On the debate over the new Arizona law, it has been assumed that the Federal Government alone should determine who is a citizen.
The Fourteenth Amendment says that a person is “A citizen OF THE STATE in which he is born or NATURALIZED.”
There is more to be learned about history by reading those words than most professional historians know about history.
It would be interesting to know when the Federal Government took primary responsibility for naturalization, but beginning in colonial times a person became a citizen of a colony and after the Revolution a person became a citizen of a state.
How can a person have been “naturalized” in a STATE? The Fourteenth Amendment’s wording makes it clear that for the three generations it had been taken for granted that states did the naturalizing.
If you are an American residing abroad you cannot vote in the American elections as a “United States citizen.” You vote for the electors of your state on and how ITS electoral votes will be cast. You vote on YOUR STATE’S senators and representatives in congress.
In case one thinks that this distinction died out after 1868, it took an amendment to the Constitution itself to get electors for the District of Columbia not that long ago.
Can a state determine that someone who has no right to be in the United States has no right to be in that state? No one in 1868 would have written that a person born or naturalized in the United States was a United States citizen. In the sense of the word as it is now used, there was no such thing as a “United States citizen.”
What the Fourteenth Amendment said was that states had to recognize people born or naturalized in them or in another STATE as citizens.
It did not occur even to the Radical Republicans jamming through the Fourteenth Amendment illegally that a state could not decide to kick somebody out who was not born or naturalized in SOME state.
As with the War of the Preambles, the Marxist worship of the Preamble to the Declaration that makes a roaring statement about “all men” and the United States Constitution which makes it abundantly clear that their document was only based on their right to legislate for “OURSELVES and OUR Posterity,” present discussions consist entirely of Temporal Provincialism.
#1 by Epiphany on 07/22/2010 - 6:34 am
The whole conception is wrong.
Not everyone born in America is
actually considered an American.
And, indeed, there are no U.S.
Citizens at all.
There are Italian Americans,
there are Irish Americans, there
are Polish Americans, and there are
German Americans. None of the above
are actually embraced as Americans at
all. I used to wonder where all this
“Ethnic Pride” was coming from.
I used to assume that “Ethnic Pride” was
failure to assimilate to the American
Way of Life.
That was before my great realization:
there is no American Way of Life; at least
not anymore. People nowadays associate with
their ancestral Homeland, instead.
#2 by backbaygrouch on 07/22/2010 - 8:40 am
United States Constitution, Article One, Section 8, “The Congress shall have power…{paragraph four} To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization…”
On March 26, 1790 it was enacted that a person could after two years residence become a citizen of a state in which he had resided for one year. A state had to allow for this. provided that he be of “good moral” character and “A free WHITE person” [emphasis added] and that the person [as a citizen of a State] would be considered a “Citizen of the United States.”.Exempted were persons proscribed by state statutes [which would have included many of my antecedents] unless allowed by a state law of the state that had proscribed said person. This last section is important. Clearly the federal government deferred to the individual states in matters of citizenship. Further, one became a citizen of the United States by virtue of becoming a citizen of a state. One could not become a citizen of the United States without becoming a citizen of a state.
#3 by BGLass on 07/22/2010 - 10:18 am
“…I used to wonder where all this
“Ethnic Pride” was coming from.
I used to assume that “Ethnic Pride” was
failure to assimilate to the American
Way of Life.
That was before my great realization:
there is no American Way of Life; at least
not anymore….”
I used to think the American Way of Life really pretty much referenced the WASPS ways, whether New England Puritans, or Quakers, or the Appalachian-settled Scots lowlanders and Presbyterians, etc. These regional variations were what one “assimilated” into.
This America does exist still in pockets. (And those pockets are identified and attempts made to break them up.)
Many colonial Americans are STILL HERE. Many have no “ancestral homeland” to harken back to exactly— as in the Anglo-Saxons who fought England. This thing —the Anglos separating from Anglos, fighting other Anglos– is a BIG DEAL, and still plays out but none of the other populations get this at all.
Protestants are still over half the country (and yes infiltrated, but still). And Anglo-Saxons aren’t uncommon outside city centers.
I realized this when I began to identify with “POST-COLONIAL” populations RATHER THAN other “Americans” (who were, as Epiphany said, hyphenated Americans, whites who saw themselves as having what they sometimes call now “home countries.”
Americans have NO HOME COUNTRY, unless you want to go back 300 years. So, for them, the South African situation, and the situation of different white factions, is more interesting and evokes more emotion–often than “American” events s/a 9-11.
South Africa, Australia, the muslim displacement of europeans, has more emotional force, or news of similar populations in the deep south or midwest (a reported flood in Iowa)— are far more interesting than a bomb in NY or foreign gangs in L.A., and so on.
The oldest Americans identify with OTHER colonial populations, since that is their experience, NOT THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE.
The word “immigrant” is not something that pulls any personal chord with them ever. They are far more interested in themselves, and their experience, and say, how Australians are being taught about ‘aboriginals.’
This epiphany came in watching Noam Chomsky go at a white South African student about all his moral obligations, etc. And in then understanding the appeal of Australian movies and books among older American populations who do not harken back to ‘ancestral countries’ so much as to other people involved in the same way in the ‘colonial’ experience.
This is an indicator of the shifting sense of citizen, (in real terms, of people’s loyalties). This trend seems to be toward their overall increased identification as WHITE, something helped along and pushed by the minority-hegemony constantly (which daily parses them out this way, forcing their identification as such on t.v., in movies, articles, etc). A trick is getting the COLONIAL whites to identify with the immigrant whites (eg: Italian Catholics and colonial Protestants, and so on).
But the difference in colonial consciousness is never addressed. The mainstream minority-hegemony CAN’T address it (having no orientation to it, and also b/c it’s not in its interest to do so). And the white movement usually bogs down in why WASPs are so mean, and were mean to “immigrants” and so on.
#4 by Dave on 07/22/2010 - 10:29 am
Since the states issue drivers licenses, business and occupational licenses, and sanction academic transcripts, visa enforcement has to be done by the states in any event. So it is not only law that places citizenship at the state level, it is the pratical requirements of regulating the entry and presence of aliens.
Everybody knows that the Mexican consular card system (Federal regulations allowing Mexicans to establish US bank accounts without having to prove they entered to the US with inspection), and ICE, and the Border Patrol are just show piece programs put in place by the Federal government to veil treason.
#5 by Simmons on 07/22/2010 - 12:53 pm
Of course no one ever ask those questions of Mommy Prof, and if someone were to ask them of Mommy, said person would have a fit and invoke some clause of the PC religion.
I doubt our “union” is long for the world. Whites are now where Serbs were when they started organizing their Field of Blackbirds gathering where Slobo screwed up and ignited the majority’s rebellion against dispossesion communism.
Maybe some physically tyranical regime can hold it together, but no Turd World looter crew will hold together the 3000 mile wide Detroit.
Anyway, then we will define citizenship all over again as always happens when the Shirley Sherrods of the world try to enslave the productive to her stupid nigger fantasies.
PS I’m sorry Jared Taylor if I offended you, please accept my apologies and allow me to post at your Asian IQ forum, for it is the most pressing issue of the day. Sorry I had to do this here.