Please show me your papers
What makes you a US citizen?
There's a lot going on, and it's hard to keep track of which hellish thing is bubbling up the top of the cauldron of doom.
This one, though, is important to keep tabs on. It’s one of the underlying themes around everything the Trump team is doing: Citizenship.
Here's a question:
If you're an American citizen, do you have "citizenship papers?"
Something that says, "I'm a US citizen" on it?
Chances are about even that you do – roughly 48 percent of Americans have a passport, and that's proof of citizenship.
But for the rest of Americans -- except those of you who were naturalized, or were born outside the United States -- you don't have anything that says you're a citizen.
You don't need it. You never have.
That’s because you have a birth certificate.
That's all that's required -- if you're born here, you're an American.
Have you had a baby born in the United States?
Then you know how you get a birth certificate — they don’t ask for citizenship papers from the parents.
The kid is born here, on US soil, so it doesn’t matter what citizenship the parents have — the kid’s American.
Forever.
So, a couple things to think about with this:
First — it’s apparent that the plan all along has been for this government to have a say in determining who’s a citizen and who’s not.
And the underlying goal is to prevent certain people from voting.
This means that a lot of the cruelty to trans people and immigrants is a smokescreen — or for the Trump administration, maybe even a bonus — so they have an excuse to require “citizenship papers.”
There are two pretty awful “executive orders” at play here. The newest one, about “the integrity of American elections” says that to register to vote, they want to require proof of citizenship that includes: A United States passport; an identification document or military ID that meets REAL ID standards and that says they’re a US citizen, or a valid government-issued photo identification, if the ID is accompanied by proof of United States citizenship.
If you’re one of the half of Americans without a passport, you can’t use that option. A driver’s license or state ID won’t work since it doesn’t state your citizenship on it. So that leaves you with: An ID, like a driver’s license, accompanied by proof of United States citizenship.
But where do you get “proof of United States citizenship?
It’s your birth certificate, right?
But wait.
This is where we get to the second terrible executive order.
The “executive order” that Trump signed the day he was sworn in claims to end “birthright citizenship” (in reality, none of these executive orders do much, especially if they’re unconstitutional, which this one clearly is. But let’s follow it through, to see where this is going.)
The order says that as of February 20 of this year, babies born in the United States won’t be allowed citizenship when their “mother was unlawfully present in the United States” unless the father is a US citizen or resident, or when their “mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary,” and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident.
In other words: Unless one of the parents is a citizen or legal resident, the baby won’t be an American.
But here’s the real question:
Birth certificates don’t have the citizenship of the parents listed. Nurses don’t ask for a parent’s green card.
So in order to enact this law, either everyone is going to have to “prove” citizenship when they apply for a birth certificate, or else they’re going to have to create a whole new set of “citizenship papers,” which is what I think they’ve been after all along.
For now, your birth certificate is your proof of citizenship – this executive order, if it’s found to be legal, doesn’t affect anyone born before February 20 of this year.
But it’s clear what the intent is: To make citizenship much harder to prove, to make sure that only those who can prove it can register to vote, and to make sure we all need “citizenship papers.”
Because if everyone has to carry citizenship papers, then it’s much easier to simply make sure that certain people don’t get them.
And if you need citizenship papers to register to vote, it’s a whole lot easier to make sure only the “right” people have them.
For now, these are in front of the courts. But every time you see someone deported who was here legally – including legal residents and green card holders – know that it’s not just “non-citizens” that they’re aiming for.
If you’re an American who opposes Trump, you’ve already been targeted. Your rights as a citizen are next.
Sources and more information:
There's more to this: The SAVES Act, REAL ID, how these issues are going to affect people who changed their gender or name since birth, and so forth.
This is the boiled-down version.
But if you look at almost all of the executive orders as a way to define what's "American" and as a way to clarify who's a citizen, a lot of it starts to make more sense as part of a long-term plan.
Birthright citizenship:
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/.../birthright...
The two executive orders:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/.../protecting-the-meaning.../
https://www.whitehouse.gov/.../preserving-and-protecting.../
They're already trying to see if they can make this work. In Maine, they decided that babies shouldn't get a social security number at birth. My guess is that they were going to make the families prove citizenship before they issued a social security number. As it stands now, of COURSE you can get a social security number in Maine when you're born. Because if you're born in Maine, you're a US citizen.
People were so mad, and the plan was so bad, that they withdrew it within days.
They didn't mention birthright citizenship, but that's where it came from.
Of course, the name on the certificate of birth is different from my married name.
Incandescent with rage.