Take six prototypes for puzzling through the contradictions of citizenship and globalization:
1. The child born in San Francisco to a business executive here for three years on an H1B visa who will thereafter return permanently to Italy.
2. The child of a Mexican undocumented alien born in Arkansas who is likely to spend the rest of her life in the United States.
3. The child of an Dominican immigrant born in Washington Heights with both US and Dominican citizenship, who goes to elementary school in Santo Domingo while living with grandparents, inherits property and a business there and ends up voting in Dominican national elections.
4. The child of a Mexican citizen born in Juarez.
5. A tech worker living in Bangalore who’s never been to the United States but watches the Simpsons, wears Levis, is employed by Dell, has cousins in the US, follows US politics closely on MSNBC (is a big fan of John McCain), and would eagerly take an oath to uphold the Constitution.
6. A native-born American who moves permanently to Israel after graduating from college.
I left off my first post on my book Beyond Citizenship suggesting that the barriers to citizenship won’t and shouldn’t be raised. On the politics of birthright citizenship, naturalization, and dual citizenship, see my explanation here. On all three counts, a more restrictive regime is just not in the cards.
On the normative side, for every child of an H1B executive who leaves at age 2 there will be many others who born here who will stay permanently to become organic members of the community, like the child born in Arkansas. If the threshold is raised to exclude such individuals, more members-in-fact will be left outside the citizenship circle. That’s a problem of underinclusion. It creates a problem of coherence and raises the specter of intergenerational caste.
As some of you noted in the comments, immigrant insulation isn't a new phenomenon. I think the technologies of globalization change the picture. Diaspora communities may be able to sustain themselves on a transnational basis. With the dramatic rise in the acceptance of dual citizenship, they’ll be able to maintain the formal tie as well. So the segmentation could be persistent, as in the Dominican example above. The old model of assimilation may no longer hold.
But here’s something that really is new: the underinclusion of members-in-fact outside the territory of the United States.
One of the commenters on my first post pressed the proposition that America is an idea. That’s completely consistent with strong civic notions of American citizenship and identity.
At one time, that idea was distinct. No longer. The American idea of constitutional democracy has gone global. That’s America’s triumph, but it may also be its downfall.
As I ask in the book, if that person in Bangalore wants to take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, on what grounds can we deny him membership? Indeed, why wouldn’t we want to welcome that person to our community. And what of the child born in Juarez, whose interests and identity will be connected to El Paso, Austin, and Washington (perhaps more so than the native-born American who moves to Israel), but who has the bad luck to have been born a mile on the wrong side of the line? On what grounds can she be excluded?
Same thing if we define America in cultural terms. The rest of the world is bathed in American pop culture. (By way of proving the proposition: Baywatch is a top-rated show in even Iran and Venezuela.) As for (somewhat) higher culture, on the other end, it’s been shown that most American high school seniors would fail the naturalization test.
So: whatever it means to be American, it’s everywhere. But that makes it all the harder to draw the membership line in a meaningful way. The citizenship binary doesn't allow for scalar affiliation. And once community on the ground detaches from membership status, citizenship inevitably decays. As an arbitrary quantity, it will be able to do less work for its members. That explains why the “rights and obligations of citizenship” is already an empty quantity, to which I’ll try to turn in my next post.
Related Posts (on one page):
This may already be the case for the elites in both places, and indeed one of my cousins has chosen to marry a well-off Mexican and move to Mexico permanently. I'm sure there is an equivalent couple somewhere in the US, just as there are British/American couples living in both the UK and the US.
The trouble comes when the migration is overwhelmingly one way and caused by the fact that one of the countries runs its affairs badly. As has been stated in other discussions, it would be impossible for the US to take in all the immigrants who might want to come here to get away from bad governments and underdeveloped economies. If several billion more people want to live under good governments and in developed economies, a lot more countries are going to have to put those things in place.
Then maybe some of us can watch their television programs and work for their tech companies. The Indian Matt Groenings and Michael Dells will no doubt do interesting things.
Ironically under the law, many of the examples you give represent individuals with substantial unpaid income tax liabilities who could in theory be arrested on the spot if they ever set foot on US soil.
