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This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and Heather Cox Richardson is with us in the studio today. She's author of Letters from an American, the hugely popular newsletter and substack. She's also the author of many books, including her latest, which is Democracy Awakening, Notes on the State of America. She's also a professor of history at Boston College. Professor Richardson, welcome back to On Point. It's always a pleasure. Okay, so I'm going to start...
With something a little bit different today, since you are in the studio here with me, I've got a little bit of a highlighted text here on my screen. I'm going to turn the screen towards you. Can you just read that sentence? All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.
So what's that? What is that? That is the beginning of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified 1868. I've been told it's your favorite amendment. It is. Everybody has a favorite amendment. That happens to be mine. So this is the first sentence of the first section of the 14th Amendment, which really means something significant. Is there any way, any possible way, you think, to interpret that language in
other than you're born here, you're a citizen here? No. No, there really isn't. And I could tell you how people get around that by trying to create a different pathway around it. But
In order really to understand what the primarily Republicans in Congress were doing in 1866 when they first began to explore the question of how do you decide who's a citizen in this new post-Civil War period, you really have to look at the Civil Rights Act of 1866. And what's interesting about that is when they talked about the Civil Rights Act of 1866 –
I'm sorry, the civil rights bill because it doesn't become a law. They are very aware that it's not just black Americans who have faced discriminatory legislation in Massachusetts, for example. The Irish did in California, indigenous Americans and Chinese immigrants did.
And Mexican immigrants all face discriminatory legislation. So they write this 1866 bill in which they explicitly say all races, everybody who is here becomes a citizen. And then Andrew Johnson, who succeeds Trump,
Abraham Lincoln, vetoes that bill. And one of the reasons he vetoes it, and he talks about this, is that he says you can't, you cannot, and I'm paraphrasing, you cannot meet the Jew intent to include Chinese people. And he's very concerned about gypsies. That's something else he puts in there.
That you could include all these people as citizens of the United States. Plus, if you really mean to do that, why do you have to add that to the Constitution? Because you're arguing that the Constitution already says it under this other thing we can talk about. So when they write the 14th, they explicitly take that into consideration and say, yeah, they just are citizens under the Constitution. And yes, obviously that means everybody. Okay. Well, yeah.
We're going to go into that deep history in detail with you. But the reason why I wanted to have you here with us today is that obviously there currently there are, as you're saying, several people in the Republican Party, including the president of the United States, who actually disagree with you. We're the only country in the world that does this with birthright, as you know.
And it's just absolutely ridiculous. But, you know, we'll see. We think we have very good grounds. People have wanted to do this for decades. So the this is ending birthright citizenship. And that is from President Trump's first day in office this time around, January 20th of this year, when one of the first things he did was sign an executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. So
So let me give a little bit more background to listeners here, Professor, if I can. This obviously wasn't a surprise, right, because he had been repeatedly saying during the 2024 campaign that he would sign such an order. I mean, here's an example. This current policy is based on a historical myth that
and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates. There aren't that many of them around. It's amazing. Who wants this? Who wants to have prisoners coming into our country? Who wants to have people who are very sick coming into our country, people from mental institutions coming into our country? And come they will, they're coming by the thousands, by the tens of thousands. As part of my plan to secure the border on day one,
Of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law,
Going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship. So we're playing these segments of President Trump speaking in their entirety or at least long chunks of it in order for people to hear fairly what he said. And also it's quite revealing to me how he clearly goes off script sometimes and you can hear him jump back on script.
But that's actually really significant. And one of the things that we don't obviously have to talk about this today. He's not at full mental acuity. And this is a huge problem that we're not dealing with this because we're trying, as you say, to change the very foundations of what it means to be an American. According to the words of somebody who, you know, just three nights ago from when you and I are recording, you know, he didn't know what the Declaration of Independence was.
