Jacob Sullum writes about one of my pet peeves:
Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley is rightly alarmed by the federal government’s position that naturalized Americans can lose their citizenship based on trivial misstatements to the Department of Homeland Security. But Stanley wrongly portrays that position, which was staked out by the Obama administration, as a product of Donald Trump’s special hostility to immigrants. The mistake illustrates the sadly familiar tendency to frame what should be critiques of government power as complaints about particular parties or politicians.
But make no mistake, this is not something limited to the political left. I have long observed that it was Republicans who set the stage for Obama’s drunken sailor splurge. Big-statist Republicans put that ball into play and Obama just picked it up and ran with it. This left me unsympathetic to former Bush apologists decrying the Obama years with a marked lack of introspection let alone repentance. And of course in the Trump era, the same thing is happening in spades. Indeed, every time Trump enforces an Obama era statute or regulation, it is being decried by Serious Academics™ as evidence Donald Trump is ‘literally Hitler‘, unlike nice Barack Obama.
I thought that there was a similar thing going on with the people involved with the ‘March for Science’. They were perfectly happy for politics to intrude into scientific matters as long as the politicians were all willing to sing along with the climate change alarmism hymn sheet. Someone who disagrees with them ascends to power and suddenly it’s a problem.
Now is indeed the test – there is a Republican majority in both House and Senate and no President Obama anymore.
So any failure to cut government spending (and so on) is down to Speaker Ryan and the rest of the Republican leadership.
It really is that brutally simple.
Just outside my workplace there was a weekly ‘vigil’ at a church to protest at the existence of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. It stopped the very week Obama became president even though the camp is still open for business.
I’m wise to your sophistries. It’s Hitlers all the way down.
It’s Hitlers all the way down.
Probably the wisest thing I’ve read all week.
I don’t disagree with the basic point of this post. But you chose a poor example. There are few things more properly within the “power” of government than the granting (or withdrawal) of citizenship. You can argue about whether the decision it made on this particular issue (originally under Obama, then continued under Trump) was a wise one. But you can’t argue with the legitimacy of its making a decision in the first place.
Oh I disagree that it is a poor example, in fact it is an excellent one. I do not want the state to have broad discretionary powers to decide who they can retroactively make an unperson due to the Kafkaesque processes they put people through.
In one sense, I agree with Laird. In the wise words of Edmund Burke to his fellow MPs: “All that we have a right to do is not always wise to be done” but in law, state sovereignty is absolute over which non-citizens can become citizens, under which conditions and with what degree of revokability for infractions. The modern PC idea that everyone in the world has a right to be a citizen of any first world country, and activist judges a right to enforce that, is just one of PC’s many insolent fictions.
In another sense, however, Perry’s example is an interesting one to choose precisely because it is a case of someone sympathetic to a PC idea who nevertheless recognises the fraud of how it is urged by the PC.
Dominic Cummings makes a similar point in his article about how Brexit was won:
(He means “… a lie whose exposure undermines the pro-EU campaign’s attempt …”)
Perry, I think we are making somewhat different points. In this particular instance I agree with you (or with what I believe you are saying, anyway) that the US government is taking far too hard a stance in arguing that any insignificant error or omission in the application is sufficient grounds for withdrawing* a grant of citizenship, and I expect that the Supreme Court will rein them in (probably on Due Process grounds). But while this may be an abuse of discretion, it says nothing about the legitimacy of that power, which in my mind is indisputable. And that’s why I said it was a poor example of your principal point.
* I disagree, however, with your characterization that the withdrawal of citizenship somehow creates “unpersons”. We’re talking about people who came from somewhere else and were granted citizenship at the complete discretion of the government. If that is rescinded due to fraud or material dishonesty (both of which I would consider valid grounds for such withdrawal), those persons would still retain citizenship in the country of their birth.
Especially in our new age of social media – where we get instant and voluminous feedback on our correctness from our peers – most people do not vote based on issues.
Instead, we vote for our “side”. It’s very much like deciding which sports team we’ll root for.
Elections are won based on the thin margin of uninformed people who haven’t bothered to pick a side until voting day. Sadly, these may well be the only people who actually look at issues, even though they do it badly.
More to Perry’s main point, we no longer see a big-government party versus a small-government party. We now have each of the two parties fighting to make it their own big government. It’s an expected reaction that, after one party gets government monies flowing its own way for four or eight years, the other party sees a need to make the money flow their own way.
