but to no avail. There seemed to be no solution. In reality, there was a "solution" that was obvious to Hitler. When one has surplus livestock that are a drain on resources, one gets rid of them. Neither Hitler nor Stalin saw any reason why people ought to be treated differently. The "solution" had logic on its side, yet there remained a sentimental obstacle: In the prewar period, it was not yet possible to exterminate surplus people the way a farmer might kill off surplus cattle.
It's telling to me that Trump's lackeys are also being legalistic about this.
In court, the Justice Department used the 1884 case of Elk v. Wilkins as a legal analogy to justify Trump's executive order. Arguing that "birth in the United States does not by itself entitle a person to citizenship, the person must also be 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States," it said the case found members of tribes "are not 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States and are not constitutionally entitled to citizenship."
That case has another point that I also note, which is that the plantiff, a John Elk, petitioned the court to be eligible for birthright citizenship because he had "voluntarily separated himself from his tribe, and taken up his residence among the white citizens of a state". Ultimately, how much one assimilates is not the point. The point is to find a mechanism which can used to brought to bear. And citizenship is the perfect lever. It's a construct built upon national borders and history that we often take for granted, but when poked at, can fall apart. From this article:
Last year, the Brennan Center partnered with VoteRiders, the Center for Civic Democracy and Engagement (CDCE) at the University of Maryland, and Public Wise to survey Americans about what identification they possess and what they know about voter ID laws in their state. We also asked respondents whether they had documents that prove their citizenship — a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers — readily available. Our research indicates that more than 9 percent of American citizens of voting age, or 21.3 million people, don’t have proof of citizenship readily available. There are myriad reasons for this — the documents might be in the home of another family member or in a safety deposit box. And at least 3.8 million don’t have these documents at all, often because they were lost, destroyed, or stolen.
We also uncovered evidence of racial disparities in these numbers: while just over 8 percent of self-identified white American citizens don’t have citizenship documents readily available, that number is nearly 11 percent among Americans of color.
It does seem of a piece, questioning birthright citizenship and efforts like this.
But as I say, this is something that I tend to focus on. So, any interesting nationality stories? If pressed, how would you prove you are a citizen?
lj -- great stories and I will try to tell some if I get time. But as to proving I'm a citizen? I have a passport and a birth certificate, is the simple-minded answer, though if they do away with birthright citizenship (I was born in Ohio), and since the passport depends on the birthcertificate, maybe I'm not as sure a bet as it would seem.
On my mother's side, I have published genealogies of two lines of ancestry that go back as far as 1637 in Connecticut. But that Josh Marshall piece you mentioned (which I also read but now can't find) includes the observation that since there never was any clear process for asserting or proving "citizenship" at the beginning, my not-quite-Mayflower ancestry may be useless to me. (Will save the DAR story for later. ;-) )
It would be ironic, in light of history and the current animus toward immigrants, if my Italian immigrant grandfather's citizenship papers (of which I do have a copy) ended up being my path to proving my citizenship.
Also ironically, if my dad had been born before my grandpa became a citizen, IIRC I could apply for Italian citizenship. But my dad was born a couple of years later. C'est la vie. Not that I want to move to Italy, but you never know.
Posted by: JanieM | January 31, 2025 at 11:49 AM
me: I have published genealogies of two lines of ancestry
I don't mean I published them, I mean that the genealogies I have are published, hardbound volumes.
Posted by: JanieM | January 31, 2025 at 12:32 PM
Hey, got those Mayflower johnny-come-lately dudes beat, because OF COURSE there was an ancestor stirring up trouble in Roanoke colony.
...and then there was the side-chain of the genealogy that fought on BOTH sides of the Revolutionary War.
Troublemaker I, but come by it honestly, whatever that means.
