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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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Well, you should be concerned, at least theoretically, because I can all but guarantee you can't do this. The only chance I'd give you of actually being able to is if your parents are relatively recent immigrants who naturalized before you were born, and you have access to their naturalization papers. Otherwise it's damn near impossible. I did a fair amount of genealogical work when I was in oil and gas and simply proving a bloodline back 100 years can take a significant amount of work, and that's including unofficial sources like obituaries and affidavits. In particular, anyone whose ancestors came here before about 1890 you can forget about entirely, as vital records simply weren't kept before then and estate records didn't normally include a list of all the heirs. And this work didn't even get into naturalization records, which are filed with the District Court where the person was naturalized, which, good luck that they were properly archived. So I guess you'd agree then that we should establish a system where the most recent immigrants and their descendants are the most likely to be allowed to stay and the people whose families have been here the longest are the most likely to be given the boot?

Would you say that your basic argument is that the rules shouldn't be changed, de facto or de jure, because the change might be weaponized against a given group, and that instead we should accept the status quo because its formal strictures provide better protection from such weaponization?

It's more that people advocating for certain rule changes often do so based on the presumption that they will only be used against other people. OP thinks that it's fine to deport native-born citizens with non-native parents, confident in the belief that he's protected. In reality, he probably can't meet the standards he imposes on other people, and even if he can, the vast majority of people can't. If we were to take this idea to its logical conclusion we'd end up with an America that looks vastly different than the one we have now. I don't think the OP sees the end result of this being that a second-generation Mexican and a naturalized Bangladeshi have a much easier road ahead than someone whose ancestors have been here for hundreds of years.