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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26396 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Akhil and Vikram Amar, along with their student, Samarth Desai, have been posting a series of articles on SCOTUSBlog about the birthright citizenship case. I haven't really covered them. They sort of trickled in as I was working on my chonker post on the topic. I'm not going to go back and pick at every one of them. They have pretty clear difficulties for their arguments once you've just read through all the case law. They do, indeed, cite many of the relevant precedents. I would even give them credit for not really getting distracted by the smattering of random state court opinions that have been mined for dicta.

Yesterday, they posted another installment, with the primary argument being that since "parents" (or variants) are not to be found anywhere in the text of 14A, one simply cannot consider them in any way. Of course, this runs into the typical difficulties if you've read the case history. I won't go through this post in detail either. Suffice to say, this one doesn't talk at all about Indians; they address that case in other posts, and, well, it leaves something to be desired, for sure. But I guess I'll just let their glaring lack of addressing it here speak for itself.

What stuck out to me was this section, addressing the other categories that pose difficulties for their position:

What about the traditional “exceptions” to the general rule? (These exceptions involve children born to foreign diplomats, children born on quasi-sovereign Indian land, children born behind the lines of an occupying enemy army, and children born aboard foreign-flagged warships.) At pages 3 to 4 of his reply brief, the solicitor general claims that the Trump v. Barbara respondents (represented by the ACLU) “recognize” multiple “exceptions” to birthright citizenship “based on parental status.” We doubt that’s the best reading of the ACLU’s brief, but even if it is, it’s surely not the best reading of the Constitution. To win the case, the solicitor general needs to outrun not just the respondents, or even the doctrine, but the document itself. And as we’ve explained in prior writings, the soil-and-flag touchstones cleanly explain both the scope and the limits of the Constitution’s grand birthright-citizenship guarantee. The so-called exceptions are really just applications of the originalist “under the flag” principle.

True, one – and only one – of the birthright-citizenship rule’s main exceptions, exempting an American-born child of a foreign diplomat, is parent-based. (The others, as Akhil’s amicus brief carefully explains, are based entirely on birth-place, and in no way whatsoever on birth-parentage.) But even the tiny diplomat-child wrinkle, properly conceptualized, is an exception that illustrates and confirms the under-the-flag rule. A legal “fiction” of “extraterritoriality” treated diplomats and their children as if they were floating human chunks of foreign soil, with partial or total diplomatic immunity from America’s laws. Indeed, diplomats and their broods were seen as personal extensions of the foreign sovereign.

To see this point most vividly, imagine that Queen Victoria herself visited America in 1869 and gave birth to a child on American soil. Were America to claim this heir to the British throne as an American citizen, war between America and Britain might well have ensued. The 14th Amendment, properly read, viewed neither Victoria nor her hypothetical baby as ever being squarely “under the American flag.” The monarch, and her brood, and her diplomats, and their broods, were always in legal contemplation under the British flag, wherever they went, rather like British warships in American waters. But none of this extraterritoriality logic applied to American-born babies of foreign sojourners generally.

I didn't want to spend the time to copy over their links, so click through if you want to read them. What stood out to me was that their only case link was to, wait for it... Schooner! Of course they're appealing to the framework and theory of Schooner! That's the case that elucidated a framework and theory for how to think about the principles of sovereignty, allegiance, license, and jurisdiction. They even pull what is perhaps one of the most confusing examples from the case - when a sovereign, himself/herself, were to enter the US.

Of course, they don't talk about Schooner's discussion about the case in which a foreign sovereign entered the US without the consent of the US. Nor do they actually work through the rest of the framework and theory that Schooner put in place. They want the Full Schooner, but they don't want to take it seriously! They don't want to actually read through the case and engage with how the opinion says the framework applies to various specific situations. They just want to pull very specific pieces and then form their own, different, theory to wrap around it. It's just so glaring now, every time I see someone write on this topic. I can't unsee it.

Akhil and Vikram Amar, along with their student, Samarth Desai

Goddamnit, these people have no business discussing the laws of my country.

Of course, they don't talk about Schooner's discussion about the case in which a foreign sovereign entered the US without the consent of the US

That's because they don't want to be sent back where they came from. It's all motivated reasoning, all the way down, but the truth is just like last time the foreign born population crested 15%, there's a backlash coming, and this is laying groundwork to salvage some of what will be lost.

