That’s easy. My kids! I am white… I mean productive.
The real question is, what is citizenship? What does it mean? When the USA came into being, it marked a shift from “subject” (of the crown) to “citizen” (a member of a polity sovereign unto itself, and not beholden to any monarch). Defining what a citizen was was a pretty complex topic, and it still is.
In essence, one way of looking at it that is consonant with American traditions is that a citizen is anyone who agrees to abide by and support the Constitution, and buys into the values and principles it contains. That is pretty much how we handled things for a long time, before the late 19th century when racial issues gained power and we did things like the Chinese Exclusion Act. You came here, you agreed to live by the basic tenets of civil society here, and after a few hoops you got to be a citizen.
We made citizenship hereditary I think largely for practical reasons, I suspect, because the only other alternative would be to test everyone at majority and boot out those who can’t or won’t agree to abide by the rules (something many sci-fi type narratives play on). Now, the thing about being born on American soil I’m not totally clear on, but I suspect as well it comes down to part of the creation myth for the country. There’s a lot of equation of the land/territory with the ideals, and because sovereignty and national identity in the period the USA was founded was pretty much rooted in physical geography, it made sense, and it short-circuited any attempts by the former colonial masters to exert control over, say, the children of people who had been born British subjects.
But in the end, what we as a nation have to ask is what does it mean to be an American citizen? I personally feel it’s about accepting the basic principles of life and liberty, and the general constraints of a civil society, as outlined in the Constitution. Makes no difference what color, gender, nationality of origin, or comic book hero preference you may have. Does that mean everyone, anywhere, who wants to come here can, if they agree to abide by the rules? I don’t know. That’s a tough one. Economic migration is the biggest reason people come here, and by and large that has been a net positive, but are there limits? I don’t really know.
I do think that in the absence of omniscience, I’d rather err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion. Get enough of us together we can probably figure stuff out.
Or just embraced “A Modest Proposal” more firmly.
Space force. Service guarantees citizenship.
The topic of immigration in the US is a mess.
There’s a spectrum of belief from “anyone ought to be a citizen, who needs citizenship anyway, who needs country” to “no immigrants who came after me – certainly none who came after I was a child – ought to be allowed here.”
Both ridiculous and unworkable. But most people would probably take some sort of middle, reasonable position, if it weren’t for the relentless machinations of the people who run the Republican Party.
Their MO, really since WWII, on a wide array of issues has been to covertly support things, often for the benefit of the more upper crust portion of the party… and then run against the resulting situation, blaming the liberals.
They did this with civil rights, they did it with all the Warren Court rulings, but immigration really takes the cake. I have lots of well off Republican friends who always needed illegal immigrant workers to make their businesses (mostly ag) work, but they voted Republican decade after decade because they were in on the secret: elected Republicans would rail against illegal immigration, but they would never stop illegal immigration.
So… millions of Republican voters increasingly felt defrauded, became radicalized, and called for extreme measures… which, as is typical of politics, pushed all the pro-immigration people into the Dem tent (Dems have only been unambiguously protective of illegal immigration in recent years).
Thus, it’s a toxic topic. No reform idea is going to get a fair hearing, because it is probably part of a plot to do something extreme, and probably based upon a lie.
The particular article being linked would be exhibit A. I might accept that birthright citizenship is not the ideal policy. But the writer is being devious. He wants to take the constitutional wording “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and have Congress fix this by passing a law saying that some young children are not subject to our jurisdiction? He doesn’t mean that, and if Congress passed such a law, they wouldn’t mean that. Imagine: some fifteen-year-old kid of an illegal immigrant robs and kills an old lady, and we are going to say: “All we can do is expel you because you are not subject to our jurisdiction”? Give me a break.
No, the problem is that the constitution says something that, arguably, it would be better to change. And very much like liberals (who this former Trump official, I am sure, would be quick to criticize) wants to change the constitution to say what he thinks it ought to say, without the trouble of actually following the arduous amendment process.
I have heard a couple of millennials who feel like nations and/or capitalism have failed them, say things like this. Will this continue to be niche thinking or is this how the elites lose control?
That was a long but fascinating article. I’m going to ponder that for a while. I’m glad at the end, instead of concluding with the usual, “it will all end in chaos followed by rule by megacorporations just like '80s cyberpunk predicted,” the author offered suggestions on how the world might escape the trap he foresees. Not that I think that the global situation is quite as dire as he warns.
The idea that “capitalism failed them” seems nonsensical to me, given that they are enjoying the highest standard of living of humans, ever, in the history of the species.
I think that their view stems largely from their inexperience with literally anything else, and some imagined fantasy where they just… I dunno… get anything they want without effort?
I mean, the kind of crap that capitalism has given us, in terms of modern technology, is mind boggling. We all have fucking star trek tricorders now. Hell, our smartphones are BETTER than tricorders. I can essentially tap into the entirety of human knowledge, at any time. Maybe it’s because I lived when we couldn’t do this that I appreciate it so much.
When we were in college, and talking about random shit, if someone sitting there in the room didn’t know something… guess what? You just never fucking knew the answer to that question. It wasn’t like you were gonna go check out some freaking microfiche at the library.
I’ve got a cartoon on my wall in my office titled “Life before Google”, with two guys sitting on a couch. One guy says, “I just thought of a thing that I’d like to know more about.” and the other guy says, “That’s a damn shame.”
