Alrighty, so Donald Trump announced an actual policy beyond general racist babbling regarding the dreaded, totally real, not-declining-at-all menace of illegal immigration. And the plan is just as cruel and impossible as one would expect: deport eleven million people, build a massive wall along the southern border paid for through money and suffering drawn from both legal and illegal immigrants alike, suspend green cards for several years, and end the terrifying specter of
I'm not going to get into how impossible logistically Donald Trump's plan is, as plenty of other people have done so better than I could. Instead, I'm going to talk about how morally outrageous it is. Donald Trump--and, it seems, the entire Republican party--are not only content with fighting tooth-and-nail against obviously beneficial policies adopted by nearly every other developed nation on the planet, but now seek to destroy one of the few things America is undoubtedly better at than many other nations. In the shambling, sickly corpse of the American Dream, birthright citizenship is the functioning kidney pulling overtime for its dead brother. The premise of the American Dream, that anyone can come to America with nothing, and through hard work and determination create a better life for themselves, is laughably false at this point. Factors like incredibly difficult social mobility, stagnant wages, and systemic, violent racism mean one's own merit plays an increasingly unimportant role in whether or not one succeeds.
But birthright citizenship keeps one last element of the dream alive. People fleeing from poverty, violence, or other problems from their own countries can take refuge in America knowing that their children will grow up full members of the American system. This system prevents the infuriating paradoxes of countries like Germany and Japan, where tax-paying members of society born in the country to parents born in the country are still locked out of full participation in their country's system. As unfair as every other aspect of the American Dream has become, birthright citizenship remains as the last glimmer of hope to those who dream of starting a family in our country. And, of course, that's not even getting into how the 14th Amendment's official guarantee of birthright citizenship was one of the only ways the federal government did right by newly-freed slaves. You'd have to be fucking crazy to argue that something as American as birthright citizenship is no good!
Which brings us back to Donald Trump. As laughable as the vinyl-haired man is, the way national discussion of this issue has changed after he released his policy paper has shown that Donald Trump is actually much more dangerous than people give him credit for. In the same way that Bush and Cheney transformed a disturbingly large portion of Americans into advocates for torture programs that nobody would have dared discuss in past years, Trump's announcement caused the majority of Republicans running for president to either call for "reforming" birthright citizenship or outright ending the practice. Now people on the news are debating about something so rightfully sacred that FOX News might have laughed them off the air if they tried bringing it up. Trump may not win the nomination (a prospect which, after five straight weeks of an absolutely crushing lead in the polls despite numerous gaffes, is not something one can easily dismiss anymore), but with every Republican nominee rushing to jump on board his policies, it will hardly matter. I won't ask anybody to stop treating Donald Trump like a joke, because come on. Fucking look at him. But as more and more patently insane policies, even for Republicans, get brought into the mainstream by his xenophobic preaching, and as more and more vulnerable populations fear for their safety as bigots emboldened by Trump's rhetoric, follow the example of two monsters in Boston and begin taking matters into their own hands, we must be prepared for the joke to get a lot less funny.
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