So this is somewhat – not even somewhat. This is problematic. So let's say the business at hand. But I feel like that's this whole red – a factory of red flags that we are not adequately addressing in this country. Well, exactly. And when a president of the United States calls something that is written in the Constitution a historical myth, it's – we have to pause and focus on things like that, which is –
What we're going to do here. But the other reason and you wrote about this in your sub stack that I wanted to provide this context has to do with the actions that the Trump administration is currently taking that are having an impact on not just U.S. citizens naturalized, but U.S. born citizens. Right. Because they have been removing some of them from the country. Right.
who, again, under the 14th Amendment, have the right to due process. They're, first of all, birthright citizens, and they have the right to due process on U.S. soil. So here's a little news coverage this week from MSNBC on the deportation of two Honduran women and their U.S.-born citizen children from Louisiana.
So when asked by reporters why the Trump administration is deporting U.S.-born citizens, here is what White House Borders R. Tom Homan said. I'd said from day one,
If you enter this country illegally, it's a crime. If you choose to have a U.S. citizen child knowing you're in this country illegally, you put yourself in that position. You put your family in that position. What we did is remove children with their mothers who requested their children depart with them. They weren't deported. We don't deport U.S. citizens. The parents made that decision, not the United States government. OK, so let's dig into that for a little bit here. The Trump administration, as you just heard, a
asserts that the women who were unauthorized immigrants were given the choice to take their children with them and that they chose to do so. In fact, here's Secretary of State Marco Rubio on NBC News. Three U.S. citizens ages four, seven and two were not deported. Their mothers who are legally in this country were deported. The children went with their mothers. Those children are U.S. citizens.
They can come back into the United States if there's their father or someone here who wants to assume them. But ultimately, who was deported was their mother, their mothers who were here illegally. The children just went with their mothers. So Secretary Rubio there mentioned the father of these fathers of these children, specifically one of them. OK, so just a few days ago, Gracie Willis, who's an attorney representing one of those U.S. born children, said,
says that the Trump administration has been completely misleading on this. She told MSNBC's Jose Diaz-Balart that DHS officers did not give the child's father the chance to stop that child from being removed from the country.
There was a one-minute phone call. There was a two-minute phone call. There was one minute of those two minutes where the father and mother were able to speak, and they were asserting the child's U.S. citizenship on speakerphone with the ICE officer who was in the room with the mother. And the ICE officer said, oh, yeah, we don't know if she's going to be deported yet. And as soon as the father started providing the phone number for an attorney, the ICE officer hung up the phone. That was the last time they spoke to each other until the mother landed in Honduras.
So the government says the mother wrote a letter asking that her child, U.S.-born child, go with her to Honduras. What do you say to that?
The letter itself, ICE has been misrepresenting what's in this letter. The letter, as was just stated, says, my child will come with me. I will bring my child. It's not a statement of desire. It's not a statement of what the mother hoped or wanted to happen. And in fact, what we now know is the mother was told, your child will be deported with you, and was told to write this letter that said, my child will come with me. She was never provided an opportunity to make a different choice.
Again, that's Gracie Willis on MSNBC. Professor Richardson, you wrote about this. And why did you feel like this was an important place to start one of your more recent letters to an American? The question of who is a U.S. citizen is not just about the individuals involved. It's a question of what we want for our country and how we treat the people in it. That is what the government considers is important for U.S. citizens.
So this moment is, I think, a struggle over the very nature of the United States, not simply over whether a four-year-old with stage four cancer is going to have access to medicine, which itself is, you know, sort of a headline, but what we consider the meaning of America and
That's a really, really big question. And it's not new. We've been grappling with this really since at least 1790 when we had the first Naturalization Act deciding who could be welcome in America. And much of our domestic politics has always...
always centered around who gets to be a member of American society and who doesn't and what the U.S. government is going to do to support those who we consider to be central to who we are and what it's going to do for those it does not consider central. And so I think in this moment, you're watching a political movement trying to change the nature of America in part by terrorizing both undocumented immigrants
But also their children, so U.S. citizens. And that's, you know, we've not been here before. And that's a really important moment. We've not been here before, even though this has been a battle to expand the meaning of who belongs under the category of we the people since 1790, as you said?
There's a really important distinction between who can become a naturalized citizen, who can come in and go through the process of naturalization. And we put in the United States, there was a law in 1790, the first naturalization law, that I'd love to get into more because it has some really important distinctions in it that are not going to hold. And it's one of the things that the 14th Amendment is going to try to address.
