Friday, January 31, 2025
Multiculturalism Is Awful
But beyond the legal arguments there is a pressing moral argument about citizenship and nationhood that lies at the heart of our current debates about the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship. The moral argument engages a different and arguably more important set of questions. What is an American? Who is America for? What is the purpose of immigration? What do immigrants or would-be immigrants owe to the native-born population?
For a long time, conservatives didn’t want to talk about these things because doing so risked being labeled a xenophobe or a racist. It was easier to take refuge in platitudes about how we should crack down on illegal immigration but expand legal immigration, as if we were all agreed that mass immigration was a net positive, we just need to make sure it’s orderly. It was easier to affirm the conventional wisdom that America was a “propositional nation,” an idea, and that anyone could be an American if they adopted our idea.
This was a mistake, and not just because it’s a lie. This way of thinking and speaking prevented us from getting beyond the platitudes and coming to terms with some hard truths, like the fact that America is not in fact a merely propositional country. Contrary to what has been drilled into most of us since grade school, not everyone can really become an American. Being an American means more than simply assenting to live by our laws and paying taxes, because America is more than an idea. (As others have noted, if America is just an idea we can write it down and send it overseas, and foreigners need not come here at all.)
Simply put, America is a nation. We have a common language and a shared history. We have a certain way of life and customs. We have a distinctly American identity. Our system of government is founded explicitly on Christian claims about God and man. For most of our history, Christian morality has been the basis of our civic life. We are bound together by family ties, by our connections to the land, by shared experience, by what Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address called the “mystic chords of memory.”
Every foreigner who comes here understands what this means as it applies to their own homeland. It has been a grave error that we have insisted for so long that none of it applies to us. Making a case against birthright citizenship will mean making a case against the pernicious ideology of multiculturalism, which we have been taught makes us strong but in reality makes us weaker and poorer.
It will also mean asserting that it’s not actually the case that someone whose parents emigrated to America from a foreign country, and whose family has only been here a single generation, is “just as American” as someone who traces their ancestry to the American Revolution. It will mean admitting that America would be much better off not only with zero illegal immigration but with only a very low level of legal immigration, which would help preserve our cultural and community cohesion, and encourage the complete assimilation of all newcomers.
Via John Hinderaker.