Goddamnit, these people have no business discussing the laws of my country.

That is a new low. I mean, even our resident antisemites will rarely dismiss an argument outright for being made by a Jew. I mean, I am a Kraut and I still reserve the right to have opinions on every legal system between the US constitution and Sharia law.

Of course, denying that an Indian-origin American can be a "real" US citizen makes this extra charming. If you feel this way about random bloggers, I can only imagine how you felt about Trump appointing Kash Patel to head the FBI.

Maybe the "antisemites" should.

I can feel a very clear border when talking to many of my foreign co-workers. There are topics beyond discussion because all parties know there isn't one to to be had. It would in fact be an insult to even broach them. Yet here I sit, my entire culture now revolving around how to accommodate their viewpoints within the nation my ancestors made.

Looking at the big picture it's all futile. They get a say in your land, you get no say in theirs. Their customs are sacred, yours are at best arbitrary and certainly up for critique and debate. They have a just cause, you have guilt and sin. And if you want to keep the peace then that's the truth. This dynamic has been playing out wherever immigrants stake their claim in the west. At some point it's just stupid not to point out how this all goes.

They ultimately recognize their common cause as outsiders who are trying to keep their foot in the door. Keeping my ear full of how great their country is and how bad mine is yet somehow never stumble on the idea that they are here for a reason that might impugn that assessment. That maybe because their countries have one too many a person with exactly their type of temperament and opinion is the reason why they find themselves traveling thousands of miles to a country with, apparently, worse weather, worse food, dumber laws, worse religion and more racists.

Humility would go a long way, but no. The most common explanation I get when I point this out is that somewhere along the way those nasty Europeans did evil to them and theirs, so they now have to come here. Well... What great neighbors I have!

You do not have to imagine how I feel about Patel, I think you know quite well enough.

Amar isn't a random blogger, he's an eminent originalist constitutional scholar. I recall a blurb on the back of his book saying he was one of the five most cited living American legal scholars. He's a man who has devoted his life to the study of the American constitution.

This is the challenge facing the project of building a new American nationalism, you can't excise people like Amar without destroying much of what makes this country great.

I stand corrected.

This is the challenge facing the project of building a new American nationalism, you can't excise people like Amar without destroying much of what makes this country great.

Agreed.

He's a man who has devoted his life to the study of the American constitution.

The Constitution is dead. It has not protected me, it is not protecting me now, it will not protect me in the future. To the extent that power flows from it, it is because people with poor understanding allow themselves to be scammed by appeals to it.

This is the challenge facing the project of building a new American nationalism, you can't excise people like Amar without destroying much of what makes this country great.

I emphatically do not agree that racial descent is a workable frame for pulling together a nation out of the wreck, but that does not change the fact that most of the things that made this country great appear to be either dead or dying, and the appeals to a "creedal nation" were either useless to prevent this process or actively accelerated it. The basic fact is that we hate each other, and cannot find consensus on what the law is or how it should be enforced, and that is not a survivable situation long-term.

If there be a way to salvage something worthwhile from the wreck of America, it seems likely that it is going to involve more sacrifice than your arguments presume.

You're getting a lot of reports and more than one mod wants to ban you. Largely because you have a long and shitty record. Mostly, though not entirely, because of this particular hobby horse.

On the one hand, "Only white people should be considered Americans and birthright citizenship should be ended" is an opinion, and we don't prohibit people from expressing opinions. Even disagreeable opinions, even opinions that offend lots of people, even opinions that would strip a lot of people of their currently extant rights. So, you're allowed to express that opinion.

On the other hand, we do have other rules about civility, about contentless sneering at your outgroup, about making generalizations about groups. When you have an opinion like "Indians can't be Americans and don't deserve to live here" or "Jews are evil alien parasites" or "Women are NPCs" or "Blacks are incapable of civilization" and so on (note: these are examples; I am not ascribing all of those opinions to you), your sincerely-held opinion does run up against some of those other rules, and that's where people start complaining about how our rules demand you use "too many words" or dance around "the truth." Because yeah, you are allowed to believe things about non-whites, about people with non-white ancestry, about who should be a citizen. You are not allowed to just say "these people" like they are not citizens, or talk about sending them all "back where they came from" unless you are willing to put in a lot more effort actually describing a colorable position (even if it's literally race war, in which case, say so, and yes, you still have to be polite about advocating for a race war!). Because "these people" are also posters here and are entitled to the same civility as everyone else. That's the same reason I can have an opinion about certain people deserving a kick in the teeth, but I can't just express it like that. Because it would be antagonistic and rude.

