Not Everyone Can Become An American

There is perhaps no greater issue in American life today than the debate over citizenship and national identity. I don’t just mean the debate over illegal immigration, which often serves as a kind of proxy for the underlying debate over what it means to be an American and preserve a distinctly American nation.

Yes, we have to secure our border and put a stop to illegal immigration. But that’s just part — and arguably a small part — of a much larger and more difficult problem, which concerns American identity, national sovereignty, and cultural cohesion.

I wrote last week that in America today not everyone with citizenship is actually an American. To some, this might sound incendiary or extreme. Certainly it violates the tenets of multiculturalism that have been ascendent in America for decades now. But it’s actually just a straightforward observation of reality — so long as we understand that being an American means something more than merely securing legal documents or going through a neutral administrative process. Doing so might confer citizenship, but it will not make someone an American.

Vice President J.D. Vance hit on this in a speech for the Claremont Institute over the weekend. “You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere in the world and expect America to remain unchanged,” he said. “You cannot export the Constitution to some random country and expect the same kind of government. Our citizens are not interchangeable cogs in the global economy.”

Vance is exactly right, and his point gets at the heart of what we’re really debating when we argue about border security, or mass deportations, or immigration visas. The reason we have an immigration system at all, at least in theory, is to ensure that we know who comes into this country and that they come in on our terms and for our benefit. It is our interests, not those of would-be immigrants or asylum-seekers, that our immigration system should strive to serve above all.

But beyond immigration, Vance is touching on something essential about America that has been largely lost, suppressed really, for more than a generation: America is not just a “propositional nation,” not just an idea but a people. That’s why you cannot export the Constitution to some random country and expect the same kind of government or suddenly import millions of people from foreign lands and expect America to survive. We are not a set of abstract propositions to which anyone from any part of the world can assent and suddenly become an American. We are a people with a common language, culture, history, customs, and so on.

About 20 years ago, Pat Buchanan had a more pugnacious version of what Vance said: “It is not true that all creeds and cultures are equally assimilable in a First World nation born of England, Christianity, and Western civilization. Race, faith, ethnicity and history leave genetic fingerprints no ‘proposition nation’ can erase.”

This is an important point, and it has to be asserted even at the risk of being falsely accused of racism or xenophobia. A nation requires a certain amount of cultural cohesion — common language, customs, morality, and way of life. That means some cultures and creeds are simply not compatible with American civilization. Multiculturalism, in other words, is a dangerous delusion that, combined with mass immigration, is a nation-destroyer. 

And while it’s true that part of our American heritage is a belief in the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence — like “all men are created equal” that apply universally, to all people — it’s totally wrong to claim that our national identity begins and ends with that set of principles, and that therefore anyone who adopts them is by definition an American.

For one thing, not every creed and culture will accept the thoroughly Christian proposition that all men are created equal. And even if a foreigner did accept it in theory, that would still not be enough to make him an American if he had not also assimilated in all the other, very much non-theoretical ways that are required to join a nation and become part of its people. 

Many people on the left don’t seem to grasp this, or they cannot accept it. For them, citizenship in the narrow, legal sense is all that matters. They cannot conceive of nationalism or national identity as anything but process neutralism. In this way, they are able to embrace multiculturalism in the misguided belief that religious or cultural differences aren’t really all that important so long as one meets the minimum standard for legal status.  

A recent exchange in Britain illuminates this mode of thought on the left. Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek and a self-avowed Trump-supporting leftist, said in a recent debate that “to question whether citizens of your country are incompatible with the values of your country because of their faith is disgusting.” In her mind, there are no religious belief systems that might render some peoples incompatible with the West, and even to suggest so is somehow offensive. 

She was responding to earlier remarks by Matt Goodwin, who suggested that Islam is incompatible with the West. During the Q&A, Connor Tomlinson, a conservative commentator, challenged Ungar-Sargon on the notion that it’s “disgusting” to suggest Islam is incompatible with British culture, citing statistics about the overrepresentation of Pakistani men in sex crimes in the U.K., as well as survey data showing that three-quarters of university educated, British-born Pakistani Muslims don’t think the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel really happened.

Ungar-Sargon’s reply encapsulates the view of nationhood as mere legal citizenship, without any of the cultural, religious, or historical ties that make up a people: “I’m sorry but those are your citizens. Citizenship is the only human right that every person has a right to … I’m not arguing that you don’t have a cultural problem here in a certain subset of the citizenry of your country. But a country is made up of the people who live there, who have that legal right. You need to work a lot harder on changing hearts and minds because you cannot simply say that a certain citizen of your country is not compatible.”

She then said, sarcastically, “What are you suggesting, that they be denaturalized?” At this, the crowd erupted in applause. Undeterred, Ungar-Sargon declared the notion was “insane,” and that “you do not have a democracy if you think you can denaturalize people based on their ideas.”

Ungar-Sargon might be surprised to learn that here in America you actually can denaturalize and deport foreigners based on their ideas — specifically, on whether they misrepresented their views during the naturalization process, which includes questions about a person’s past support for communism, among other things. Naturalization also includes a commitment to our Constitution and laws. The Oath of Allegiance that all foreign nationals must take before becoming naturalized includes the statement, “I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

The point here is that we have codified in federal statute a defense mechanism, however rarely used these days, against foreigners who espouse ideas that are actually incompatible with American culture and government from ever becoming citizens. We do this because we understand that national survival requires a certain level of coherence, and that tolerance for foreign beliefs and ideas can only go so far.

Ungar-Sargon’s hazy notion that it’s “disgusting” or “insane” for a nation to insist on cultural coherence betrays a fundamentally degraded view of both citizenship and the nation. She is fundamentally wrong when she insists that a citizen of Britain or America cannot, by virtue of their citizenship, have views and beliefs that are incompatible with Western civilization. Of course they can. There are tens of millions of such people all across the West, and unless we stop allowing them in, we’re going to lose our civilization. And we’ll deserve to lose it. 

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.