What an arrogant, and fundamentally incorrect, statement. American democracy is not God's or America's gift to the world, as much as you or George Bush would have us believe it is. While we certainly helped democracy flourish in some parts of the world, we certainly delayed its progress in others. And when countries did and do adopt constitutional democracy, it is more often than not (much more often than not) based on British and European parliamentry models, not American republican democracy.
Our legal system is almost never copied either as most of the world realizes it is inefficient, if not a downright disgrace. Again, countries are more likely to adopt a civil law system or a British System, rather than ours.
What makes you think that tech workers in India are eager to presumably shed their Indian citizenship for American? I'm sure a small minority do wish to get out of India and become American citizens. But by far, the vast majority are just as proud of being Indian as the most patriotic American. Yes, they may want to work here because of the creature comforts. But turn their back on their native country because they think America is a "better" country? Hardly. The tech workers from India, Pakistan, and Singapore that I have worked with are proud of their home countries.
If it's hard to draw the membership line in a meaningful way, then what's so wrong with the way we happen to draw it now? Being born in the physical territory of the US or becoming a citizen through the bureaucratic process may "feel" both over- and under-inclusive, but it at least has the benefit of tradition and general consistency with the way other countries do it, which means that it's less likely to feel "arbitrary" to people than many other lines you might propose.
Also, several of the examples you bring up raise some questions.
#3: how many people are likely to fall into this category and why should anyone be bothered by that?
#3 and 6: as a normative matter, I'm not sure what's wrong with people being citizens of one country and moving to another. We have a large immigrant population in the United States, not all of them wish to sever their official ties with their former homes, nor do I think we expect them to.
#5 suggests that being an American means buying crap from American corporations. I disagree. Also, as much as some American posers like to talk obnoxiously about English Premier League soccer, I don't think the U.K. is feeling a moral crisis about the bars to those people becoming British citizens.
#4 -- you ask "And what of the child born in Juarez, whose interests and identity will be connected to El Paso, Austin, and Washington (perhaps more so than the native-born American who moves to Israel), but who has the bad luck to have been born a mile on the wrong side of the line? On what grounds can she be excluded?" This seems like a stretch. We've had something called borders in the world for centuries, even though some Alsatian French people might feel more in common with the Germans than the Parisian French, and some people in Montana probably have more in common with the Canadians in Saskatchewan and Alberta than with the Americans in Atlanta or San Diego. The answer to your question is that Juarez is in Mexico.
I don't think any country starting from a clean slate has ever chosen to adopt a British common law system. The common law countries all have it because they inherited it as part of their history of British rule. One might observe that virtually all the common law countries have better legal systems than virtually all the civil law countries, but maybe that's just cheering for the home team.
To adopt an open borders policy (which really means no borders) would create even more chaos than we have now. It would also mean a tremendous increase the the US population which is already at 300 million. Professor Spiro should think about the consequences of what he advocates. It would mean an end to the welfare state because it would no longer be affordable. It would also put a tremendous strain on resources.
I'm going to guess that Spiro believes in global warming and supports a drastic cutback in carbon emissions. Does he think people come to the US to consume less? Does he not think that adding an extra 100 million people to the US population wouldn't doom any such cutback in carbon emissions? You can't have both open borders and less carbon emission without virtually deindustrializing the US.
Actually, I would say it is just the opposite. Except for the U.K. and Ireland, all the Western European countries have civil law systems that work quite well thank you. Even the U.S. contains a couple civil law jurisdictions (Louisiana, Puerto Rico, and I think Guam). By necessity we have adopted many aspects of civil law (the UCC is a prime example). The common law is simply archaic.
The natural born statute aside, I don't think there can be a real discussion on naturalized citizenship in terms of a global right when it should be viewed as an invested priviledge.
Before you wrote this post, or an entire book, maybe you should have famaliarized yourself with this:
(emphasis mine)
Granted, you can fudge on that and after naturalization, former citizens of certain countries (mostly western European) can petition the State Department to have their birth citizenship recognized and be a fully recognized dual citizen by the U.S. But the general rule of naturalization as a U.S. citizen is that you "entirely renounce and abjure" all other allegiances.
Empty?
Really?
"Ambiguous," yes. "In many areas, there is no bright-line distinction between citizenship and alienage." Sure.