Capisce?

So, every time you feel an urge to go off on your "Man born in a barn" metaphor sneering at people with funny furrin' names, pretend you are saying it directly to such a person's face in an environment where civility is expected. Because you are.

If you can't do that, next time I will ban you, and nothing of value will be lost.

I want to register that although I disagree with my learned friend in argument @KMC here and have said why below, I don't think this particular comment crosses the set lines of theMotte.

If we want to move the lines around that's fine, but it's perfectly in line with discussions of other ethnic groups that have been accepted in the past, and a new rule shouldn't be enforced retroactively.

Because "these people" are also posters here and are entitled to the same civility as everyone else.

Indians shouldn't get kid glove treatment because there are clearly open Indians among our number, where blacks or Palestinians or Iranians wouldn't because we don't have posters within those identity groups.

You read the above and your conclusion is that we just made up a new rule: "You cannot insult Indians"?

Buddha wept.

No. The rule is "You may not direct generalized insults at broad groups of people." Whether or not those groups are represented here on the Motte.

We/I did not "move any lines" or retroactively enforce some new rule against KMC. He's been warned about this before.

I would like to point out that there appear to be groups that are exempt from this this rule.

Jews/Israel are one example, MAGA-coded white guys and African Americans appear to be two others.

It is the appearance of such exemptions (IE that there are groups that users users here are allowed to denigrate and groups that they are not) that is fueling the push-back you're receiving here.

As I've said before, I chose to create this account and "rejoin" the motte after a year+ of mostly lurking in response to Charlie Kirk's murder, or more accurately in response to some of the reactions I observed on this forum. Specifically the casual dehumanization of Kirk and his supporters coupled with attempts to downplay his murder as "no big deal".

Always amusing when some posters are accusing us of allowing Joo-posting because we're a bunch of antisemites, and other posters are accusing us of protecting Jews because we're a bunch of Zionists.

You're simply wrong. There are no groups that this rule does not apply to. People are allowed to say they don't like Jews or blacks or MAGA white guys. They are not allowed to just insult people for being Jewish or black or a MAGA white guy. Do we always catch every single instance and enforce it uniformly? No, we're not AIs.

As for Charlie Kirk, your recollection does not match mine at all. Maybe someone here on the Motte said his murder was "no big deal" but I would bet more people by far on the Motte are sympathetic to Kirk than not. Even I, one of our resident "center-leftists" who had no particular fondness for him, was unambiguous about condemning his murder. Bluntly, if you are claiming one or two people said something dismissive, I'll take your word for it, though I don't remember it, but if you are claiming this was a widespread sentiment on the Motte, I think you are making things up.

I have two objections.

First: Whether you as a moderator believe that an exemption exists is only superficially relevant to whether such an exemption is perceived as existing. Similar to the arguments that I used to get into with @ymeskhout about crime statistics and electioneering, whether or not a specific instance of tom-foolery would sway the result is a separate question issue from whether tom-foolery occurred. The fact is that there are a number of of somewhat prolific users here who have built a significant portion of their "brand identity" around a sneering contempt for the outgroup. Whether that outgroup it is Jews, Blacks, or MAGA is also only superficially relevant to the conversation.

For the record I would like to commend you for the pulling the trigger on @DaseindustriesLtd but the fact that his antics were tolerated for as long as they were is a big part of the problem. People notice that certain users (and I am trying to avoid publicly naming names but if you want me to I will DM you) seem to get treated with kid-gloves, they compare these users' treatment to that of prior luminaries, and they start to pattern match. One of the patterns that is easy to arrive at given the make up of both the forum and the moderation team is H1Bs looking out for other H1Bs, and that is where I feel like users like @KMC and @FiveHourMarathon are coming from.

