LOS ANGELES — California is challenging the historic status of American citizenship with measures to permit noncitizens to sit on juries and monitor polls for elections in which they cannot vote and to open the practice of law even to those here illegally. It is the leading edge of a national trend that includes granting drivers’ licenses and in-state tuition to illegal immigrants in some states and that suggests legal residency could evolve into an appealing option should immigration legislation fail to produce a path to citizenship.Read the rest here.
With 3.5 million noncitizens who are legal permanent residents in California, some view the changes as an acknowledgment of who is living here and the need to require some public service of them. But the new laws raise profound questions about which rights and responsibilities rightly belong to citizens over residents.
This is a very bad idea.
John - at this point what does American citizenship get you anyway? If you're a net producer, it's just a number the government uses to make it easier to extract taxes. One thousand more serfs will pass through the system next week, and they'll get numbers too. As the number of grants of citizenship increases, it becomes valueless, like the Third Reich frantically handing out field marshal batons.
ReplyDeleteThis is what libertarians and other advocates of proposition nationhood completely overlook. What makes the traditional ethnic nation-state so valuable is the fact that membership in the ethnic nation is not the State's to grant, and no State can ever take it away from you.
Propositional nationhood is a reckless modern experiment, and it is going to be a long, hard slog winding it down.
On juries? I can hear appeals lawyers absolutely giddy over that one.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denationalized_citizenship
ReplyDeleteGoogle 'transnationalization' or 'globalization'. You and I are way behind the times. The future is one world, one government, one people, ruled by one, global élite.