All your complaints are right, factual, and accurate. But what’s the solution? Pointing out very real problems isn’t even half the battle.
Don’t get me wrong — I’ve got many reasons (first and foremost, my family, almost all of whom are nonwhite, and many of whom are immigrants) to support doing what is necessary to diminish or end the racism in the immigration and citizenship process. But I personally try not to run afoul of the law of unintended consequences, for ending citizenship would almost certainly result in much worse problems than the ones you describe.
How would it make things worse? Let’s say we got rid of all requirements for citizenship. As much as I oppose the Right’s insane attacks on immigration, we’d suddenly have a seismic shift of many tens of millions of people coming from across our southern border — not just from Mexico, but from every single nation there undergoing social or political unrest. The overwhelming majority of immigrants (legal or otherwise) commit crimes at a significantly LOWER rate than native-born Americans, but sudden grand-scale shifts of population from one nation to another results in a great deal of unrest — just ask Syria and Turkey after they each took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees after our illegal and unwarranted invasion of Iraq. Syria’s civil war started at least in part due to the social and civil pressures caused by the influx of those Iraqi refugees.
What’s more, if we get rid of citizenship, then who gets passports? If nobody gets passports, then nobody (including me and my family) are going to be able to fly to see our family overseas. But what if everybody gets passports? Then the other nations would be much less eager to let Americans visit since we’re not vetting passport applicants. For instance, Joe Nazi, who had been hiding out in Mexico, can suddenly come back to America, get a new passport, and go wherever…and the other nations would know that our refusal to vet passport applicants for citizenship and criminal histories would be putting their nations at risk.
Get rid of citizenship, and the whole system of international travel, tourism, and commerce is put at risk…and that’s something that nobody wants to happen.
So while it’s very good indeed to point out the problems, we should also be realistic about the danger of metaphorically throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