But that's different than who is a citizen when they are born here. And that's actually in the Constitution. And they don't deal with it explicitly because in part they're working so much from the common law that they're taking from England that does talk about a natural born citizen. But also in part because you've got to remember in the period in which they're writing the Constitution, there's lots of different people moving around and coming and going and who belongs to whom. And we've only got originally the 13 colonies and so on and so forth. Yeah.
So I'll let you pick that up in just a second. Heather Cox Richardson is with us today, and we are hearing the full and true story of birthright citizenship in this country. This is On Point.
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Professor Richardson, one of the reasons why I enjoy talking to you so much is we can very clearly connect things that are happening in this moment, literally second by second, to America's long and complex history. And I wanted to ask you something about what we heard Secretary Rubio say a little bit earlier, you know, because he says he asserts, yes, these the children who have been removed from the country who are U.S. born citizens, he doesn't question their citizenship.
He doesn't also question the fact that they were removed from the country, but he says, "Hey, since they're U.S. citizens, they can come back. So what's the big deal?" So I said before there's a distinction between people who can be naturalized and people who are natural-born citizens that are born either in this country or under certain conditions elsewhere. And this is something that Americans dealt with immediately after the Civil War because, again, there's a lot of people coming and going in this period.
And as early as 1889, the U.S. government recognized that once somebody had become – was born here and was a citizen here, that the government, that is the country, had an interest in making sure that citizen had the best opportunities and was well protected. So there's actually a case in 1889 where a woman and her husband have come from Scotland with a child who was born in Scotland.
But they have a baby here who is a natural-born citizen. And they leave and go back to Scotland. And then the man abandons the woman and she tries – she thinks he's in America. So she comes back.
And she comes back at a time after 1882 when we don't only get the Chinese Exclusion Act, but we also get a different act about three months later that governs the people who come in through New York. And that says if you're a pauper, you can't come to America. And just as a sideline here, I want to be clear, this is not my research. This is a fabulous immigration historian out of University of California, Berkeley, named Hidetaka Hirota, who writes about this.
And she comes back to America to try and find her errant husband. And they stop her in New York and they say, well, you can't come in because you're destitute.
But then the guy realizes that there's a U.S. citizen there. And so he writes to his superiors who at the time were in the Treasury Department. That's what oversees immigration in that period. And he says, what am I going to do? And the people of the Treasury Department look at this and they say, our interest is in making sure that American citizens are well cared for, that are as healthy as they can be. So the mother and her other child who are not –
otherwise eligible to come into the United States should come in with that small child so that the small child, the citizen, is surrounded by the loving parent. And that's not the only time that happens. It happens again a few years later. So there's, like I say, this is about defining America. If you have U.S. citizens in this period, in the late 19th century,
The government wants them to be well cared for, to grow up to be good American citizens. It's one of the impulses of the progressive era. We're doing the opposite now, saying we don't care if you're a U.S. citizen. We're going to toss you out. We're going to break up your family. We're going to send you to a place where we're not sure how you're going to be treated because we in the United States of America don't really care about citizenship. We care about a certain kind of belonging to a certain kind of idea of America. Yeah.
This is so interesting. We can only speculate, given what you said and that historical precedent, we can only speculate what would happen or what will happen if U.S.-based family members of those children do want to bring them back. I mean, in an ideal circumstance, they would be allowed back. But as you said, this is really a question of defining America. And I think the Trump administration has been quite clear on what definition they think America is. So we would have to see if those kids would actually be
allowed back easily as the Secretary of State asserts. Well, but without their mothers. Without their mothers. I mean, what are you going to do? You're going to take a three-year-old or this other one-year-old U.S. citizen whose mother was sent back to her country of origin. You've traumatized an American citizen.