Second: The issue as I see it is not whether or not people here were sympathetic to Charlie Kirk, or whether one or two people here said something dismissive. The issue is that dismissive comments were tolerated, or that if they did get moderated, it went un noticed. As I have said in prior posts on the subject I don't think it was Charles Sumner (the man in my profile pic) getting beaten half to death on the Senate Floor that undermined the norms against political violence and made the US Civil War inevitable. It was the fact that that "Moderates" from Sumner's own party (the Whigs) and his opponents in the Democratic party were seen as defending it. In an alternate history where Preston Brooks and Lawrence Keitt were immediately arrested and faced broad bi-partisan condemnation does a "backwoods radical" like Abraham Lincoln get elected? Does the question of "free states" vs "slave states" get resolved with more or less bloodshed than in our timeline? I don't know but I think it's worth considering.

@Amadan

One of the patterns that is easy to arrive at given the make up of both the forum and the moderation team is H1Bs looking out for other H1Bs, and that is where I feel like users like @KMC and @FiveHourMarathon are coming from.

To be clear, I don't think this is limited to Indians or to Jews. My feelings, as I've said before, is that at times:

If you hate white people or men you're a troll and will catch a ban, if you hate Jews or Asians you have to show receipts or you risk a ban, if you hate blacks or hispanics or arabs you're rounding second ahead of the throw.

I don't think the tone of what KMC said, though I find it wrong and stupid, would have caught any flack if he said it about Venezuelans or Somalians rather than about Indian academics. That includes me, of course, I objected to his vitriol against Amar because it's someone I knew personally and a type of person I've been close with in my life. As a result, I don't think KMC ought to be disciplined for it, or I think a lot of other discussion should be disciplined similarly.

Policing purely for tone and not content would mean that the death of the Ayatollah would be dealt with the same way as the death of Charlie Kirk, which I don't think is or really could be the case. We're always going to have a bias towards our friends.

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Your objection seems to be that people are allowed to say things you don't like.

We give a lot of leeway, but not infinite leeway. People can say they don't like Jews or they think ZOG rules the world. People can be dismissive about someone being killed.

"Lol glad he's dead" would probably have gotten a ban,. but expressing an opinion like "This is not a big deal" would not.

We try to be consistent and principled. We don't claim to be perfect.

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I feel like that ship sailed a while ago.

I can think of one black American poster, @ToaKraka, off the top of my head, and I know we have (had) some others. @rallycar-jepsen was another, but he hasn’t posted in two years. As for non-Americans, @Tanista is Gambian and therefore presumably also black.

Largely because you have a long and shitty record.

Always good to drive off the regulars, keeps people on their toes.

So, every time you feel an urge to go off on your "Man born in a barn" metaphor sneering at people with funny furrin' names, pretend you are saying it directly to such a person's face in an environment where civility is expected. Because you are.

I would happily and willingly repeat the man in a barn line, and have done so, in person. However, I take your point, and I was rude and discourteous beyond any use, and worse, without any redeeming quality.

Do you have some evidence that one (or all) of them is the child of a foreign sovereign?

Why would that matter to me at all?

Did you read the passage you quoted?

Yes, I did.

What about it? I do not consider them American in any way, regardless of Schooner, full or partial. They want the partial schooner (foreigners born in US are citizens) but not the full schooner (illegal aliens are not entitled to citizenship for their children because they have no license to be there in the first place, general or explicit). In other words, they want the best possible outcome for their coethnics. In that, I supposed they're the same as me.

Forget Schooner for a moment, what positive meaning do you ascribe to Art I, Section 8 pt iii ?

The Congress shall have Power To ... To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization

What do you mean? Congress has the power to establish a uniform rule of naturalization. That is one of their enumerated powers.

That just returns the debate to what the rule should be, which can be simply changed with a majority of each house and the signature of the President, like the rest of the enumerated powers (ha!). If there's a way to vote ourselves out of this, it's right here, but I'm skeptical about that possibility.

Sure, but having exercised those powers in the past to naturalize individuals, those individuals are now naturalized.

They have done the thing that they are expressly empowered to do.

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After the right couple of accidents, Lillibet Windsor could qualify…

That's because they don't want to be sent back where they came from.

Akhil Amar and Vikram Amar were born in the US.

Isn't it begging the question to consider your standard to be the relevent one, if the discussion is about birthright citizenship?

As far as I can tell, the discussion is about birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants.

Being born in a barn does not make a man a horse. They are foreigners, Indians, obviously, and that's the case no matter which barn they were born in.

  • -10

I've met, had lunch, and argued about politics and baseball with Akhil Reed Amar. He's a better American than you.

