American Citizenship

“…citizenship is more fundamental than civil rights…” — Hannah Arendt

From calling President Obama’s nationality into question to the announcement of his candidacy which targeted Hispanic immigrants, Donald Trump has put citizenship at the center of his political agenda. His announcement this week to end Birthright Citizenship should not come as a surprise.

Last February Trump removed the words “nation of immigrants” from the mission statement of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. This past summer in July Michael Anton, former national security official in the Trump administration, penned an editorial calling for an end to Birthright Citizenship. Anton wrote that it is up to Trump to issue an executive order to end Birthright Citizenship.

This is not the first time in American history that citizenship has been mobilized as a weapon of political fear. During the McCarthy Era in 1956, The US Attorney General Herbert Brownell proposed a plan to deprive native and naturalized citizens of their citizenship in order to punish them for communist activities. The policy was not carried out, but the proposal revealed the tenuousness of American citizenship in the United States and the ways in which statelessness can be used to threaten, punish, and exclude those individuals from society that are deemed undesirable.