Laird,
Wouldn’t that depend on the native country’s laws regarding citizenship? I thought there are some countries that do revoke the citizenship of even native-born citizens; but perhaps I’m wrong.
Even if so, I don’t see what stands in the way of a country’s doing that, if its citizens or its regime so choose. And even if “international law” says You Can’t Do That, said law is still a matter of handshake agreements (even if they’re signed in blood) because there’s no method of enFORCEment to abide but it. (In this case at least, good.)
Perry, thus:
Heh. For some reason this puts me in mind of Gollum/Sméagol going on and on under his breath about “good hobbitses, nice hobbitses” and “nassty hobbitses.”
I can only assume it has to do with my current re-researching of the Source Document.
Julie, you could be right (it would, of course, depend upon the specific country), but I do know that the US no longer requires the renunciation of foreign citizenships, and lots and lots of people have dual or even multiple citizenships. So I think what I wrote is broadly correct even if there may be the odd exception.
Thanks for your reply, Laird. Yes, I know we have “dual citizenship”; but I’m not so sure that that is universally, without exception, the case. Also, I would take it for granted that the U.S. can’t revoke somebody’s citizenship in another country; only the other country could do that.
What we (or any country) can do is to make a law disallowing a person wanting naturalization to hold citizenship here and in another country: We could insist that a person choose one or the other. But that says nothing at all about what the other country could do.
—-By the way, now I see what you meant in the sentence I quoted. I read that from a POV a little different from yours when you wrote it. :>)
This is a major reason that I have written off most libertarians as hopelessly idealistic and naive about immigration. Not only is Reason magazine eager to import more of the Third World’s poor, they seem blind to the fact that the left and Democrats support mass immigration because they know immigrants will vote for more government.
Libertarianism is not a suicide pact. The “right of free movement” does not require that I welcome in foreigners who want to make my country more like the dungheaps they are escaping.
My emphasis. When I took my citizenship test, I said “I’m glad that you asked me that” in response to one of the questions. It was question 8; “What did the Declaration of Independence do?” and I went on to explain that giving either of two of the three model answers provided in the government issued study guide could be viewed as making a false claim of US citizenship.
The examiner agreed and volunteered that she’d forward my observations up the chain. I just looked it up and, after several years, nothing has changed. The model answers are:
In fact, on looking at it again, none of those answers are sound. The first two have the applicant saying “our”, which he is arguably not yet entitled to do. The third references “the United States”, which did not exist as a singular entity at that time, there being, rather, “these United States”.
For some reason, this reminds me of the episode of Big Bang Theory where Dr. Sheldon Cooper goes to traffic court.
I will mention a recent paroxysm. Trump issued a proclamation of May 1 as “Loyalty Day”. Millions of hissy fits were thrown over this blatantly fascist action, by people who didn’t know that the same proclamation had been issued every year since 1956.
I agree with the thrust of Perry’s post, but at least the US and UK have reasonably robust systems to protect against arbitrary revocation of citizenship.
Contrast some places like Bahrain.
The rather elderly cleric in question is, of course, ‘not one of us’.
The other side of the coin is the granting of citizenship to those who are ‘us’ ie Sunnis of Pakistani origin and other nationalities. The idea is to ‘redress the imbalance’ of Sunni/Shia, currently approx 30/70. Hmm.
It allegedly happens extensively in Malaysia, too: Bangladeshi migrant workers, and those of other nationalities, are given ICs (Identity Cards), sometimes with Chinese names. The idea is said to be to bolster the number of the ‘right kind’ of voters. Hmmm.
Why do we grant automatic citizenship to any infant who immigrates here from wherever the hell they come from?
I say make the little buggers comply with the same citizenship rules we impose on adult immigrants.
And at age 18, or 21? Jesus, people look back and admit the truth – you were pig ignorant fools, and so were your friends. We boomers wrecked western civ because we got the vote at 18 and out-voted all the sensible old farts
@ bobby b: Ouch! Harsh, but probably fair. I did get away with it, though, unlike Dr. Cooper.
Having been through the process, end to end, in two countries (one as an immigrant, one as a sponsor) I feel confident in saying that the bulk of what most people think they know about this subject is wrong.