Born in the USA

I admit it, I’m obsessed with Donald Trump, a man I detest so much that I’ve been known to switch channels the instant he appears on TV. Sadly this summer, avoiding him hasn’t been that easy. This does not bode well for the rest of the 2016 presidential campaign.

To say that Trump is breaking new ground in American politics would be stating the obvious – which, unfortunately, has never deterred me before. He seems to possess some kind of weird animal magnetism borne from his giving voice, a brash and loud voice, to what is apparently a gigantic level of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US. Folks say he’s “tapping into” the anger some Americans, and I'm mostly thinking Tea Party types here, have over the approximately 11 million illegal aliens (or undocumented immigrants, pick your terminology) living in the US. I think it’s more like he’s exploiting that anger.

Anyway, with a substantial lead in the polls, this seems to be working for Trump. In the process, he is also forcing the other Republican candidates to ante up and match his more extreme opinions on immigration. Again, this does not bode well.

One of the Trump talking points now on everyone’s lips is “birthright citizenship”. This is a natural fixation for Trump, since it combines his interest in scapegoating illegal immigrants with his hobby of ferreting out who is and isn’t a citizen, at least when it comes to Barack Obama. Trump is, after all, a bona fide Birther, somehow convinced that Obama is not really an American because (in the alternate world of Birtherism) he was "born in Kenya". It would be sad if it weren't so idiotic. 

Birthright citizenship, currently the target of Trump's voluminous ire, is the legal right, enshrined in the Constitution no less, that grants US citizenship to anyone born on US soil. This means anyone, even if their parents are not US citizens and had barely set foot in America before going into labor.

Such jus soli ("right of the soil") basis for citizenship is typical in countries of the New World, no doubt due to the fact that they are all nations made up entirely of migrants, except for that minuscule slice of Americans, both North and South, able to trace their birthright back to the closing of the Bering Land Bridge some 11,000 years ago.

Jus soli is how I got my US citizenship. Or, at least, that’s my layman's legal interpretation of it.

The entire basis of me being an American is my birth certificate, a piece of paper that says I was born in a little town in Georgia. This was my only evidence of citizenship until 26 years later when I got my US passport – which was issued solely based on, wait for it, my birth certificate.

It was immaterial whether my parents were Americans. I assume no one at the hospital, or later at the county courthouse, demanded to see my parents’ proof of citizenship. I doubt my parents had any such proof anyway, other than, again, their own birth certificates. In any case, it didn’t matter what nationality my parents were. The fact that I was born within the borders of the US was enough.

It’s different back here in the Old World – the source, over the last five centuries, of the migrants “swarming” (to use David Cameron's term) to the Americas in hope of a better life. Citizenship in Europe has traditionally been based mostly on the jus sanguinis principle, that is, the “right of blood”. You were a German or a Finn at birth because your parents were Germans or Finns, irrespective of your birthplace. My children are Finns, not because they were born in Helsinki, but because their mother is Finnish. It’s all about the blood ties.

Sometimes, those ties can be surprisingly wide ranging. Finland recognizes a “right of return” for ethnic Finns, which means Finnish-speakers in Russia who for generations have never lived anywhere else can be fast-tracked for citizenship here simply thanks to their bloodline, while a child born in Helsinki to two Russian citizens will be a foreigner.

Of course, countries are free to define citizenship any way they want. In addition to birthright citizenship, the US also recognizes a form of jus sanguinis citizenship by allowing Americans to claim US citizenship for their children born abroad. That’s how my kids became American.

A few European countries even practice a form of birthright citizenship. France, for example, grants automatic citizenship to second-generation immigrants. Germany has since 2000 granted Staatsbürgerschaft to the children of foreign residents who meet certain conditions (one of which, I presume, would be the ability to actually spell "Staatsbürgerschaft").

And, some countries do make the kind of radical changes to citizenship criteria that Donald Trump is now envisioning.

The Dominican Republic ended birthright citizenship in 2004, which, as I say, it is free to do. However, the Caribbean country went a major step further by recently making the change retroactive. Suddenly, upwards of 200,000 Dominican citizens of Haitian descent became stateless, instantly being turned into undocumented foreigners in the only country they’ve ever known.  

I doubt (or at least fervently hope) that even if Donald Trump gets his wish and the US revokes birthright citizenship, it doesn’t go as far as the Dominican Republic. Interestingly though, such a retroactive move could strip one prominent Republican presidential hopeful of his citizenship. Marco Rubio was born on American soil, but to Cuban immigrants. While it has to be said that Rubio's parents were in the US legally, I still have to wonder whether he falls into the category of "anchor baby" that conservatives rail against so much.

I’m not sure what affect Trump’s proposal would have on another GOP presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, who came by his US citizenship in the same way as my children did.

Cruz was born in Canada, and he’s a US citizen solely thanks to his American mother. His father, a Cuban, wasn’t a citizen at the time, but that doesn’t matter, since you need only one American parent to become an American yourself. Ironically, Cruz also had Canadian citizenship until recently, since birthright citizenship is also a thing north of the border. Apparently, Cruz wasn’t even aware of his dual citizenship status until someone pointed it out a couple years ago after he became a rising star of the Tea Party. I have no idea whether Cruz could also claim Cuban citizenship through his father, but obviously that's not something he's eager to do.

And even more ironic, the circumstances of Cruz’s birth (born in a foreign land to a foreign father and an American mother) is exactly the same as Barack Obama’s back story would have been if he had, in fact, been born in Kenya, and not Hawaii. It’s that mythical Kenyan birth that many “Birthers” believe disqualifies Obama to be president. Tellingly, none of them is making the same claim about Cruz, not even the most famous Birther of them all, Donald J. Trump.

