07/25/2018
Mass immigration brings so many negatives that they are hard to track, but one important one is the continuing denigration of American citizenship. Any earthling who can crawl across the undefended Mexican border will likely qualify eventually, thanks to the efforts of hordes of leftist anti-sovereignty organizations and mainstream media that lobby constantly for “immigrant” rights. The value to foreigners is easier access to free stuff from the government and protection from a free trip home. Under Obama, open borders were the rule, and naturalizations were expedited.
One measure proposed to deal with Obama’s sabotage was Congressman Lee Zeldin’s bill to remove citizenship from foreign gangsters, submitted earlier this year.
But President Trump has a different idea, that crooks who wangled citizenship for evil purposes should have it removed.
Consider a couple of recent examples:
Take Iyman Faris (pictured), an aspiring jihadist who plotted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge 15 years ago. Born in Pakistan, the convicted jailbird recently had his bogus US citizenship protected by a lunatic judge. So he presumably won’t be deported when his prison term is up in 2020, thereby giving him another swing at violent jihad in America. Convenient for him, but dangerous for Americans.
Judge rules against stripping convicted terrorist of US citizenship, Fox News, July 21, 2018
A federal judge ruled against stripping away the U.S. citizenship of a convicted terrorist tied to a plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, citing a lack of evidence to prove that the status had been granted based on misrepresentations.
Iyman Faris, 49, was sentenced in 2003 for aiding and abetting al-Qaida by scoping out the iconic New York bridge as a part of a plot to cut through the cables supporting the structure. He had met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and worked with 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed …
The New York Times is leading the leftist cadre shrieking over denaturalizations of obvious criminals. It recently used Peruvian Norma Borgoño as an example of America’s cruelty under the Trump administration — even though she pleaded guilty to assisting her employer to defraud the Export-Import Bank of the United States of $24 million. Somehow, the Times construes that enormous theft as a non-major crime, though we can imagine that a born-here American would be jailed for a lengthy stretch for such a robbery.
The Times published an opinion piece denouncing the uptick in denaturalization — which was reprinted in a Nigerian (!) website, linked below:
Opinion: Congratulations, you are now a U.S. citizen, unless someone decides later you’re not, Uncova.com, July 23, 2018
MIAMI — Norma Borgoño immigrated to the United States from Peru in 1989. A single mother with two children, she set roots in the Miami suburbs, finding work as a secretary, dedicating herself to her church and, earlier this year, welcoming her first grandchild, a girl named Isabel, after Borgoño’s middle name.
She took the oath of citizenship in 2007, a step she felt would secure her status in her adopted homeland. But hers, it turns out, is not a feel-good immigrant story: The Justice Department has moved to revoke Borgoño’s citizenship, an action that could eventually force her to return to Peru.
Federal prosecutors in May filed a rare denaturalization case against Borgoño, 64, accusing her of committing fraud when she applied for citizenship and failed to disclose that she had taken part in a crime of which she had not even been accused. In 2011, Borgoño pleaded guilty to helping her boss, to no benefit of her own, defraud the Export-Import Bank of the United States of $24 million …
Finally, the Times continued its defense of improper citizenships on Monday, railing about the “politics of fear” even though a top job of government is to protect public safety, not to service foreigners with criminal intent toward Americans. The opinion piece goes so far as to recommend that the US should “make citizenship permanent and irrevocable” by passing an Amendment to the Constitution, which would certainly count as a new extreme in liberal pandering to unlawful foreigners.
The article was reprinted:
Trump’s New Target in the Politics of Fear: Citizenship, ReviewJournal.ca, July 23, 2018
The president has embraced McCarthy-era scare tactics. We may need a constitutional amendment to guarantee that citizenship can’t be revoked.
Surveying the wreckage of McCarthyism in 1957, the political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote about efforts to denaturalize American citizens suspected of Communist ties.
“It seems absurd,” she concluded, “but the fact is that, under the political circumstances of this century, a constitutional amendment may be needed to assure American citizens that they cannot be deprived of their citizenship, no matter what they do.”
It no longer seems so absurd. Citizenship is squarely in the Trump administration’s cross hairs. It has organized a Citizenship and Immigration Services task force to denaturalize American citizens, the first effort of mass expatriation contemplated since the McCarthy era. In a recent op-ed article for The Washington Post, Michael Anton, a former national security official in the administration, even proposed getting rid of birthright citizenship — by dictatorial fiat, no less: “It falls, then, to Trump. An executive order could specify to federal agencies that the children of noncitizens are not citizens.”
Yes, you’re reading that right: A high-ranking former member of the state security apparatus seriously believes that it is good policy to revoke citizenship by executive order.
Nor is this is just the oddball notion of some eccentric former staff member. As far back as August 2015, Mr. Trump himself has trotted out similar ideas, telling CNN, “The 14th Amendment is very questionable as to whether or not somebody can come over and immediately that baby is a citizen.” He also suggested that “you can do something fast” to end birthright citizenship. It may be time to revisit Arendt’s proposal.
For Arendt, the prospect of mass statelessness was particularly alarming. Since states are the only institutions able to guarantee rights, she wrote, “A stateless person is not just expelled from one country, native or adopted, but from all countries — none being obliged to receive and naturalize him — which means he is actually expelled from humanity. Deprivation of citizenship consequently could be counted among the crimes against humanity, and some of the worst recognized crimes in this category, in fact, and not incidentally, been preceded by mass expatriations.”
The idea of “mass statelessness” is more lefty hysteria: denaturalized persons would merely revert to their original citizenship.
Seriously, the Times and other left-wing shriekers need to chill out, for their already questionable mental balance if nothing else.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.