The Trump Administration has chosen to honor the Semiquincentennial of a nation of immigrants with a vision that sends the country back in time.
Shortly after taking office for the second time, Donald Trump created the White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday, naming himself—“the man who some say is the Greatest President in History”—as its chair. The celebrations start this month, but the party planners seem to have faltered. Musical performers largely pulled out of a concert, so Trump is staging a rally, and a U.F.C. cage match will grace the South Lawn. It is a heady moment to be asking existential questions about what it means to be American. But, as it happens, another member of the task force has spent the past year and a half preparing a diligent and thorough answer on behalf of the President.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic-policy adviser, has presided over the most concerted effort in a century to recast citizenship as a tool of systematic exclusion. Under his direction, the Administration has chosen to honor the Semiquincentennial by keeping people from entering the United States, by restricting those who have already done so from becoming full citizens, and by trying to strip naturalized citizens of their legal status. It is a vision that sends the country back in time, to some of the lowest points of the past century.
If the reasoning in the memo struck immigration lawyers as dubious, this may have been because the agency’s office of chief counsel failed to properly vet it. According to the source, government attorneys have been reassigned to work with Assistant U.S. Attorneys in investigating people whose legal status the government might be able to strip. Earlier this year, U.S.C.I.S. created the Tactical Operations Division. Some eighty officials are tasked with finding citizens, green-card holders, and refugees to investigate on the ground that the status they lawfully obtained might have been granted either through fraud or in error.
Thousands of people living legally in the U.S. have already been identified, the Times has reported. By contrast, the U.S. averaged eleven denaturalizations a year between 1990 and 2017, and these were largely exceptional cases in which a person had deliberately misrepresented a serious criminal history, such as a Nazi past or links to war crimes. Denaturalizations were exceedingly rare in part because they’d once been common, used in response to disfavored political speech or ideology (as in the case of the Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman) or identity (Germans and Japanese during the First and Second World Wars). The Supreme Court eventually interceded, with a series of rulings that made it far more difficult to remove someone’s citizenship for political reasons. Now U.S.C.I.S. has been instructed to refer one hundred to two hundred cases to prosecutors each month.
The Administration’s strategy seems to hinge on a fantasy of radical subtraction—removing people who would dilute the country’s white majority. “If you import the Third World, you become the Third World,” Miller has said. There’s a model for what the government is doing: the Immigration Act of 1924, which established racial quotas that restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe and blocked it altogether from Asia. That bill’s sponsor, Senator David Reed, of Pennsylvania, promised that “America will cease to be a ‘melting pot.’ ” Nearly a century later, Miller wrote, “That is exactly what most Americans want.” At the very least, it’s what the White House wants, and the President is trying to go even further, attacking the most foundational terms underlying the country’s understanding of who belongs here. Revealingly, in this summer of lofty celebration, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on birthright citizenship, which Trump, by fiat, has tried to end.
The growth rate of the U.S. population is slowing, and it’s conceivable, even likely, that current immigration policies will tip the country toward a steadier population decline. If returning the U.S. to 1924 is the goal, the Trump Administration is succeeding. Two hundred and fifty years into the national experiment, however, this would mean that the future looks ever more like the distant past. ♦
