Donald Trump needs a lesson in U.S. history. Starting with the fact that this nation’s greatest leaders didn’t divide Americans through labels and insults. They united us through their brilliance and moral integrity.
The president’s latest volley on immigration calls into question whether he was paying attention in any of his history classes in high school or college that dealt with constitutional issues. Trump vowed Tuesday morning to sign an executive order that would seek to end the right to U.S. citizenship for children born in the United States to non-citizens.
It’s a blatant effort to rally his base before the midterm elections. It also runs counter to the intent of the framers of the 14th Amendment, who addressed the issue in no uncertain terms. Prior to President Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the question arose whether African-Americans born in the United States would be considered citizens.
Attorney General Edward Bates, who was regarded as the most conservative member of Lincoln’s “team of rivals” cabinet, was asked to address the issue.
“Our constitution, in speaking of natural born citizens, uses no affirmative language to make them such, but only recognizes and reaffirms the universal principle, common to all nations, and as old as political society, that the people born in a country do constitute the nation, and, as individuals, are natural members of the body politic,” Bates wrote. “If this be a true principle, and I do not doubt it, it follows that every person born in a country is, at the moment of birth, prima facie a citizen.”
If Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch are, as they have repeatedly claimed, originalists who believe that it’s a moral imperative to get to the heart of the intent of the framers of the Constitution, then they should lead the effort on the court to declare any such Trump executive order unconstitutional.
His threat of an executive order accompanies his political grandstanding before Tuesday’s midterm elections by sending thousands of troops to the U.S. border to meet the “migrant caravan” from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Trump claims the caravan poses a threat to the United States. That’s ridiculous. The refugees aren’t likely to get to the U.S. border for another month. When they do, they will represent only a fraction of the immigrants who cross the border every year.
Instead of being greeted by border police, the United States should put together an army of immigration officers to humanely process their asylum claims. Yes, we should protect our borders. And yes, we should follow our laws. But we shouldn’t automatically assume that these potential immigrants are criminals intent on doing harm to Americans.
Ronald Reagan understood this. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Santa Clara, points out that in Reagan’s farewell address he offered a clear view of the renewal that immigration brings to our identity and nation:
“Thanks to the wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity,” Reagan wrote, “we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation.”
That’s the kind of thinking that has sustained the United States for 242 years and gives us the best hope of bringing together what today is clearly a divided nation.
— The Mercury News