Posted by: Snarki, child of Loki | January 31, 2025 at 12:38 PM
It's possible that this is the Josh Marshall piece you were referring to:
Once you open this box, things get very complicated. The entire edifice of U.S. citizenship is based on birthright citizenship, not simply in the sense of rights but also in terms of record keeping, verification and bureaucracy.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/day-two/sharetoken/44c9a525-3edf-414f-ac1e-1027316143df
The part of the post about stateless persons made me think of some stuff that's been happening here with e.g. minor girls who were radicalised online and ran away to become "ISIS brides". The particularly newsworthy one, which some of you who read the Grauniad may know about, is called Shamima Begum. She was a UK citizen, with no other nationality but with rights to Bangladeshi citizenship if she were to apply for it. Her UK citizenship was stripped from her, two governments have fought to deny her right to return here (very controversial), and she is, last I heard, stateless, which again is higly controversial. I don't have time to search more, but this (although a bit simple minded) gives a general idea of her case and the legal aspects.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-53428191
Posted by: GftNC | January 31, 2025 at 01:03 PM
In other words, the ordinary way in which everybody understands “subject to the jurisdiction” is you’re subject to the law and legal authority.
Basically, the only people who are in the US, but not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof" are those with diplomatic immunity. You can tell because they can, for example, simply ignore parking tickets without consequences.
The other problem with the "you're only a citizen if your parents** were citizens" approach is that logically you'd also have to prove your parents were citizens, too. Without reference to the "born in the USA" principle. Good luck with that. Especially for those, like JanieM, whose family in this country goes back before the Revolution. Because they would never have been naturalized. Oops!
** And it obviously does have to be both parents, else Obama's citizenship would never have been in question.
Posted by: wj | January 31, 2025 at 01:38 PM
Yeah. To be without doubt, you’d have to trace your lineage back to someone who became a citizen, presumably because they were born somewhere else. And the line would have to be unbroken - citizens in every generation in between.
If it truly does have to be both parents, every line in your pedigree would have to meet the same criteria. Ironically, the simplest case for a US-born person would be having 2 immigrant parents who became citizens.
If it's only one parent, I can rely on my Puerto Rican great grandfather’s naturalization under the Jones-Shafroth Act (1917).
Gee, isn’t this fun?
Posted by: hairshirthedonist | January 31, 2025 at 03:05 PM
It strikes me that the Trump solution to stateless people is Gitmo.
The general thrust of the regime so far seems to be breaking everything in the name of bigotry. "Think this through and consider the consequences" is not part of the agenda.
Four more years of this to go.
Posted by: russell | January 31, 2025 at 03:16 PM
At the risk of annoying everyone, two more LLM links(My $10 monthly fee gives me 10.000 points a day. Unused points don't roll over into the next day. If some of the innovations used with DeepSeek prove out, the cost of LLM prompts may drop to less than a Google search.)
Which countries have the least complicated determinations for who is a citizen by right?
"Countries with the least complicated determinations for citizenship by right typically base it on jus soli (right of soil) or jus sanguinis (right of blood) without requiring additional conditions, such as residency, cultural integration, or bureaucratic processes. Here's an overview of countries with straightforward systems:"
Citizenship Laws
Which countries have the most complicated determinations for who is a citizen by right?
"Countries vary widely in how they define citizenship, and some have particularly complex or restrictive criteria for determining who qualifies as a citizen by right. These complexities can arise from historical, social, or political factors, including colonial legacies, ethnic considerations, or attempts to control migration. Below are some examples of countries with complicated systems for determining citizenship by right:"
Citizenship Laws
LLM grammar is getting better. My grammar checker didn't throw any flags on the above text.
Posted by: CharlesWT | January 31, 2025 at 04:04 PM
Snarki @12:38: Per my 11:39 and hsh's 3:05, none of that does you a whole lot of good if you need paperwork. It may facilitate a different kind of response to the demand for paperwork....
Posted by: JanieM | January 31, 2025 at 04:41 PM
Why not be consequent and return to the ancient custom* of citizen commissions that all newborns have to be presented to and which decide whether it will be accepted as citizen? Since obligatory pregnancy registries are just a matter of time (in conjunction with the state run menstruation databases), no spawn should escape this patriotic profiling. Any kid lacking the indelible seal of approved citizenship is to considered ipso facto not a citizen and can at best be granted metic status (no rights but all duties) or disposed of by deportation or other means (after marking them permanently as rejected).
