From 1860 to 2000, in the largest legal migration in human history, over 61 million immigrants arrived in the United States.  They were not only escaping poverty and oppression, but they were eager to assimilate and attain the most sought-after national status in the world: American citizenship. Today in the 21st century, American citizenship and its one-of-a-kind written contract with the central government, the Constitution with its Bill of Rights, is under relentless assault by the nation’s governing establishment and teetering on the edge of meaninglessness. 

Taking the Oath of Allegiance at a citizenship ceremony (YouTube screengrab)

No nation can maintain its status as a nation without secure and identifiable borders.  Citizenship means nothing if untold millions of illegal immigrants openly defy the laws without consequence.  It is estimated that 22 million illegals resided in the United States as of 2018.  Responding to an explicit invitation from the Biden administration, another 2 million have walked unchallenged across the border in the past 18 months.  

These so-called undocumented immigrants are becoming legally indistinguishable from citizens as they openly reside in 500 sanctuary jurisdictions, receive welfare, education and medical care, are granted drivers licenses, and given tuition breaks at public universities as they, not legal immigrants or American citizens, are exempt from federal immigration, health and travel laws.

The nation’s motto “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of many, One”) has been deliberately and maliciously replaced with degenerate tribalism.  The current iteration of the ruling class and their radical left-wing allies have relentlessly promoted the concept that individual citizens do not owe their allegiance to the United States but instead owe their allegiance to racial or ethnic groups that look like them or to those that profess certain sexual proclivities or to those that wallow in corrosive anti-Americanism.

This elitist and progressive heterodoxy aspires to destroy statues, rename streets, buildings and military installations, re-write and recast American history, and erase the art and architecture that does not reflect either their globalist views or their narcissistic racial, ethnic, sexual, or class-structured self-gratification.  Being a “woke” citizen of the world is far more important than being a citizen of the United States.

The vast bulk of the American elites and their status-seeking hangers-on see nothing exceptional in America, either past or present.  Turning their backs on their American citizenship while denigrating it, these apostates are deliberately attempting to fuel shame among the citizenry over what they claim to be the iniquitous origins and traditions of America.  Regrettably, they have succeeded in perhaps permanently undermining the distinctiveness and unique privileges of American citizenship which is the glue that has held this society together for over two hundred years.    

After the blatant and unconstitutional voting law changes that allowed the Democrat party and the ruling elites to fraudulently win the 2020 presidential election, one of the basic birthrights of American citizenship, voting in fair and free elections, has been permanently imperiled.

Millions of mail-in ballots with no security controls were indiscriminately distributed and unaccounted for throughout the length and breadth of the country, at least 4-8 million ballots were illegally “harvested” by paid campaign workers, and per the documentary film “2000 Mules” hundreds of thousands of ballots were feloniously “stuffed” into innumerable drop-off boxes.  

The denials of election fraud and subsequent cover-ups by the media and the ruling class ring hollow and insincere as they, in essence, have told the American citizens that they have little or no say in who is chosen to run or how their leaders are elected.

The first seven words of the U.S. Constitution are: “We the people of the United States.”   It is a document by the American citizens for the American citizens.  Not only can the citizenry no longer rely on open and honest elections to choose the president and members of Congress, the judiciary and bureaucracy have unconstitutionally evolved into uncontrolled powers unto themselves.

Activist federal judges habitually overturn legislation they find contrary to their left-wing political beliefs and willfully impose their cultural beliefs on American society.  They do so in the knowledge that there will be no repercussions from their political allies in the other two branches of government nor do they care that they are cancelling the votes of untold millions of American citizens.

Meanwhile, in the swamp of Washington, D.C. the bureaucratic, administrative, and regulatory state has become so vast, powerful, and unaccountable that desk-bound apparatchiks can issue life-altering edicts that have the force of law, they can harass entrepreneurs, and they can issue regulations that can drive a business or an American citizen into bankruptcy.  All without any oversight or constraint by those the American citizens are supposedly electing and who are purposefully derelict in their duties.

Among the most important and unique aspects of American citizenship are the written guarantees of rights as enumerated in the first ten amendments to the Constitution.  Four of these amendments (the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth) are devoted to making certain that the legal process is fair and protects the citizens from injustice.  Another amendment, the fourth, limits the ability of the government to conduct warrantless searches and seizures.  Thus, five of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights focus on the citizen’s right to fair and impartial justice.

Yet over the past two decades, the ruling class, in conjunction with their fellow-travelers in the state and federal judiciary, has systematically ignored these enumerated rights of American citizenship and created a two-tier system of justice.  Their political allies and followers as well as politically correct felons and criminals are treated leniently or, in many cases not prosecuted, while their political adversaries and their followers as well as non-politically correct felons and criminals are hounded and punitively prosecuted.

The disproportionally harsh judicial treatment of the non-violent protestors on January 6, 2021, as compared to the lack of prosecution and leniency shown the de facto allies of the ruling class who throughout the spring and summer of 2020 sowed death, destruction, looting and arson, confirms that not all American citizens are equal under the law. 

It is no longer the Constitution but the ruling class that defines what encompasses the rights and privileges of American citizenship.  All our constitutional rights, including freedom of speech and the unalienable right of self-defense, are increasingly optional and subject to the whims and fiats of the elected and unelected politically correct and self-righteous elites and bureaucrats. 

This nation is unraveling, transforming American citizens into mere residents of a vast stretch of land between the borders of Canada and Mexico.

The most meaningful day in my life occurred in 1956 when as a boy of eleven or twelve I became a citizen of the United States.  Little did I know that in my lifetime I would see the descent of American citizenship into near meaninglessness.  A collapse that came about internally and was not directly precipitated by the nation’s foreign adversaries. 

Unfortunately, the bulk of Americans obliviously believe that American citizenship remains what it has always been; in reality, it is rapidly disappearing.