And that's going to matter as that child grows up. I guess that's the point. Sorry, I missed the original point of the story about the Irish woman that she was not allowed in but was eventually allowed in because of her U.S. citizen child. That's correct because the U.S. government believed it needed to protect the well-being of a U.S. citizen. And if that meant bringing in the mother –
So be it. Okay. So let's go back then because, you know, it's interesting when we talk about the Constitution, there's an automatic sort of unconscious response thinking, you know, what the framers of the Constitution wanted. But the 14th Amendment came well after the original framing of the Constitution. So just again, you said this at the top of the show, but I want to be clear. I understand it correctly. Why was the need for the specific language of U.S. born people?
people are automatically given citizenship. So the 14th comes from a very different place than the original Constitution and yet it's worth reminding people that it is as much a part of the Constitution as the original part, which is something sometimes originalists don't pay a lot of attention to. The 14th Amendment comes out of the fact that the state laws in the American South after the Civil War continued to discriminate against black Americans.
And they had tried some ways to address that. The Republican Congress had tried some ways to address that, and they had not been successful. So they write the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and one of the things that they have to do is to overturn the Dred Scott decision of 1857. And the Dred Scott decision, which is the Supreme Court decision of that year, said that black Americans could not be citizens.
And so they had to figure out how to address that so that black Americans in the American South would, in fact, be considered citizens. And so they started, as I say, in the Civil Rights Bill of 66 to say all races, whatever. Let's talk about – can we just talk about Dred Scott for a second? Sure.
I mean, you know it so well that you just go speed through it. But it is one of the most consequential, I'd say, Supreme Court decisions in this country's history. Right. And 1857. So pre-Civil War. Can you tell us a story about Dred Scott and why that case ended up the way that it did?
So Dred Scott was an attempt of the Supreme Court to decide the conflict between the northern free labor states and the southern states that supported human enslavement by creating a new standard. And what it did was not only said that Dred Scott, who was an enslaved American, did not have any rights, that black Americans had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.
It not only said that, it also said that the U.S. Congress could not legislate in the U.S. territories, which meant that enslavement would spread there and Congress had no way to stop it so that the free labor states would eventually be outweighed by the slave states in the American South and the American West and slavery would become national.
And that idea, I think, is important here because it's not just about Dred Scott's citizenship. And there were many ways that they could have answered that question that did not create the ruckus that it did. But this was an attempt of the elite enslavers to take over the U.S. government.
And, again, it was not just a question of Dred Scott and his family, which is quite an interesting history. It was a question of what was America going to become? Were people going to have rights or were they not going to have rights? And this is one of the things that spurs the fledgling Republican Party, not just the rights of black Americans, but also, as I say, the Irish and the Chinese. What was the consequence or outcome of the Dred Scott case?
Well, it completely destroyed faith in the U.S. Supreme Court, at least for close to a generation, because it was pretty clearly a political decision. And we now know that James Buchanan, who was about – the decision comes down about a week after he's inaugurated.
which is why it's 57 and not 56. Many people make the mistake of thinking it's 56. It's actually 57, that he was in on it and that this was political. It was not at all an attempt to preserve the ideas of the Constitution, where, in fact, you can see in the 14th, the way they write that 14th, most Americans thought that, at least the ones who were not in part of the slave power, thought that the Constitution itself guaranteed freedom.
birthright citizenship because of it's in a funny place it's in the section under who can become a president and they talk about a natural born citizen in that and as I say they pick that up in the 14th and say yeah we're going to put into law into constitution that if you're born here we don't care where you come from or anything else if you're born here
You're a U.S. citizen. And that's different, as I say, from who can come in from outside. Right. And that's a distinction that actually is going to matter quite a bit until the present. Well, you quoted a part of the Dred Scott decision in your newsletter, and I just want to read it because it is so jarring, right? Yeah.
The Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent, quote, and this is from the decision, are not included and were not intended to be included under the word citizens in the Constitution and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. Yeah, that's Roger Taney.