Good for you, but no he isn't. He's not an American nor is he my countryman. He's the son of Indians, he married an Indian, and he has Indian children. I will give his parents credit for the middle name, though (Reed).

I'm sure he's nice to have lunch with, that was never in question.

The most American of traits as I've mentioned before is looting the commons for your own benefit. Barely a month later someone told me on this forum in a conversation about doctors/market distortion around doctors that they want less competition for their own job and more competition for other jobs so they could pay less for goods and services, and pointed out that this is a value held by a majority of Americans (in a business sense), meaning that the immigration debate for sake of protectionism is essentially a non-starter.

People want in. Whether this is because they see more opportunities there (or suckers there), finding a new land to seek your fortunes in is as American as apple pie and processed cheese product. Socializing the losses and privatizing the gains is a game Americans play better than everyone else, as I've said before - so why are you at all surprised when those are your countrymen and there's a long line of potential NBA All-Stars chomping at the bit to get in so they can play that game?

You are going to have to contend with every white racist's problem, which is that the majority of the people you would like to be in your ingroup feels more kinship with the urbane Indian-American guy than with you. If we were entering a new golden era of free association and vibes-based citizenship, they would sooner team up with him to send you to Madagascar than with you to expel him. I feel like the abstract schema, where A and B say "I consent" to each other while C is off to the side seething at B like "I don't, you should be with me instead", occurs fairly frequently in cuckoldry memes.

In fact, going deeper, it seems fair to hypothesise that extreme xenophilia and anti-tribalism is now a core "white" racial trait (unless perhaps you stick with some marginal groups like Albanians), no doubt aided by centuries of natural selection where those who didn't have them were more likely to go off to slaughter each other. Are you partisan for the whites that actually exist, or some fantasy version you wish existed?

You are going to have to contend with every white racist's problem, which is that the majority of the people you would like to be in your ingroup feels more kinship with the urbane Indian-American guy than with you. If we were entering a new golden era of free association and vibes-based citizenship, they would sooner team up with him to send you to Madagascar than with you to expel him. I feel like the abstract schema, where A and B say "I consent" to each other while C is off to the side seething at B like "I don't, you should be with me instead", occurs fairly frequently in cuckoldry memes.

The problem is that this is an extremely selected comparison, and it's kind of embarrassing that our elite capital folks are missing the point.

I've written posts complaining about personal experiences with Indian immigrants - let me give a different example. The professor I had most often (3 classes) in college was an older Indian guy who taught physics. One of my favorite memories of him was when he was covering a unit on optics, and he had projected on the board an illustrative image, which he off-handedly mentioned was the cover art to his favorite album.

Yes, it was exactly what everyone is thinking.

We teen white kids had a great moment of fun about it. "Holy shit, did you guys know Indians could be Boomers, too?"

I liked that professor. He was a good dude, and he was good to me. I'll bet the Yale professor on Con law is in a similar boat.

Cool.

So, what about the other 99.99%?

Because the average immigrant is absolutely not an urbane, 130+ IQ dude with excellent English and a witty command of prestige television references. That's actually about 4ish SD above average. The experience of the average American dealing with the average immigrant is more like spending 10 minutes struggling to explain the difference between a square and a circle to someone with English (and apparent reasoning, though the linguistic issue is likely severely amplifying that) skills on the level of a three year old, while they are acting like an entitled asshole.

There was a post on the old place, years ago, and I can't quite remember who it was. GeneralMcCusker, or McJuncket, or however those names were spelled, I think. Anyway, the post described the enlightening experience of working in a T-Mobile store in a bad diverse part of town. And the post basically suggested that a similar life experience ought to be a requirement for having meaningful opinions about the communities of people involved.

I think a lot of this discourse is driven by people who never see what everyone else is complaining about, not in spite of, but precisely because they are extremely high functioning individuals of means who have organized their lives so as to never have to deal with the downsides of their tolerant and high-minded policies.

I know several such people IRL. Friends and family. Great people. I truly love them.

But on this sort of topic, all I can ever think is "Your actions speak so loud, I can't hear a word you're saying."

For comparison, imagine if we dumped an entire American trailer park into a small town in a foreign country. And when the locals objected and complained, the entire upper class said "What are you losers talking about? The Americans are amazing. You're just jealous because they're better than you." And then the only American they've ever met is FiveHourMarathon. Just so when everyone here is acting like their mental model of an immigrant is self_made_human.

