The Trump administration’s hostility to naturalization was at odds with America’s founding values. Among the grievances in the Declaration of Independence was that the King “obstruct[ed]” the “Naturalization of Foreigners” and discouraged “migrations hither.” In short, Britain’s anti-naturalization and anti-immigration policies were impeding the natural right of all would-be Americans to build a new nation. If his administration makes naturalization easier, Biden will be upholding a vision of citizenship first articulated by the nation’s Founders, who imagined a capacious, inclusive form of U.S. citizenship. But Biden’s effort could go further, shaking off a second legacy of the Founders, who imagined future Americans as exclusively White.
The idea that individuals can choose their allegiance was one of the United States’ most important innovations. Under centuries-old British law, everyone born on territory controlled by the Crown owed “true and faithful obedience … to his sovereign,” not as a matter of choice but because God and nature required it. “Once an Englishman, always an Englishman,” was the maxim of the British courts, even if the Englishman in question wanted to shed that status. (Or, as King George put it in the musical “Hamilton,” “You’ll be back, soon you’ll see. You’ll remember you belong to me.”). The Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War forced Britain to recognize for the first time that citizenship required consent.
The new nation followed through on these values by making it easy for most White settlers to become U.S. citizens. The Naturalization Act of 1790 allowed immigrants with just two years of residence in the United States to apply for citizenship. Even as naturalization law has evolved over the years, the law has only rarely required more than five years of residence to be eligible for citizenship — less than most nations throughout history. In 1812, the United States went to war with Great Britain once again over citizenship, provoked by the British Royal Navy’s bad habit of impressing naturalized U.S. citizens on the ground that they remained British.
Yet hostility to naturalization also has deep historical roots. Although the United States has long made it easy for some people to become citizens, in the past naturalization has been denied to people of certain races and ethnicities. Just as troubling, the government has frequently used its power over naturalization and denaturalization to disenfranchise certain voters.
For centuries, access to citizenship was limited by race. Yes, the first Naturalization Act of 1790 made it easy to become a U.S. citizen — but only for “free white persons.” Everyone else was barred from accessing the right to vote, hold office and claim identity as an American. Following the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship for all born on U.S. soil, and the Naturalization Act was amended to allow Black people to naturalize. But racial restrictions on naturalization by Asians, Arabs and other ethnic and racial groups remained in place until as late as 1952.
Today, the great majority of legal immigrants eligible to naturalize are from Mexico, Central and South America and Asia. In other words, they are not White, and many are from what President Donald Trump called “s — thole countries.” The Trump administration’s multimillion dollar campaign to investigate 700,000 naturalized citizen, searching for grounds for to denaturalize them, also appeared to target certain racial and religious groups from countries the U.S. government designated as of “special interest” to U.S. national security, such as Afghanistan, the Philippines and Sudan. These are not people the Trump administration viewed as truly American.
Obstacles to naturalization have also long served as a voter suppression tactic. In 1798, the Federalist-dominated Congress, supported by President John Adams, dramatically extended the residency requirement for naturalization from five to 14 years. Federalists feared that if newcomers gained citizenship they would vote for Thomas Jefferson and his rival Democratic-Republican Party in the next election. Similar concerns animated Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, barring Chinese immigration and naturalization in part to prevent people from voting.
For at least the last four presidential election cycles, the Republican response to naturalized citizens’ tilt toward Democrats has been to take a page from the 1798 Federalist Party’s book, hoping to win elections by limiting access to the ballot. In the short term, the Trump administration’s barriers to naturalization were distressingly effective. One organization that assists immigrants estimated that the long delays in processing naturalization applications would prevent 441,000 would-be citizens from voting in the 2020 elections — votes that were likely have gone to Biden and other Democrats by a wide margin.
In what may have become a vicious circle, Republicans seem to fear that liberal immigration and citizenship policies could create new Democratic voters. But they should take a moment to consider the lessons from history, which suggests that the opposite is true: the more the Republican Party is seen as anti-immigrant, the more it persuades legal immigrants to naturalize and vote them out of office. That appears to be just what happened in 2020. And if Biden can implement his proposed reforms to ease naturalization, there may be millions of new voters ready to cast their ballots in 2024.
March 09, 2021 at 06:00PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/03/09/republican-resistance-easy-naturalization-will-likely-backfire/
Republican resistance to easy naturalization will likely backfire - Washington Post
https://news.google.com/search?q=easy&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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