To deny birthright citizenship is to make these people into stateless persons. To send them out of the country of their birth, where they may or may not have family or membership, to set them adrift, is beyond the pale.

There’s historical precedent in this. I was reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (Aug 1959 printing) this morning. In Chapter Nine she writes of the stateless who emerged after the First World War (and later after the Second World War), chief among them the Jews and the Armenians.

Making people stateless dehumanizes them, denies them of their inalienable rights with which they are endowed, by placing them outside the political community that grants and protects rights. Making people stateless was one of the steps in the rise of totalitarianism, right before the Nuremberg Laws and “the distinction between Reich citizens (full citizens) and nationals (secondly class citizens without political rights)” (288). If they don’t belong here, and here is the only home they’ve known, then they belong nowhere and to no country.

Just a quote, taken in hindsight:

The survivors of the extermination camps …. were regarded as savages and, afraid that they might end by being considered beasts, they insisted on their nationality, the last sign of their former citizenship, as their only remaining and recognized tie with humanity. Their distrust of natural, their preference for national, rights comes precisely from their realization that natural rights are granted even to savages. Burke had already feared that natural “inalienable” rights would confirm only the “right of the naked savage,”’ and therefore reduce civilized nations to the status of savagery. Because only savages have nothing more to fall back upon than the minimum fact of their human origin, people cling to their nationality all the more desperately when they have lost the rights and protection that such nationality once gave them. Only their past with its “entailed inheritance” seems to attest to the fact that they still belong to the civilized world.

If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man. This is one of the reasons why it is far more difficult to destroy the legal personality of a criminal, that is of a man who has taken upon himself the responsibility for an act whose consequences now determine his fate, than of a man who has been disallowed all common human responsibilities (300).

Like climate change, this isn’t a fun political debate between two sides. These are dangerous and offensive beliefs held by a far-too-significant portion of the American electorate, stoked by people (Ivy League college graduates, a former Rhodes Scholar) who should stop, think, and make atonement.