*e.g. Athens and/or Sparta
Posted by: Hartmut | January 31, 2025 at 04:55 PM
I have a fancy certificate that says I am a US citizen, just like Elon and Melania, and unlike Donald and most MAGAts. It would not surprise me if He, Trump claimed the power to revoke my certificate (and not Elon's or Melania's) by "executive order", and I would not be surprised if his lackeys on the SCOTUS ruled He can do that. Note that none of them has such a certificate, being maternity-ward immigrants themselves. You'd think they would therefore stop short of abolishing the 14th Amendment, but of course they know doing so would never inconvenience them personally as long as they keep serving their Orange Jesus. Any inconvenience for run-of-the-mill MAGAts would not trouble their tenured "originalist" asses.
--TP
Posted by: Tony P. | January 31, 2025 at 05:26 PM
IIRC, for the discussion around the citizenship issue, the US 'inherited' England's birthright common-law tradition.
That is, until US slavers wanted to break it, because of racism. Same as now.
Of course "citizenship" wasn't really a thing until the late 19th Century, when passports got their start. No surprise that the European countries with Napoleonic Code law went with the "citizenship by blood", since they already had those intrusive registries of people and residences.
I've experienced people in Italy being surprised that the police in the US don't have a "current register of where everyone lives", closest being "the phone book" (back when we had those).
Napoleon casts a loooong shadow.
Posted by: Snarki, child of Loki | January 31, 2025 at 06:29 PM
Napoleon casts a loooong shadow.
About 70 countries have some form of Napoleonic Code. British Common Law is limited to English-speaking and British colonization countries.
Posted by: CharlesWT | January 31, 2025 at 06:58 PM
It strikes me that the Trump solution to stateless people is Gitmo.
So look for a surprise (as in abrupt, unplanned, disorganized) invasion of Cuba. So we can expand Gitmo to hold all those people Trump wants to deport, don't ya know.
Posted by: wj | January 31, 2025 at 07:41 PM
GftNC thanks, that is it, Also I had forgotten about Shamima Begum and the other similar cases, and the parliamentary debate that emerged from it has a lot of threads to pull on.
https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-53428191
Posted by: liberal japonicus | January 31, 2025 at 07:48 PM
Well now, it appears Musk's goons are taking over federal offices and snooping through files, etc., where they have no fucking business.
Has the coup started?
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/01/a-coup-by-any-other-name
Posted by: bobbyp | January 31, 2025 at 08:34 PM
the cost of LLM prompts may drop to less than a Google search
Which is... not nothing.
A friend hipped me to the fact that you can avoid the AI response in a Google search by appending -ai to your search text.
AI is freaking expensive in terms of both electric power and water. If you really, really need the AI response, go for it. If a plain old Google search (which consumes less than AI but is still not negligible) maybe try the -ai thing.
And hey, you can always read a book. Libraries are still open, operators are standing by!
Convenience is nice, but it ain't free.
Posted by: russell | January 31, 2025 at 10:44 PM
Side note, but Richard Rubenstein was on the religion department faculty at Florida State for many years, along with my father, who was chairman from 1974-80 (I believe those are the correct dates). So I’m sure I met him some times during my childhood, as given my dad’s position there were a number of faculty and faculty-grad student gatherings hosted at our house, which we moved to in 1968, and where my mother still resides.
Posted by: Priest | January 31, 2025 at 11:39 PM
Didn't William the Conqueror (iirc preceding Napoleon by a few years) do a complete survey and census of the population of his newly acquired realm of Britain (Domesday Book)?
Prussia also had mandatory conscription already in the 18th century and kept an up-to-date registry of its population.
Of course those registries were of subjects not citizens.
Posted by: Hartmut | February 01, 2025 at 01:51 AM