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Goddamnit, these people have no business discussing the laws of my country.
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.
Akhil Amar and Vikram Amar were born in the US.
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.
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.
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.
Trying to fix this:
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.
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.
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.
I, in fact, have said exactly this in the past, and it was my one and only AAQC nomination.
I didn't call them American, of course, but I considered those three groups the only ones who I would consider "native," that is, with no where else to go back to.
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