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This is a false dichotomy. There are a lot of other possibilities around which to organize citizenship. In the Roman republic and empire, it was for example build around collective military aid: polities on the Italian peninsula which were subjugated by Rome and fought side by side with the legions were eventually granted citizenship. In the French foreign legion, it is individual military aid: mercenaries who are willing to die for French interests get French passports for their service. Or a lot of cultures were willing to integrate women who married their citizens, willingly or otherwise. In Tír na nÓg , citizens and immigrants share a metatype. In Israel, immigrants and citizens (mostly) share a religion (which is only an ideology in the widest sense of the word).
Of course, if America has an ideology, it is the ideology of the American dream. The idea that an immigrant who arrives with little more than the clothes they are wearing can through hard work thrive in the land of capitalism and freedom. Having opinions about which group should murder which somewhere in the old world seems pretty orthogonal to that.
Some rights are clearly citizen rights -- the right to vote is a clear example. Some other rights are basically human rights, and should naturally apply to any human under the power of the state. The right to free speech, freedom of religion, due process, confront their witnesses, or the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments are examples of the latter.
Ideally, I would not want the government to change people's immigration status based on any actions which are not actually criminal (or at least narrowly concerning immigration, such as "lying on your visa application"). A world in which each free country has an LLM which searches if visa applicants have made any statement the ruling party does not like and automatically rejects them is not a freer world than one where no free country does such a thing.
This is a deep and incorrect elision of the same process - the denigrating and hollowing of republican citizenship into imperial subjection - that I am arguing is happening here, today. The socii did not participate in the roman centuriate assembly or plebeian councils, did not serve in roman offices or have any say in roman foreign policy, despite making up at times at clear majorities of roman armed manpower; in fact, the original premise of their becoming socii was that rome would not interfere in their cities' internal affairs at all, in exchange for a territorial guarantee and military mutual aid. In practice, this confederal relationship broke down and Rome did indeed start meddling in the internal affairs of the socii, and the legal distinctions between the various cities began to chafe as rome grew prosperous off war proceeds while the socii were left having to deal with trade barriers that blocked their ability to share in those rewards. By the time of the principate and empire, roman "citizenship" was a very different, much diluted thing.
Of your other examples, it's telling that two are entirely inapposite - one isn't a country but instead a quasi-penal military unit, another is entirely fictional - and the third literally has a religious requirement for naturalization (at least of the type you're discussing). Far closer to my point than yours.
The term "American dream" is itself an artifact of the modern progressive era, with basically no resonance at all before that (with the exception of a tiny little bump in the years immediately surrounding the founding).
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It’s hard for me to see this as other than a placebo ideology – an ideology against any common ideas, a standard against standards. It has no unifying power except that of money. Upward mobility for immigrants is a great thing. But it is not the only thing, and it shouldn’t replace the American heritage.
I remember a clip of a TV interview with a black Alabaman and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans during the George Floyd protests. He was counter-protesting demands that Confederate monuments and symbols be torn down. He had been adopted by a white family; their heritage became his heritage, and he was defending it. He’d become a true member of a family into which he was not born. But it’s not as though he had somehow ceased to be black. I think about this often as an analogy for immigration.
Some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants went further in this direction than I could ever ask – for example, refusing to pass on their birth tongues once they’d learned enough English to raise their children in it; I don’t think I could or would have done the same in their shoes. Or consider the spirited embrace of Columbus Day in some Italian-American communities, because it emphasizes the intersection of the Italian and American heritages.
We could do worse than to prioritize those immigrants willing to respect the culture and heritage of the society they are joining.
This was quite different back then than it would be now. If you live your entire life in one neighbourhood and there are a dozen other ethnicities living there, soon enough everyone will adopt a common tongue. To have separate communities you need a certain amount of space between them.
Nowadays, every Arab youth in Europe is on Arab TikTok, and people don't speak to their physical neighbours anyway, no matter if they share a language or not. With the disappearance of physical barriers, it's the language barriers that define the communities.
Except that's not true. New York had significant yiddish, italian, bulgarian, lithuanian, greek, etc. communities, where those languages were spoken alongside, or even to the exclusion of, english in the early 20th century. Chicago had polish, ukranian, etc. Los Angeles today has several areas where spanish is predominant, as well as several suburbs that are at least duolingual with many/most advertisements in mandarin, vietnamese, etc. Up until WWI huge swathes of the midwest spoke german, usually as a second language, but in some areas to the exclusion of english.
Immigrant ghettoization is extremely common, and tends to preserve language use.
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