But "empty?"
I'll wait for the explanation.
No, a diplomat is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, workers on visas are.
That anyone would choose to view Baywatch does not demonstrate American cultural assimilation, merely that they have low threshold for how to waste their time.
As for the American high-school seniors who would fail a citizenship test, I'm all for having US adults test into citizenship when their birthright citizenship becomes conditional at age 18.
Wow this is shockingly ignorant. Regardless of the "its a different system" civil law countries are notorious for abusing and minimizing the rights of the accused. France, Spain, and Italy for instance are advanced countries with convoluted legal processes and a substantial degree of suspicious entanglement between the courts and politics.
But this has everything to do with independence: independent judges, juries, and prosecutors in the English system and judges, juries, and prosecutors who are all part of the same branch of government in the historically civil law countries.
Common law has been dead for 200 years. The idea that common law rules in any nation is wrong. Its all parliamentary law now. The question then is one of independence and conception of fundamental rights.
I suppose you mean, "on what basis can one deny that he is culturally American?" It's important to rephrase the question so it doesn't imply that we determine who is culturally American, i.e. that cultural groups determine their own membership. French notions of culture aside, the limits of a culture are a question for ethnographers, or cultural anthropologists, or philosophers perhaps, and I can't imagine that there is one scientifically (or philosophically) "correct" answer.
So if any line is going to be drawn -- and it must; I don't think we can have the whole world voting in our elections -- it will have to be an arbitrary one. There's no sense decrying the arbitrariness of it.
All this was puzzled out in the 1840's, mainly by german american philosophers who sought to understand how america could hold together as a country without the bounds of ethnicity, religion and so on. Their concern was driven in part by a desire to see their fatherland finally become a nation as they felt it naturally should be, but wasn't at this point in time.
Their answer was simple. our nation was defined by ideals rather than those other things. To this day, because of their work, literally the word nationalism doesn't mean the same thing in american english as it is in "English" english. in england a nationalist is a soft word for a racist. in america race literally has nothing to do with it.
The side effect of it is the belief that certain ideas are unamerican--that is so alien to our culture that you cannot hold them and claim to be part of our community. that can be taken too far, e.g. in the mccarthy era, but i guess it beat ethnicity as a binding force. as a man once said in a short story, if you take away freedom in france, its still france. but if you take away freedom in america, its no longer america.
The other implication of this is that Americans are more prone to identify themselves with ideological brethren all over the world. which is why america is more likely to pursue a moral foreign policy than most other nations, including most other democracies.
So to concentrate on citizenship misses the real picture. what makes newcomers american is not blood or birth, but assimilation. and that is the issue. and yeah, we need to revive our belief in assimilation, especially on issues involving freedom and democracy. i don't particularly care whether a person eats pizza and hamburgers, so much as i care whether they belief in ordered liberty.
This is the isolation due to mass immigration without assimilation that Robert Putnam recently wrote about.
From
http://tinyurl.com/yo43y5
We have truly lost something by failing to adopt a more nationalistic model of citizenship.
I meant to say "maintain" instead of "adopt".
What aspects of the common law do you find archaic? What I'm trying to get at is how do you distinguish between a common law system and a civil law system. Take Puerto Rico for instance - the main difference between Puerto Rico and Delaware (or any other state) is that Puerto Rico has statutorily defined contract law and tort law, and limits the freedom to dispose of property after death.
The US border with Mexico is not terribly effective, but that's because of lax enforcement of our immigration laws and inadequate border control. Neither is a law of nature.
As for immigration being a big step to take that's true. But that's not enough to deter hundreds of millions from wanting to take that step for the material benefits of US residency. No one has shown me a good reason why we should have open borders. I can give you many reasons we shouldn't.
Not according to the U.S. government. As far as the U.S. is concerned, when naturalized, one is a U.S. and only a U.S. citizen. It is true that a person's home country generally only recognize renouncing of their citizenship if it is done in front of a consular officer of the home country. So many naturalized citizens (like me) are in the peculiar situation where their country of birth recognizes them as a dual citizen (in my case of the U.S. and U.K.) but the U.S. recognizes them only as a citizen of the U.S. (because of the citizenship oath).