Trump is, after all, pretty heavily invested in the Birther Myth. In 2011, the last time he threatened to run for president, Trump dispatched, to great fanfare, a crack team of private investigators to Hawaii to dig up evidence that Obama was NOT born there.

Those super sleuths must still be there four years on, still searching for clues, since Trump has never revealed the outcome of that investigation, though he did claim at some point that his investigators “couldn’t believe” what they had uncovered so far.

In fact, “unbelievable” is just the word that comes to mind when I think of anything to do with Donald Trump, and his take on American citizenship. Just unbelievable.

Sweet, Sweet Irony

These days I spend a lot more time thinking or reading about politics in the US than I probably should, and certainly more than I used to. It’s become an obsession (benign, I hope) that was born when Barack Obama was elected president. No doubt, a few million Americans on either side of the political divide could say the same, so groundbreaking was Obama's election.

A Birther trying to make a point.
Photo: Bonzo McGrue

The obsession isn’t only due to my hopes and excitement over a Democrat and African-American winning the White House. It’s was intensified, in large part, by the ferocious backlash by many conservative Americans to Obama. If Republicans in the heartland had grudgingly accepted President Obama’s legitimacy, reined in their more obstructionist instincts, and allowed Washington to get down to business as usual, I suspect I would have become bored with politics as a spectator sport by now.

That didn’t happen, though. The total and strident opposition from the right, in the form of the Tea Party, turned the political scene into a slow-motion train wreck that I couldn’t turn away from.

I see the Tea Party as mostly older, mostly white, sometimes illogical folks lashing out over the fact that things aren’t what they used to be, that the US got hit with a gigantic financial crisis, and that – Heaven Forbid! – the Democrats won an election. (It has to be said that for some, though I hope not most, it is also all about the color of Barack Obama’s skin.)

As fanatical (or fanciful) as the Tea Party sometimes can be, there’s a subset that’s even fringier – the Birthers. These are the folks who believe (or pretend to believe) that Barack Obama is not eligible to be president because, as they claim, he was born in Kenya and therefore is not a “natural born” US citizen, as required by the Constitution.

I personally know many people back in Georgia who could be characterized as Tea Party supporters. I hope none of them is also a serious Birther.

For Birthers, it’s not enough that Obama is an American by right of being born to at least one American parent (in his case, his mother). In the astute legal opinion of your average Birther, laboring away over a keyboard in a doublewide somewhere in the wilds of West Virginia, Obama would also have to be born on US soil to be “natural born”. American soil!

Despite the fact that all evidence points to Obama being born in Hawaii barely three years after that state joined the Union, hard-core Birthers refuse to believe it.

For this reason, most Birthers seem delusional (meaning there really is something wrong with them), or else they are cynical pranksters trying to egg on those others who are delusion.

The worst offender, in my mind, is Donald Trump, who made the Birther issue the linchpin of his so-called presidential campaign. He supposedly went so far as to send a crack team of special investigators to Honolulu on a loudly publicized, but insubstantial, wild goose chase to uncover the “truth” behind Obama’s origins.

I’m sure Trump never really believed the Birther nonsense (he’s not that stupid), but he was happy to stoke the conspiracy flames for his own self-promotional, giving the movement a sheen (very oily sheen?) of respectability. Because of this, my opinion of the man went from him being mildly ridiculous and obnoxious to being outright despicable.

(Ask my wife how I feel about Trump. She has seen me practically leap over the sofa trying to find the off switch on the remote whenever his face appears on TV. Following the Birther business, I cannot stand the sight of the man.)

Most Birthers, however, are true believers convinced that Americans born on foreign soil (and, for them, that means Obama) cannot rightfully be president. So, imagine my glee when, a few weeks ago, there was an unexpected turn of events in the Birther saga. And it came from deep in the heart of Tea Party country.

A rising star in the Republican Party is Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas and a conservative with impeccable Tea Party credentials. 

Cruz is smart. He graduated Harvard Law School – just like Barack Obama. And he’s ambitious. There’s already talk of him running for president in 2016, even though he’s only a one-term Senator – just like Barack Obama. He has an American mother and non-US father – just like Barack Obama. And he was born on foreign soil – just like Barack, wait, no, not like Barack Obama.

Unlike Obama, Cruz is the real deal. He actually was born abroad, in Canada, a fact that people only seemed to realize recently, after months of him generating White House buzz among the Tea Party faithful. Mon Dieu! To quote an old Cheech and Chong routine: “You are Canadien, not you are?”

I love this. A charismatic conservative firebrand, the answer to the presidential dreams of Tea Partiers (and presumably Birthers), has the exact background that Birthers claim disqualifies the current, much despised Commander in Chief.

The good news (for Cruz) is that it seems most experts who don’t live in the fantasy world of Birtherism agree that being born in Calgary doesn’t make Cruz any less presidential material.

That would also be good news for my children, born American on the foreign soil of Finland, if they ever aspired to run for the highest office in the land, as long as they fulfill another constitutional requirement of living in the States for at least 14 years. In any case, becoming POTUS is nothing I would wish on any of my loved ones.

The bad news (for Birthers) is that the eligibility of foreign-born Cruz leaves them with a dilemma.

They have to either drop him faster than a disgraced Rick Perry or Herman Cain, or be forced to admit that they were wrong. They would have to face the fact that the singular "issue" that has outraged them over the past five years, the issue that they have worked themselves into a tizzy over, harped on, protested against, flooded the Internet with ALL CAP diatribes about, and even took Donald Trump seriously over, was, in fact, from the very beginning simply bogus.

Or they could bend logic and decide, as a supporter quoted on TV did, that “Canada’s not really foreign soil”. Either way, I am enjoying the irony of it all. ¶