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No, it's actually just correct. Being a citizen of the US is a reward for anyone not entitled to it by blood. We're the best. Everyone knows it.
No, it's actually blood. Blood is deeper and more true than everything you list.
I have family members who lived in the United States for over a decade, on permanent visas. They went there for work, and undoubtedly contributed to American prosperity. Their presence was completely legal.
Eventually they were offered pathways to American citizenship.
They refused, because they didn't want to be American citizens. They wanted to leave and come back home to Australia, which they eventually did. They sometimes still visit the US for business reasons, but only for short stays. They tell me quite frankly that they prefer living in Australia and view Australian citizenship as preferable to American.
Are they wrong?
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Just curious, since I don't often receive this kind of candor.
Have I earned it, in your opinion?
I was born here through no choice of my own. But! I've been here for five decades, speak English fluently, have two houses, was raised in the Christian tradition, have paid millions in taxes, have never been to jail, have a white wife and two white children (three including step child) who are irrefutably citizens via my wife.
Also, kindly let me know what you feel you've done to earn being an American citizen.
It's not your fault your parents fucked you over, and you did the best you could. But no, you're illegitimate. I'd be willing to fast-track you through the immigration system, but you'd have to go back first. Once exceptions start being made, they get made for everyone, otherwise.
Oh, I was born to two citizen parents. Citizenship is mine by blood.
At least you assume so. Unless you can prove that their parents had the power to transfer citizenship, I'm just going to assume you aren't, and that goes all the way back up the chain. You'd better hope that a sufficient number of immigrants in that chain were either here before 1789 or naturalized before they had your ancestors, or else they couldn't have transmitted citizenship to their children and I'd prefer you'd be deported to South Sudan or some other country that will take anyone. At that point you can get in the back of the line behind all the other South Sudanese who want to live in the US (Good luck!).
Just curious- other than one great grandfather, all of my ancestors were in the continental US before 1776(many were in then-Spanish Louisiana, but the rest were in the thirteen colonies). Do I count?
In theory, yes. In reality, you'd have a hell of a time proving it.
On one side I have the family tree, supported by Catholic church records, going back to 1200 AD. I'm confident it's provable that I qualify.
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You're not very convincing, buddy.
I'm not sure what you're failing to understand. If your great-grandfather immigrated here in 1910, had your grandmother in 1925, and naturalized in 1930, he couldn't have possibly passed his citizenship to your grandmother because he had no citizenship to pass. And since your grandmother isn't a citizen in this scenario, neither is your mother, and neither are you. What's the problem here?
There's no problem, just you wrongly assuming I'm not a citizen by blood. I am correcting you. There's no need to try and fearmonger.
Great! Let's start with an easy question: Who was the most recent immigrant in your lineage? You don't have to give a name, just tell me their relation to you, the date they immigrated here, the date they naturalized, and the birthdate of the descendant through whom you're claiming citizenship.
No thanks. I'm not concerned.
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I appreciate the endorsement.
Well! My blood claim is probably as solid as yours is, maybe even moreso.
You're just a citizen and I am not in your framework by legal technicality.
Feel free to think that, I'm not interested in humoring foreign entitlement.
Fair, but I'm pretty sure Native Americans would quibble with the moral basis of your nativist entitlement.
They lost.
If might makes right is your morality: so did you. 😇
The end of that conflict remains to be seen.
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It's crazy to criticize magic soil when apparently you believe in magic water. Having a particular genetic sequence or ancestral tree doesn't establish responsibilities and liberties any better than touching a particular patch of soil. Actually, it is explicitly, legally worse at transmitting those things.
Blood is not water, nor is it magical. It's deeply physical. A people are tied by it.
Implying that dirt isn't? Implied that a people aren't tied together by living together in the same place? This entire argument is 100% special pleading.
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"A people" might be. A country is not a people; most countries are too big to be anything but a collection of peoples tied not by blood, but by a language (not always), an army (sometimes not their own) and a flag (usually their own).
A midwestern farmer and a coastal urbanist have no common blood between them. Memes might tie them closer than blood does some tribes. But not blood.
America is a collection of regional blood-tied communities -- at least, it was. I accept that rootless cosmopolitans have spread about and diluted themselves so fully they're not a people of any tribe or place, but blood is still the most important tie. Those people are just deeply unfortunate and damaged.
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