We could halt all immigration and fully denaturalize and deport the bottom 90% of immigrants, and it's likely that most Westerners who actually post to this forum would barely notice.

But the people dealing with them in parks and the subways and retail establishments and getting undercut by people's who market niche is ignoring labor laws most certainly would.

The poster I was responding to was specifically declaring to be unAmerican some Indian guys who wrote a blog post about SCOTUS minutiae in flawless English, and who another poster claimed to have met and argued about baseball with. The average immigrant is irrelevant to this argument, as he very specifically excluded a non-average one, implicitly asserting that this non-averageness does not matter to him.

(Incidentally, I think demanding +4SD for 130IQ etc. is excessive. The set of Indians who immigrate into the US is already biased towards the smarter, more looped-in with US culture set; the criteria you lay out are maybe +2.)

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The professor I had most often (3 classes) in college was an older Indian guy who taught physics. One of my favorite memories of him was when he was covering a unit on optics, and he had projected on the board an illustrative image, which he off-handedly mentioned was the cover art to his favorite album.

Yes, it was exactly what everyone is thinking.

We teen white kids had a great moment of fun about it. "Holy shit, did you guys know Indians could be Boomers, too?"

Lol, boo-this-man.gif

Politely: quit it. "Americans" are not a race or ethnicity. They just aren't. On no serious theory are black Americans not Americans. You can claim to only recognize WASPs as your "countrymen" if you want, but "WASP" is not, nor will it ever be, the legal or the everyday, common-sense definition of the word "American"; insisting otherwise will only breed needless confusion. Like, dude, this isn't about political correctness. You'd have to search pretty far even among white supremacists for any significant numbers of people who think the sentence "Martin Luther King was an American activist" is somehow using the word "American" incorrectly.

I don't even know what you're trying to do here. I can understand some forms of insistence that Americanness is more than a piece of paper. There can be an actual, coherent political agenda behind that kind of linguistic warfare: for example, if you don't think paper citizens who barely speak English and don't meaningfully identify as American or participate in American culture should, in fact, be allowed to keep their paper citizenship, or to stay within the country's borders. That's a coherent, achievable political project, and the definition games make sense within that project.

But like. There's no constituency for expelling all non-WASPs or stripping them of citizenship. It's just not gonna happen. So what's the point of insisting, against all common usage, that you're only a real "American" if you're from the same ethnic group as the Founding Fathers? Literally what is the point? If you got your wish and everyone started using that as the definition, all you'd get would be a needlessly obnoxious situation where "Americans" are a hazily-defined plurality within the much, much broader cohort of "American citizens", and are one of several groups who participate in "American culture" and "American politics". That helps exactly no one. If what you want is just the dubious self-esteem buzz of getting to say "I'm a real American™" with the full blood-and-soil weight you give to the word, please just try to be happy with "I'm a Heritage American" or some other suitably complimentary turn of phrase, without trying to gerrymander what the bare word "American" means into uselessness.

"Americans" are not a race or ethnicity. They just aren't. On no serious theory are black Americans not Americans.

I'd be happy to go with "no hyphenated Americans" but that died a miserable death long ago. Alas!

Feel free to disagree with them, but denying American as a race or ethnicity is exactly what generates people like that, who refuse to disbelieve their lying eyes about what groups get certain privileges.

without trying to gerrymander what the bare word "American" means into uselessness.

Done been gerrymandered into meaninglessness anyways.

Politely: quit it. "Americans" are not a race or ethnicity. They just aren't.

The first step to destroying something is to deny its existence. Like it or not, there is a certain quality mix of ex-european immigrants that could be called American by ethnicity, I'm sure there would be a wide range of genetic mixes some more pure, some more mixed, but you can't just handwave them away. They fit all the criteria for an ethnos, a shared religion, founding myth and blood relation.

I don't dispute that; I dispute that this particular ethnos get to hog the word "American" all to themselves when at the very least black, slavery-descended Americans are equally distinctive, have been here for centuries too, and are equally laughable to imagine all sailing back to the shores of their forefathers one day.

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I don't even know what you're trying to do here.

Trying to fix this:

"Americans" are not a race or ethnicity. They just aren't.

There's no constituency for

Not yet. Not until you build it. Not until you say it out loud, and declare that it's what you want, and goal worth pursuing.

Literally what is the point?