The modern internet gives us access to everything… and now we have that on little handheld devices that we can use anywhere.
That shit is crazy, yo. People who think that our system has failed them probably should go spend some time in another system and get some perspective.
Racial minorities, women, the poor, they may all have reason to believe the system has failed them.
Yes, it’s not wrong that capitalism has led to tremendous innovations. It is equally true that it, left unfettered, tends towards massive inequality that leaves people unable to make basic ends meet.
Things like smartphones are amazing, but it’s also a bit of bread and circuses while you’re living on the street.
When I got out of college I got a good job using my degree, with a pension, health insurance, solid mortgage possibilities, etc. People graduating in the '00s got an iPhone and Wikipedia to use while living in their parents basement until their next minimum wage job interview. Life is amazing.
Are they living in this country? Compared to the 3 billion (almost 1/2 the world population) in world living on less than $2.50 day the system hasn’t failed them at all. This will sound snarky, but as recently as the Greatest Generation, the concept that 2 out 3 poor people in a society were overweight or obese would have been considered crazy.
It is a free country and people are allowed to believe what ever they want. But even the poor in this country (and most European, and Commonwealth countries) are in the top 1/5 of the world population in living standards. From an historical prospective in the top1%.
If you are poor and you live in a bad part of some American Metropolis do you really care that you have it better than somebody living in Somalia or Chad?
Would that thought somehow brighten your day?
And it’s not as true as strict dollars and cents make it seem. A person making mimimum wage in the US is making double to triple what my Indian engineer coworkers back in Chennai make, if you convert dollar to rupee.
But that minimum wage person is not living double to triple the standard of living. Quite the opposite in fact, the person in India has a far better life, other than the fact that an iPhone costs two months salary (they have Chinese options for 1/4 the price). They can’t buy American cars as easily, but you wouldn’t want an Explorer in their traffic anyhow.
No, that Indian engineer making $5-8k converted has about the same standard of living as someone making $60-80k here. Mostly. There’s no good direct comparison.
So that ‘the poor here live better than 80% of the world’ is complete horse shit.
No, it’s really not horseshit at all.
You are comparing someone to a guy in India… Who is a highly trained engineer. That guy is also living way better than the vast majority of the world.
Compare it to the billions of people in India and elsewhere who are still essentially living in 3rd world conditions.
The absolute poppers person in America lives in a system where they can get access to food and shelter. They may not take advantage of those systems, and we absolutely have homeless people… But still, the systems exist for them to take advantage of.
Life in Western society, while not equally good for everyone, is still objectively good compared to life under say, the Soviet Union, or in modern day Venezuela.
What I was objecting to was the oft misused idea that a poor person makes $x which is more than y% of the worlds population, ergo they are better off than y% of people in the world, so poor people in the US have nothing to complain about.
That is horse shit.
Now if you were to limit it to the poor people in India vs the US? Yeah you might have a different story.
But I was here for an extended period, I saw the poverty. The villages, for lack of a better term, made from salvaged materials like signs, branches, and posters that dotted the outskirts of New Delhi.
But I also see things like the tent cities in Portland under many overpasses. The stuff is superficially nicer, but the standard of living isn’t so drastically better for them, not in the ways that count.
My main objective is using dollar values to evaluate the situation. Because what @Strollen cites about the poor here being in the top 1/5th of the global population is pure garbage. If you compare dollar to dollar? Sure. But that’s useless. When you’re paying for housing in a month what they pay in a year (for a similar level), then saying you’re better off because you make more isn’t just wrong, it’s insultingly wrong.
That’s what tweaks me off, because I’ve seen that line of thinking many times before, and using it to downplay the seriousness of the problems for the working poor isn’t right.
The difference between that and the crushing poverty of the third world, is that you don’t ever NEED to live in a tent City in the US.
Make no mistake here, I’m not saying that homelessness is an entirely self imposed problem. Most of the time it’s not. But the fact remains, systems exist in the US which are specifically set up to give people assistance if they want it. To some extent, many are unaware of that assistance, or have problems like mental illness or drug addiction which prevent them from taking advantage. My girlfriend did outreach to homeless families for years, so I’m not unaware of the issues or unsympathetic.
But no one in America is so poor that the literally starve to death from a lack of food. We do not have famine, or large scale epidemics. And the reason is largely a result of capitalism. What it is to be poor in America is not the same thing as true, crushing poverty.
This is absolutely not true. It’s a lie, and it’s a disgrace for you to be selling it.
My girlfriend’s job was to specifically do outreach on the streets to help get folks into the programs that existed to help them. Maybe you should consider that you may just not be aware of them.
Also come on man, don’t just call me liar.
The systems exist, sure. It’s the suggestion that they’re in any way adequate that’s false. Or that people “don’t NEED to live in a tent city in the US,” as if the thousands of people living in misery on the streets of our cities would be doing so if it weren’t their only alternative. They die of exposure because they’re starving.
I’ve done homeless outreach myself. I have friends who survived homelessness, and I’ve lost friends who didn’t. They’re living under overpasses because there’s no other place for them to go. They have nothing, and so they get nothing. The immense wealth and well-being of this country is not available to them, because they’re too poor to matter.