I’ve had several TPM Readers reply to the post below about denaturalization and say it’s actually even worse than I say. Specifically, that we can’t really have any confidence that people who were born citizens won’t face denaturalization too. One reader simply makes the point: why not? What’s the bar that is stopping that? And of course, sure: Anything can in theory happen. And some things that we would have thought were only possible in theory a decade ago are happening routinely now or appear on the horizon. Another reader, more concretely, notes that, while his ancestors have been here for a century, the Chinese Exclusion Act raises the possibility that some of his “natural-born” ancestors may not have been citizens after all and that could be applied against him.
As a general matter, I take these points. I simply note that for now and I strongly suspect going forward that one thing is conceivable but the other thing (denaturalization of naturalized citizens) is happening, or is being actively planned for. So that’s where I’m focused. But as I noted to the second email correspondent, this returns me to a related point I’ve referenced several times over the last six months: it’s not just recent arrivals whose citizenship rests on birthright citizenship. It’s actually the basis of almost everyone’s citizenship, both in a foundational sense and even more as a matter of proof and record keeping.
Let me go back to the what I mentioned in the earlier post about my presumably inviolate citizenship. My biological ancestors on one side all came to this country roughly a century or a bit more ago. On the other side they go back to the 17th century. I’m a citizen because I was born in St. Louis, Missouri. But if we take birthright citizenship out of the mix, am I a citizen? My birth certificate lists only my parents and that they were both born in Missouri. But absent birthright citizenship that’s meaningless. It doesn’t say whether they were citizens. And their own birth certificates don’t include that information about their parents either. This is actually a bigger deal than it appears on the surface. It’s something that is in a blurry area between the actual basis of citizenship and the record-keeping, or lack thereof, which makes it almost impossible to know. Absent the clarity of birthright citizenship we simply have no record-keeping in the country that provides any clarity about who is a citizen and who isn’t, absent for the recently naturalized.