As a practical matter, this doesn't have much effect on people's day to day lives. But these subtleties do matter when you are discussing these things.
Wow this is shockingly ignorant. Regardless of the "its a different system" civil law countries are notorious for abusing and minimizing the rights of the accused.
Wow, considering the U.S. holds half the entire world's prison population and our incarceration rate is the highest by far in the world, calling me ignorant is kind of shockingly provincial.
It would be a simple matter to introduce a bill in Congress allowing this. If is' such a good idea, why hasn't it been done? The answer is obvious: any politician proposing such a bill would be booted out of office next election.
The overwhelming majority of the American people do not want unrestricted illegal immigration. Only a fool of a professor, living in his liberal ivory tower, would believe otherwise.
Go ahead, prove me wrong. Get that bill introduced, and we'll see who's right.
One perfect example is the idea that a lay jury is capable of deciding complex technical issues in both civil and criminal cases. From the OJ Simpson trial (where interviews with the jurors revealed they ignored DNA evidence simply because they didn't understand it), to the Health South trial (where the jury found Richard Scrushi (sp?) innocent basically because they didn't understand the complicated fraud he had perpetrated and he managed to paint himself as a nice church-going guy) to any number of tort trials, especially medical malpractice cases, where the scientific evidence is just blatantly fraudulent, demonstrates that a jury of ones peers is often a bad way to dispense justice.
Just because somebody dreamed it up in the twelfth or thirteenth century as a check on the excesses of the nobility and church, doesn't mean it is still a good idea 800 years later.
On plenty of grounds. Perhaps he's a convicted criminal or a sociopath. Kim Jong Il is known to love American-style luxuries, does he have an equal claim?
But more to the point, whether our theoretical Indian wants to be an American does not decide the matter. The question that must be answered is, does America accept him as a new citizen? He may come with automatic cultural assimilation, and that should be a factor when he applies in line like everybody else. But if all 1 billion people in India start buying their Festival of Lights regalia at Wal-Mart, does that mean they all get added to our Social Security rolls? Are the all now entitled to live anywhere in the physical United States that they wish?
This is a bit of deja vu, in a previous comment thread I went round and round with Thoughtful who posited that adding 1 billion more American citizens would "merely" triple our population density, and he couldn't see a problem with that. I'll hazard a bald assertion that most Americans would have a legitimate problem with unlimited expandsion of citizenship, and the checks and requirements in place today represent the American populace's desire to control for it. I have yet to see any rational case that Americans should not be allowed to legislate this policy as they see fit.
And if, say, an Iranian who became a naturalized American citizen publicly claimed to hold allegiance to Iran in support of Ahmadinejad and against the U.S., does this foolish professor actually believe, as he states, that the "renunciation component of the naturalization oath has never been enforced, and never will be"?
The fact that Spiro has an anti-American, scofflaw agenda is obvious from his post -- which is directly contrary to the United States':
Oath of American Citizenship:
"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God."
Certainly, citizens of other countries would love to be able to vote our taxpayer dollars into their foreign pockets. The question here is: why is Spiro being their enabler?
The birth rule does include some people who aren't culturally Americans, but those cases are rare compared to the number of cases where it provides a clear and accurate rule, and sometimes U.S. citizenship is forfeited later.
The people most harmed are not the kids born in Juarez to Mexican parents, per se. They are the non-naturalized people born abroad to non-U.S. persons who have lived most of their lives in the U.S. and are culturally U.S. persons. Some have no memory of their country of citizenship and do not speak the language of their country or have strong cultural ties to it. An exception to the general rules for people who have spent, for example, nine or more years as minors in the U.S., are emancipated, and seek citizenship (and/or legal status) within three years of attaining the age of eighteen would be a humane addition to existing grounds for citizenship and/or naturalization, that would reconcile cultural reality to citizenship most easily.
“It was in these fateful and formative years that the English-speaking peoples began to devise methods of determining legal disputes which survive in substance to this day. A man can only be accused of a civil or criminal offence which is clearly defined and known to the law. The judge is an umpire. He adjudicates on such evidence as the parties choose to produce. Witnesses must testify in public and on oath. They are examined and cross-examined, not by the judge, but by the litigants themselves or their legally qualified and privately hired representatives. The truth of their testimony is weighed not by the judge b[ut] by twelve good men and true, and it is only when this jury has determined the facts that the judge is empowered to impose sentence, punishment, or penalty according to law.
