By Paul Weiser
Although we have, at this writing, dodged the bullet of universal amnesty for illegal aliens, amid all the arguments back and forth there is one so true and basic that it has seldom, if ever, been mentioned pro or con. To understand it we must contemplate human reality - not legal fiction.
The reality is that citizenship must be earned. The opposite of "earned" is not "unearned" but "granted," just as "shall issue" is the opposite of "may issue" for state licenses: "shall" means you've met all requirements and demand your right of citizenship; "may" means you come as a groveling supplicant to the powerful.
This is why American blacks have never been full citizens. Instead of meeting all requirements - becoming rich and law-abiding, mingling, losing their accent and distinctive folkways in public - they were always supplicants. What "rights" they received were grants by power - the Reconstruction army of occupation and the federal government. This is their true scar, not race (for West Indian blacks escape it), and is ineradicable.
Mexican illegal immigrants granted citizenship by amnesty would form a similar class of never-equal co- residents, like the class of 1986. Instead of obeying the rules, immigrating legally and ascending to citizenship by hard work and public conformity, they are, would be, and shall always remain less than full Americans no matter what favors their padrons in business and government choose to grant. They would remain forever alien, eternally and justly contemptible for their servile origins and unearned privileges.
As Theodore Roosevelt understood, there can be no hyphenated Americans - no African-Americans, no Mexican-Americans. This is not so much because the hyphen indicates disloyalty (though it frequently does), but because the hyphen is a minus-sign: an everlasting symbol of tainted origin, the devalued title "citizen" thrown to beggars rather than honestly earned.
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