The chief justice at the time. Yeah. Well, again, which is – I'm not a lawyer. I'm a historian. But if that were the case, we would not have needed the Naturalization Act of 1790, which does in fact make a distinction between –
distinguished between the immigrants coming into the United States and explicitly says that you must be free and white. And that's, you know, that's after the Constitution. Okay. So getting back to the specific language of the 14th Amendment, I had you read the... Isn't it a lovely amendment? It's your favorite. It's my favorite. Well, I mean, it is the one that I think most people just generally recognize as equal protection under the law, which is a foundation
I will say foundational, even though it came a century after the founding of the country. It's a foundational concept of, as you said, what it means to be American and what this country stands for. But the Trump administration and its supporters are quibbling over a clause in that first sentence. OK, so here's the sentence again. All persons born or naturalized in the United States are.
born or naturalized in the United States. And here's the clause. And subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States. So with that subject to the jurisdiction thereof in mind, just listen to this for a second, Professor Richardson. This is Charles J. Cooper, chairman and founding partner of Cooper and Kirk, the law firm. And he testified at the House Judiciary Committee in February, on February 25th,
that President Trump's interpretation of birthright citizenship is correct, that essentially Trump doesn't believe there's any such thing. And the reasoning rests on those words, subject to the jurisdiction thereof. So here's Cooper. Why did its framers choose such a strange way to say that?
Why didn't they just say, "Subject to the laws of the United States"? Doing so would have been quite natural given that this straightforward, unambiguous phrase is used in both Article III and Article VI. The clause also ensures that birthright citizenship makes newborns citizens of both the United States and of the states wherein they reside, that is, where they live, their home.
This word "standing alone" implies a lawful permanent residence, and it plainly excludes tourists and other lawful visitors, as well as illegal aliens who are prohibited by law from residing in a state, although they all must obey our laws. Okay, that is so fascinating. I understand you're not a lawyer, but you hear what he's doing there, that if you don't— if you're not a resident of a state,
If you're, let's say, you know, if you're if you are a legal tourist coming in from Saudi Arabia, let's say this happens, you know, and doing birth tourism and coming. This happens. We're based in Boston. This happens here in Boston. Coming in, staying for six months, having your child flying back with a private nurse to Saudi Arabia. Well, therefore, you're not really a resident here. So your child shouldn't be a citizen. I mean, how do you what do you think about that?
Well, so remember when the framers wrote the Constitution, nobody was engaging in any kind of let's hop around the world in a jet. I mean, so it's a little hard. I mean, you certainly could stop that sort of travel if you wanted to now because you're operating on a very different kind of issue of transportation and technology. But
That's, to me, a side issue. Let's start with under the jurisdiction thereof and why did they say that? I mean, that's just such a no-brainer. It's frustrating even to hear because, again, the country is – at the time of the writing of the constitution, it's 13 states. The whole North American continent belongs to other people including indigenous Americans and that's going to be a real issue in the writing of these constitutional laws.
designations of citizenship is because there are nations within the American nation or adjacent to the American nation. And that means they have different, uh,
I mean, I'm sort of stammering because they have different legal systems. They have different allegiances and so on. And they are often at military odds with the United States of America. So the idea that somehow this is about who's controlled by a state is completely ahistorical.
I mean, again, we're reading things into the past to try and make them a political argument in this moment. And it just seems to me to be operating in such extraordinary bad faith, again, with this attempt to try to create a new version of what it means to be an American. You know, do we have birthright citizenship or in which people who are born here are
the basis of who we are as a country and that we want to protect them? Or do we want to say that we are a country based essentially in white supremacy? Hmm.
Well, it's interesting because attorney Charles Cooper, who we just heard, also pointed to another case, which you wrote about as well. This is the case of Wong Kim Ark. Wong Kim Ark, yes, huge. Okay, so this is how Cooper described his belief of the importance of the Wong Kim Ark case, which was late 19th century again. The Supreme Court's 1898 decision in Wong Kim Ark...
had nothing to do with the children of illegal aliens or aliens lawfully but temporarily admitted to the country. The court carefully framed the issue before it twice in verbatim terms as involving quote, a child born in the United States of parents of Chinese descent who have a permanent domicile and resident in the United States.
So Professor Wong Kim Ark was born in, as you note, 1873 in the United States. He was the child of Chinese parents. Tell us about this. Who could not become citizens at the time. Under the laws of the time. That's right. That's right. And so, again, this is one of the things that's very frustrating in this moment in American history is that, you know, we don't get the concept of an
undocumented or a person here illegally until really quite late in the 20th century. So, you know, we get this, you know, the people come and go and there are certainly requirements for being able to come into the United States after 1882, either racial components through the Chinese Exclusion Act or, as I say, you have to have enough money that you can support yourself by a later law of 1882.