I'm happy to stake out, believe in, and defend the extreme stance of where I want to be in the knowledge that the only way to get what you want is to decide what you want, and then start going there. I want to break the assumption that American means "man of any race or none in particular." I want to regain my own national character.

Not yet. Not until you build it. Not until you say it out loud (…) I want to regain my own national character.

I don't know how else to tell you that this is not going to happen. There's no constituency for a WASP ethnostate because it's just not a plausible thing to want. There are fifty million African-Americans and I'm sorry, but they aren't going anywhere. The Civil War was probably the last time a mass exodus back to Africa was remotely on the table, and even then it was kind of a laughable idea. They're centuries away from African soil being their land and African culture being their culture and African languages being their language. Talking about sending them all away as "foreigners" is like trying to get the Saxons of England to "regain their national character" and send the Normans home nine hundred years too late (except worse because there are fewer ethnic Normans and it'd be somewhat easier for them to reintegrate into French society if France were willing to take them back). It's just not happening, the boat has sailed.

Recognizing this sheer statement of fact does not necessarily entail that "American means 'man of any race or none in particular'"; you could plausibly argue the line that American means one of a bounded number of specific ethnicities, if you really want. You could say that eg WASPs, Black Americans, and Native Americans (1) are established, centuries-old, distinct subtypes of Americans like Han, Zhuang, Manchus and Miaos are distinct subtypes of Chinese - and that it's still possible to be ethnically non-American by not being part of any one of these groups. A multi-ethnic polity is not necessarily the same thing as a race-blind one. There could be a world where America moves in that direction, it's unlikely but it could happen.

What you're proposing, however, is simply impossible.

1: Please let us not go on a tangent about the term 'Native American'. I just thought it would be less confusing here than any variation on 'Indian'/'Amerindian' insofar as we started out talking about Indian immigrants in the Punjabi sense.

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National character is not merely the past. National character is not merely ethnicity. National character is not merely the line "nationality of father" in the birth certificate.

National character can be directly and plainly observed.

I don't see you building national character, for now I only see you advocating for no immigration. I'm afraid a certain Scottish Deutchman has you beat there.

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There's simply no risk of children of legal immigrants being sent back to where they "came from" and they don't fall under the foreign born population you mention in the next sentence, so the claim of self interested motivation on their part rings hollow. Your personal belief that people who live in the US their whole lives and assimilate to its culture are not Americans is, to put it lightly, a minority view in no danger of being advanced by any serious legal scholars.

I never said foreign born. I said foreigner. I did use the phrase foreign born, mea culpa. The Japanese would use the word gaijin.

I don't care where he was born, he's not American. I don't care what passport he has, he's not American.

He might be able to have American children, if he outmarries, but I won't hold my breath.

to put it lightly, a minority view in no danger of being advanced by any serious legal scholars.

I don't care about legal scholars, I care about Americans, and it's pretty popular among Americans who are tired of seeing themselves replaced in their own homeland.

I don't care where he was born, he's not American. I don't care what passport he has, he's not American.

But that's not the point. The point is that, since (rightly or wrongly!) his citizenship is not in any actual danger whatsoever even by a very restrictive reading of the Constitution, he has no personal incentive to bend the laws towards more permissive forms of birthright citizenship, as you were claiming.

I don't care what the Japanese say, I'm an American, not Japanese. I have no interest in becoming Japanese.

Way to miss the point.

The japanese have a word that means foreigner, and it doesn't distinguish between citizen or not, or care where you were born.

You're using foreign concepts from foreign languages to try to tell me about America. There's a reason that there is no equivalent American word, because there is no equivalent American concept, because that is a fundamentally foreign belief system.

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I never said foreign born. I said foreigner.

You did say foreign born:

That's because they don't want to be sent back where they came from. It's all motivated reasoning, all the way down, but the truth is just like last time the foreign born population crested 15%, there's a backlash coming, and this is laying groundwork to salvage some of what will be lost.

Because that's what's measurable and comparable to the backlash I referenced 120+ years ago. Teddy and Woodrow both said something similar, back then, to what I said now.

I will grant that I said foreign born, but it wasn't about these people in particular but rather the state of the nation.

What did Teddy say that agrees with your, uh, limited conception of who is an American?

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America lost that battle a long time ago. Curious to know how things will look in a century or two if it’s still around.

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