A land with(out) immigrants

It’s easy to forget that every American, except for Indigenous populations, are immigrants or from a lineage of immigrants.

Issue #87

Hi all —

Even Vivek Ramaswamy would not be a U.S. citizen without birthright citizenship, a principle that grants citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil.

Ramaswamy’s Indian mother was naturalized only after Vivek was born, and Ramaswamy’s father chose not to become a U.S. citizen and has maintained his Indian citizenship (at least as of 2023). That means Vivek, born in Ohio in 1985, only became a natural-born U.S. citizen because of birthright citizenship — a policy the U.S. has had for over a century.

To be clear, Ramaswamy’s past comments and Donald Trump’s executive order (which federal judges have blocked for now) have both called for ending birthright citizenship for children of parents who are undocumented in the United States.

But it is still an interesting contradiction when you really step back and think about the ethos of this country: No one in the United States is truly a native American, except for Native American communities, the Indigenous people of this country. Literally everyone else has immigrant or forced labor/migration (slave) lineages to this country.

I know I’m stating the obvious, but so many Americans conveniently ignore that very basic fact.

More than 30 countries have birthright citizenship, as the PBS NewsHour reports in this video:

We don’t need to sit here and justify the merits of immigrants to this country because it’s obvious: The United States’ economic and cultural power across this planet would not be what it is without immigrants.

But to make the point clearer, on Monday, we saw some immigrants across the country demonstrate their contributions to the U.S. by showing what it would be like if they weren’t around, by skipping shopping, school or work for the day — akin to a similar protest and boycott back in 2017.

Some relevant links this week:

• NBC News: U.S. military plane carrying about 100 undocumented immigrants lands in India

• NPR: The prospect of immigration agents entering schools is sending shockwaves among communities

• India Currents: Report highlights anti-Indian hate on X (formerly Twitter)

Thanks for joining the conversation,
Vignesh

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