But the militarization of our border is really quite late. And that idea that somehow in 1898 when the Supreme Court decided Wong Kim Ark that they had made a distinction between people here legally and people here illegally is just completely ahistorical. It wasn't a thing.
you know, that you could make a distinction at that point because nobody saw that as being part of what it meant to be an American. Okay, Professor Heather Crocker-Richardson, hang on for just a second because I do actually want to hear you tell us a little bit more of the life story of Wong Kim Ark and how you wrote about it. Don't give me that look! Ha ha!
You know it. We'll talk about it because it does really get straight to this point that distinctions are being made now that weren't being made when the concept of birthright citizenship was enshrined in the Constitution of the United States. So we'll be right back. This is On Point. On Point.
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Professor Richardson, I just do want to dig in a little bit more into the case of Wong Kim Ark, because as you note in your letters, he is a U.S.-born citizen around what, late, mid-1990s?
Early to mid 1870s. Right. We don't know exactly. Of Chinese parents. He actually did return to China in 1889 when his parents went back. That's right. They repatriate. The whole family goes back. He marries.
And then he comes back to the U.S. and does not have a problem. Then he goes back to see his newborn son and to see his wife again. And when he tries to come back in, then they stop him and say, you are not a citizen. And he says, yes, I am. And there have been a number of cases, by the way. He wasn't the only one who sued over this, but he's the case that goes to the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court looks at the case in this moment, which I have to add is a moment of extraordinary hysteria against Chinese immigrants to the United States. And they say that, listen, even if you don't like Chinese immigrants at this point, you cannot overrule the Constitution, which says he is a citizen. So Wong Kim Ark became sort of that gold standard of this is –
We are going to embrace birthright citizenship going forward. And that's stood ever since. Again, very different than who can come in from another country, but who is here. It's interesting. I've pulled up the majority opinion from the case, Justice Horace Gray. It's so fascinating because here's part of what he wrote.
As appears upon the face of the 14th Amendment, as well as from the history of the times, this was not intended to impose any new restrictions upon citizenship or to prevent any persons from becoming citizens by the fact of birth within the United States. It is declaratory in form and enabling and extending in effect. I mean, the justice there is saying...
It is what it is in the 14th Amendment. There's no other way to interpret it. Which is interesting because, as I say, this is a period when you have a real push among some people in the American West to get rid of the 14th Amendment because they don't like the idea of Chinese immigrants being treated equally to white Americans in the West. They don't care very much about black Americans in the West in this period, but they're tied in knots over Asians. Right.
And so, you know, this is not just about black citizenship. It's also about citizenship for anybody coming in. Do you know what's interesting to me? You know how you mentioned when we were talking about the current objections to under the jurisdiction thereof in the 14th Amendment? We heard Charles Cooper a little bit. In the Wong Kim Ark decision, 1898, again, there's another section in which the majority decision takes this on.
Like just square on when he says the real object of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and the qualifying words of all persons born in the United States subject to the jurisdiction thereof.
would appear to have been to exclude. That's what he's saying. It looks like it does, but it does not. In fact, it says it has already been shown by the law of England and by our own law from the time of the first settlement of the English colonies in America. There have been recognized exemptions, exceptions to the fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within this country. But then he says those principles change.
Those exceptions rest were long ago distinctly stated by this court. He's saying only diplomatic exemptions, actually, not no others. And I'm sorry, I kind of like hashed my way through that. But it's this seems to have been resolved by the courts.
130 years ago? Well, it was. But let's think about let's take it from the other direction. And that's that. Why are we talking about this again the way we are? And it's worth remembering that Trump's MAGA Republicans are a political project.
I'm not thinking this sort of about the principles of citizenship, which are important. I mean, that's really thinking about what it means to be an American and what the government should do for Americans and that Americans should do for the government and so on. Those are vital questions at every moment.