“All might seem very obvious, even a platitude, until one contemplates the alternative system which still dominates a large portion of the world. Under Roman law, and systems derived from it, a trial in those turbulent centuries, and in some countries even to-day, is often an inquisition. The judge makes his own investigation into the civil wrong or the public crime, and such investigation is largely uncontrolled. The suspect can be interrogated in private. He must answer all questions put to him. His right to be represented by a legal adviser is restricted. The witnesses against him can testify in secret and in his absence. And only when these processes have been accomplished is the accusation or charge against him formulated and published. Thus often arises secret intimidation, enforced confessions, torture, and blackmailed pleas of guilty.
“These sinister dangers were extinguished from the Common Law of England more than six centuries ago. By the time Henry II's great-grandson, Edward I had died English criminal and civil procedure had settled into a mould and tradition which in the mass govern the English-speaking peoples to-day. In all claims and disputes, whether they concerned the grazing lands of the Middle West, the oilfields of California, the sheep-runs and gold-mines of Australia, or the territorial rights of the Maoris, these rules have obtained, at any rate in theory, according to the procedure and mode of trial evolved by the English Common Law.”
Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume 1: “The Birth of Britain,” Dodd, Mead &Company, New York, 1956; pp. 221-223.
This is the wrong question. The more appropriate question is why should the US grant him citizenship? If you want to change current law in drastic way then you have the burden of proof as to why this is a net benefit to the US. And that's going to be a hard sell.
Not according to the U.S. government. As far as the U.S. is concerned, when naturalized, one is a U.S. and only a U.S. citizen.
What is your source for that claim? Here is what the State Department actually has to say about it:
"A U.S. citizen may acquire foreign citizenship by marriage, or a person naturalized as a U.S. citizen may not lose the citizenship of the country of birth.U.S. law does not mention dual nationality or require a person to choose one citizenship or another."
http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1753.html
Not the reference to naturalization and dual nationality in the second paragraph.
Sorry Smokey . . .
True, and I probably should have been clearer here. My contention is that current laws already delineate who Americans accept as citizens; we have laws that govern who we let in as immigrants, and laws on who gets automatic citizenship. The guy in Bagaladore doesn't get an automatic pass, he has to be accepted by America according to the process. The person born on American soil, or to American parents stationed overseas, has passed the very low bar we set for automatic citizenship.
Now granted, parts of both processes are random. Immigrants may face the lottery system, and the newborn infant won the overall lottery of life. But I would argue these features are intentional parts of the acceptance system and act as controls enforcing overall American sentiments. The immigrant lottery is an expression of our desire not to let everyone in at once, while also maintaining some measure of fairness to all applicants. The automatic citizenship grant is a convenient way to accept the children of citizens and some residents, without forcing them to go through a lengthy immigration process in a manner that would defy common sense.
Perhaps one of these mechanisms could use some tweaks. But I don't see how randomness per se displays a flaw in the system, instead of just a convenient tool of national policy.
I would argue that, thanks to the Internet and other global media, the reverse is also quickly becoming true - America's net "culture surplus" has shrunk dramatically in recent years, as those media have made it much easier to both export and import cultural elements across the globe, to the point where the lines between those cultures and our own become hopelessly blurred, if not altogether erased. I realize this is a bit beyond the scope of Spiro's post, but it seems to me that this is at least as big a factor in American cultural fragmentation as immigration.
The opposite number of Spiro's "tech worker living in Bangalore who’s never been to the United States but watches the Simpsons, wears Levis, [etc.]" is the native-born American who's never set foot outside the U.S. but prefers, for example, Thai food over McDonald's, Brazilian music over rock &roll, and English and European soccer over MLS, and over most American-originated sports in general. I would hazard that there are at least a couple of orders of magnitude more such native-born Americans than there were 15-20 years ago, when globalization was just getting underway in earnest, and the Internet was still in its infancy. (Indeed, ESPN televising the entire Euro 2008 tournament in the U.S., whose own national team obviously won't be involved, would have been an act of staggering business lunacy if this were not true.)