But in this moment, we've had the rise in the United States of this radical right movement. And much of its power has come from fear of the other, from fear of the immigrants coming in. And this is, of course, a pattern that Viktor Orban used in Hungary to seize power and to destroy democracy there. But in the United States, especially after COVID, we did have an extraordinary swell of people coming from over the southern border, in part because the United States –
economy was the strongest in the world. So if you had countries like Venezuela, where the economy was tanking, and many of the other Latin American countries where the economy was not good, they kind of squeezed the migrants that were in those countries out. And so this is why we had, for example, Haitians at our border, is they began to come over the border to try and find work in this country, where in fact, we had a shortage of workers, if you recall. So that weird
push after COVID, the weird numbers of people coming in after COVID, really were fuel for this political movement. And they continue to be fuel for that political movement because anti-immigrant sentiment has always been present in the United States. And it's just something that in this moment, this particular president is really doubling down on in order to solidify his base at a time when, you know, his numbers are actually not terribly strong. And one of the big things he had going for him was that when he talked about being harsh against immigrants, he was
That really goosed his base. It's actually not doing that any longer, but he's still doubling down on it because, you know, it's not clear he's going to be able to regain any ground on the economy. And he is underwater on every single other issue. And we're only 102 days in. You know, I hope you don't mind me asking you a question that removes us from the realm of history and just more sort of your view on – well, no, this is what you write about, about the uniqueness of the American project.
Because I think one thing that the Trump administration and Trump supporters and he himself points to is that this idea of birthright citizenship is actually not the norm globally. That you could probably, and correct me if I'm wrong, probably point to more places where you can be born in a country but you still have to go through a long process in order to be a citizen thereof. Yeah.
And so therefore, you know, they're saying, well, we should have that here, too, so that we have the quote unquote right kinds of citizens. I mean, what do you think about that? You know, one of the things that frustrates me so in this moment is the people who claim to be defending America are destroying it and destroying its uniqueness and its greatness. You know, I will say that.
America has always been different because – and I'm not to say – I'm not saying that we have never made mistakes. Of course we have, sometimes more often than not. But we were a country where you could come from anywhere and become an American. And somebody made the point recently that I think it's 46 percent of the people who are running the Fortune 500 companies, I think it is, are either immigrants or children of immigrants. But they're American. Yeah.
And that idea that America is about what you believe in and hard work and being able to create your own future is what has always made America so vibrant and so exciting and so different than other countries where citizenship depended on your religion or your descent or any of those sorts of things that are not – they're not about self-determination.
And that destruction of that, the idea that we want to go to a situation like that is, it seems to me, making what has been just an extraordinary country into a very small one. I mean, why are we taking orders from Hungary? Yeah.
And the way this sort of trying to reshape the idea of what America is, the way it's playing out in the lives of individual Americans, it is disturbing and weird. We talked about the children and the U.S.-born children who had been deported along with their mothers. I was just reading that this week, for example, Adam Pena, he's a California attorney and a U.S.-born citizen.
He's an immigration attorney. His family has been here for more than a century. They're as American as you can get. He received a letter from DHS to self-deport.
And he's like, where would I self-deport to? We have been living here for 100 years. We are Americans. And he told a San Diego news station that he thinks that this is an intimidation tactic because he's an immigration lawyer and some other of his fellow immigration lawyers have received similar letters. But nevertheless, I mean—
It is an intimidation tactic, an intimidation against the core idea of one's American-ness. And so to that point, actually, there has been some attempted action on Capitol Hill this week. Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington went so far as to introduce – she's a Democrat –
to detain or deport U.S. citizens. And here's what she said on the House floor just two days ago. ICE has zero authority to even detain U.S. citizens. As ICE's own policy states, quote, as a matter of law, ICE cannot assert its civil immigration enforcement authority to arrest and or detain a U.S. citizen. OK, so that's her proposed amendment. And here is a follow up comment from Democratic Representative Ted Lieu of California.
The fact that Democrats and my colleague Representative Pramila Jayapal feel the need to even introduce an amendment that says ICE cannot deport U.S. citizens is crazy. This should not even be a discussion. It's not even a question. U.S. citizens cannot be deported by ICE. It's the law. It's the Constitution. I will be astounded
If Republicans vote no on this. Okay, so let's listen to the roll call for how the vote went. Mr. McClintock votes no. Mr. Schmidt votes no. Mr. Grothman. Mr. Grothman votes no. Ms. Hageman votes no. Mr. Moore votes no. Mr. Harris votes no. Mr. Gooden votes no. The clerk will report. Mr. Chairman, there are 11 ayes and 12 noes. The noes have it, and the amendment is not agreed to. Mr. Chairman. Who seeks recognition? So.