Why "hopelessly fragmented" instead of "wonderfully diverse"? Do we really all need to eat the same things and watch the same sports for you to feel like we are a country?
Spot on. I’m surprised by how many commenters here think that national cohesion requires some kind of cultural and intellectual uniformity. Those people don’t understand that the very essence of freedom is pluralism. Otherwise “liberty” is just a meaningless slogan.
In a word... yes. And I would add "get our news and opinions from the same few sources" to that list too. When we've reached the point where we can't all even agree whether or not the U.S. is really at war, much less who our enemies are or what we're fighting over, I would call that a lead-pipe-lock sign of cultural fragmentation.
The more culturally diverse the population living within some set of borders, the less the members of that population have in common culturally. In other words, the weaker the cultural cohesion. (Not to mention the weaker the bonds of trust between people as well, but I digress.) Nations are by definition cultural entities, meaning that, also by definition, their health is a direct function of their cultural cohesion. Once upon a time we could count upon national borders to provide, or at least reinforce that cohesion. Those days are long gone.
Beautiful quote
JF Thomas:
Re oaths — you have a very good point. Some of us take oaths seriously. The fact that your home country will not take such a formal renunciation of all previous loyalties seriously does not lessen the enormity of it.
I’m a permanent resident who pays his fair share (and more) of tax to three levels of American government, abides by the law, went through the laborious legal immigration procedures, and has a plenty of appreciation for the wonders of America’s history and constitutional system. I also appreciate the privilege of American citizenship – but I can see why many people in my situation have difficulty renouncing their previous loyalties and a major part of their identity – even if it’s “only” an oath and won’t be enforced.
I’m also surprised that no-one really seems to have approached the important economic aspect to all this. America is competing with other countries in a global war for talent (e.g., see economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11016270). America does not have enough qualified people, especially in science and engineering, to maintain its pre-eminent economic position without adopting a more welcoming immigration stance. The nativist mindset of pulling up the drawbridge is not just un-American, but deeply foolish.
I am a US citizen by birth. My father was a dual citizen (US &Swiss), so I had the opportunity to become a dual citizen by applying. I decided not to because I didn't identify myself as Swiss at all, and I was not willing to do anything to advance Swiss interests as distinct from American interests. I thought it would be unfair to claim the benefit of membership in a political community if I was not willing to share in the burdens of maintaining that community.
I can understand why, for *practical* reasons, the US might not want to take a hard legal line against dual citizenship, and how line drawing might be a problem. But I wonder if it is morally defensible for an individual to claim the benefit of dual citizenship.
For exampe, I've heard news stories about human rights activists in China and Iran who were born in those countries, became US citizens, and then returned to their countries of birth to work to change the political process there. They are imprisoned, and then look to the US Government for help. This strikes me as an abuse of the US political community.
Anbybody care to comment on this?
Not to mention, utterly futile in this age of offshore outsourcing, again enabled in large part by the Internet.
Globalization may be murder on cultural cohesiveness, but countries who have embraced globalization didn't do so for the cultural effects. They did it for the economic opportunities. To play Capt. Obvious for a bit, the entire debate over globalization boils down to the simple question of whether the benefits of the latter are worth the costs of the former.
Dual citizenship violates basic human nature. It necessitates prioritizing at the expense of loyalty. Sooner or later, the dual citizens will stab one of their countries in the back.
Best to make one decision, and stick with it. Otherwise, who will really trust you?
You picked a rather bizarre example to illustrate "abuse" of the citizenship process. If you were talking about a naturalized U.S. citizen who was arrested at Tehran international airport with 10 pounds of heroin in his checked luggage, you might have a case that his subsequent appeals for U.S. consular assistance were, in some sense, abuse.
In any case, there are limits to what the U.S. government can do when citizens, or non-citizens engaged in an ideological struggle we identify with, are arrested for breaking the law of another country. With China, the U.S. routinely makes under-the-table deals for China to free political prisoners in exchange for some new trade concession. But the U.S. does that even with non-citizens who may not speak a single word of English.
Both your “master” and “boss” analogies fall flat, as they are at odds with the American concept of liberty; the state can only demand compliance with its laws – the state is neither your “boss” nor your “master”.
In any event, the dual loyalty argument is mostly bankrupt.
In fact, we expect people to have multiple loyalties: to a family, a city, a state, an ethnicity, a religion, a sports team. Outside of a totalitarian regime, no-one thinks there is anything wrong with that. Why should an additional national loyalty be any different?
This is especially so when we are talking about countries with basically the same values as the US (i.e., other western-style liberal democracies), the dual loyalty issue will almost never develop into a full conflict.
Other loyalties are only a problem when they pose an irreconcilable conflict with loyalty to America -- but even then the danger is more a loyalty to a dangeorous ideological foe rather than to a foreign state per se (e.g., loyalty to Nazi Germany, totalitarian Communism, Jihadism).
This statement is absolutely false. It's myth propagated by the tech industry to justify increasing the caps on the H1-B non-immigrant visa program to provide them with cheap labor. We do not have a shortage, we actually have a surplus. If we really had a shortage salaries would be increasing not staying flat to decreasing. If we had a shortage, experienced tech people would not have trouble finding a job, but they do. I have hired for the tech industry. When you put out a job ad the resumes come pouring in by the hundreds. This is a shortage?
Another false assertion is that America does not educate enough scientists and engineers. Salzman and Lowell published a study for the Urban Institute debunking this myth. Their results also appear in this issue of Nature. In absolute numbers the US has more top-scoring kids in math and science than any other country. However the US does have an underclass that scores low on exams and this drags drown the average. In the language of statistics the distribution is bi-model and thus the average is highly atypical of the scores. Beside it's the top scoring people that provide the scientists and engineers.
American does not need immigrants for to fill a shortage of qualified people. We have pleanty.
I fully understand your sensitivity on the issue.
I sort of wonder then, why should foreigners be any different? Why isn't an agreement to be "subject to the laws" sufficient (a passive sentiment that we might suppose natural citizens to implicitly accept), rather than an active "oath to defend" our system of government?
This statement is absolutely false. It's myth propagated by the tech industry to justify increasing the caps on the H1-B non-immigrant visa program to provide them with cheap labor.
Ah yes, evil capitalist lies?
If we really had a shortage salaries would be increasing not staying flat to decreasing. we had a shortage, experienced tech people would not have trouble finding a job, but they do.
Rather naive to suggest that IT salaries and hiring in the US are not affected by external factors (e.g., a growing pool of overseas competition and outsourcing).
I have hired for the tech industry. When you put out a job ad the resumes come pouring in by the hundreds. This is a shortage?
You have your anecdotal evidence, I have mine. I know of highly talented IT professionals who were unable to work in the US – for employers that desperately wanted their services – because of a visa system that can be arbitrary and capricious.
The Lowell/Salzman in Nature was interesting and made good reading (I agree with most of what they wrote, especially re the importance of the bimodal results and the limited relevance of the mean) – but it didn’t really support your assertion that America has enough science and technology grads to provide the critical mass needed to keep its lead in innovation (maybe their full study is more substantive).
In any event, regardless of whether their are currently enough software engineers within the US, the broader point remains: ongoing economic success in a globalized world will require a fair degree of free flow of labor. Economic protectionism in labor flows is going to be just as futile and counter-productive as protectionism with regard to goods.
Americans have a constitutional right to freedom of choice, and that right is broad enough to include the right to decide who we want to allow into our family. We can make that decision for any reason or no reason, and our constitution protects us from those who would subject our free choices to some sort of conception of fairness or morality.
We can choose to deal fairly and morally with the rest of the world if we wish, just we can choose to deal fairly and morally with those who aren't born. But we don't have to do so with either.
Indeed, it's been argued that people who would subject freedom of choice to rules are anti-American and anti-freedom, and are operating from underlying motives which are sexist, theocratic, or both even if they claim otherwise. If there's any merit to such arguments, I don't see why they shouldn't apply here.
And you'd be wrong, and decidedly so. Unless, of course, "most other Americans" excludes the military, police officers, members of Congress, Federal employees, firefighters, some state employees, and the like.