Representative Jayapal's amendment that ICE cannot deport U.S. citizens using taxpayer dollars was voted down by Republican members of the House. Well, there's even something more, I think, of concern to American citizens right now. And that's what happened in Oklahoma City a couple of weeks ago when –
ICE agents and people who claim they were ICE agents and U.S. Marshals and members of the FBI, although the Marshals and the FBI have said they were not involved, although they knew it was going to happen, went back
broke into a house and trashed the house and took the cell phones, the laptops, and all the money that was there, which was the family's life savings because they had a search warrant to go into that house to look for undocumented immigrants. But in fact, the people that they were looking for had moved out of the house and the people who were there were U.S. citizens who had just recently arrived from Maryland and
And they sent the kids out, the teenage daughters outside in their underwear in the rain with their mother while they did this to the house. And the mother kept saying, we're U.S. citizens, we're U.S. citizens. And then left them with, again, no way to contact anybody and no money and no card to know where they could get those things back. Now, that idea that we can go after U.S. citizens with our immigration and customs enforcement, law enforcement officers, that's
To look for undocumented immigrants, that puts every single American citizen at risk. And as you say, I think that's an intimidation factor. But I think it's also this idea that unless you are on the side of a particular political party so that you're not going to be intimidated, that you're going to be pushed outside of the people who get to have rights in the United States. And that's a much bigger, as I say, political project that would redefine America. Okay.
1866, 1868, 1872, 1898. I mean, over and over and over again, every time this question of if you were born in the United States, are you or are you not a citizen?
This country has basically unanimously fallen on the side of, yes, you are a citizen. You do have that birthright. And what's fascinating to me, you also wrote a book about the Republican Party pre and post Civil War. That was all championed by the Republican Party in the 19th century. And that's.
That party is not existent anymore. It's the party of Donald Trump. That's correct, yeah. And I want to just, in this last few minutes, and I want to hear what you have to say about this by stealing an idea from your letter on birthright citizenship, because it's not even the party of Ronald Reagan anymore. You pointed out that in Reagan's last speech, January 19th, 1989, his last speech as president of
He actually thought about what makes America so great, and he did so by recalling a letter he had recently received. You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk or Japanese. But anyone from any corner of the earth can come to live in America and become an American.
Professor Richardson, I'm going to give you the last word on here, but let's listen to a little bit more about why Reagan wanted to point this out. We lead the world because unique among nations, we draw our people, our strength from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so, we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America, we breathe life
Into dreams we create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, 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. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.
Ronald Reagan on January 19th, 1989. And it's an important piece there because he was actually saying that at a ceremony to honor George Shultz and the other person to whom he was giving the Medal of Freedom. So he kind of goes off script. I mean, obviously it's written, but he kind of goes off script to insert into that speech honoring them this piece that is clearly his final word. He even says, this is the last speech I'm going to give and this is what I want to say.
That, I think, is significant because he recognized the importance of how we define America and in order to keep it alive and vital and growing. And as I say, you know, this place where anybody can come and be an American, which has always been what made America great, was so important to him that he needed to say it one last time in that particular moment.
Heather Cox Richardson. She's author of the newsletter Letters from an American, and her latest book is Democracy Awakening Notes on the State of America. It is always a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much. Well, thank you for having me. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. This is On Point.
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Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from Boston University Questrom School of Business. A recent episode offers a primer on executive compensation. Listen on for a preview. Here's BU Questrom professor Charlie Tharp. The whole basis of executive compensation is really the idea of what's called agency theory. Shareholders don't manage the company. They can't observe what executives do every day.
So they rely on a board to use compensation to try to align the interests of CEOs and other managers with the people who own the company, the shareholders. And how do you do that? By making a lot of their pay contingent upon increasing the value of the company stock over time. And for, I would say, the vast majority of companies, they require executives to personally own
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