They are, that's the whole point. We don't have a shortage, and thus the tremendous influx of H1-B has created an even bigger surplus lowering salaries.
"You have your anecdotal evidence, I have mine."
My evidence pertains to more than one case. If there were a shortage why would I get hundreds of qualified applicants? How could the IT industry be so incredibly picky with a shortage? Just look at the ads and how narrowly focused they are. With a shortage why would we have so many engineers and programmers who can't find jobs when they get more than 10 years experience?
" ...the broader point remains: ongoing economic success in a globalized world will require a fair degree of free flow of labor.
No it doesn't. The US is a continental country with a population of 300 million. We have ample human resources to provide all the skilled labor we need. We are not fully using our currently skilled labor force right now. More supply just lowers salaries and destroys the middle class.
We can always bring in super stars under the old visa program for that. We need less immigration not more. If fact we need negative immigration. We had very little immigration from 1925 until 1965 when the law changed. We had tremendous economic expansion during those years except for the depression.
Oren, if that is the "diversity" you plan for Americans (and I fear it is) I will fight it to my dying breath. Abusive religious fundamentalist/separationists ought to return to their homelands. If you didn't come here to be American you really ought to go home. We don't need even more people confused about their ultimate loyalty.
The Bangalore prototype is (it should be obvious) offered as a thought experiment, by way of challenging our conceptions of citizenship rather than as a practical policy alternative.
Furthermore, I believe that the national health is best measured by the tolerance for a diversity of opinion (so long as everyone agree to play by the rules) and a healthy discourse. A mono-culture is unstable, unhealthy and distinctly anti-American.
Big Bill: I have absolutely no qualms with condemning anyone that does not abide by the democratically determined rules. The plant owners in Potsville violated immigration law, labor law, environmental law, workplace-safety law and deserve to be punished for their simple refusal to play by the rules (actually, they are in substantive violation of Jewish law as well, which means that they have no respect even for the rules of their own people -- "mamzerim" would be the best term for them in hebrew, technically translated as "bastards" but, more generally means "cheaters".)
In other words, my country right or wrong -- where she's right to keep her right and where she's wrong to set her right.
To me, the quintessential American value is that of live and let live -- I have no desire to see anything more from my neighbor than a promise to live by the rules.
Plus, I like ethnic food (not to the exclusion of the Anglo classics, of course, but in addition -- I like variety, would be more accurate).
You'd think with all that demand, US students would flock to enroll in CS depts. Think again.
So you have stated your opinion. Do you care to substantiate it? Who else shares this rather extravagant opinion?
You should really tell that to some of my buddies trying to hire computer engineers (or recruit for the CS-engineering academic depts). They've had jobs paying 4x the median income on the market for months without takers.
Wow. That proves it. I am trying to hire an experienced brain surgeon at 10 times median income, $220K, and cannot find anybody.
So, they supposedly offer $88K for PhD in CS and no takers?
It is not a very good salary and I'm pretty sure that they have gotten dozens of applicants, just no one exactly to their liking.
Frankly Oren, you are embarrassing yourself. Anyone with any involvement in the US tech job market knows how ridiculous you sound.
Median US salary is here:
wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_median_salary_in_the_US
Not a lot of Americans have shared that view historically, nor even espouse it today. Americans have always had, and still have, strong feelings about how other Americans should behave.
Because after balkanization comes the revolution.
These are the folks who talk up assimilation when backed into a corner about illegal immigration and at other times denigrate any reason at all for anyone to want to assimilate. And they promote separating mechanisms--against English as official, in favor of bilingual ed with as little English as possible, and other assaults on the national culture.
My own experience with these folks has come working in what might be called a mainline protestant church.
Dr. Spiro has already answered that for me . . .
I certainly have strong feelings on how Americans should behave but, unless their behavior either violates the law or causes me concrete and particular harm, I am content to let people do as they wish. I expect others to respect my decisions that they disagree with as well.
Richard:
(1) Third generation immigrants are fluent in English (better than 99%).
(2) Potsville is not a model to be followed because they failed to follow the law.
(3) Phrases like "assault on the national culture" are absurd beyond belief.
(4) Illegal immigration should be dealt with comprehensively. I have no desire to see the people that jumped the line get any amnesty whatsoever.