It’s High Time That America Be Selective About Who Can Become an American Citizen
What do you have in common with New York City's Mayor Zohran Mamdani?
William Sullivan | April 8, 2026 americanthinker.com
The country has been on pins and needles in recent weeks, as the Supreme Court weighs a decision about birthright citizenship, which is a question that has persisted throughout every living American’s life, though it seems to me that it never should have been.
First, let’s consider the framers’ intent.
The Fourteenth Amendment is clearly directed toward ensuring that slaves born in America, whose forebears were of African origin, would be considered American citizens after the Civil War. We know this to be a fact because many American Indians were also born on American soil, though they were not considered American citizens when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.
None of this is rocket science, and, to put it bluntly, the idea that a foreigner could smuggle herself inside these United States’ borders and birth a child to ensure that the child would be rewarded with American citizenship is about the stupidest thing anyone could have ever argued.
And yet, this stupid argument has been the supposed consensus for most living Americans’ lives.
To be clear, there would have been little “reward” for American citizenship in any years prior to the twentieth century. There was no welfare state back then. There was nothing in the way of public education, certainly no federally subsidized health care, no government assistance of any kind.
But, more importantly, what binds us as Americans is not the soil on which we are born – what binds us is the ideals to which we subscribe.
Our first and arguably greatest president explains this clearly.
Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 (which was published rather than spoken), is among the most timelessly applicable and accessible pieces of early American writing. I would argue that the final two paragraphs stand out as a primary reason why this man, in his humility and refusal to become a king, is arguably the greatest American to have ever lived.
It was later ceremoniously read by Congress in 1862 as a morale boost during the Civil War, and it’s not difficult to imagine why. Washington’s argument in the Address goes hand in glove with the argument for the preservation of the Union made by Lincoln. He clearly declares his desire that the “Union and brotherly affection may be perpetual.”
“The name of American,” Washington writes, “which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”
But the very next sentence clarifies the nature of the audience to whom Washington was speaking, whether they were from New York or Georgia:
With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together. The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts – of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.
Then, that was true. But tell me, what do you have in common with Zohran Mamdani, for example? He’s a Ugandan-born communist Muslim who was just elected as mayor of New York City. And what do you have in common with the average New Yorker in New York City, for that matter, in which four in 10 denizens are foreign-born and roughly one in four cannot speak English?
The entire American experiment relies upon the notion that the people of this country might generally agree with the basic “political principles” asserted by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, documents which were written by and for the largely homogeneous society that Washington addresses.
Washington made an appeal to cohesion among the American people being reliant on the more substantive elements by which human beings identify – religion, manners, habits, and political principles. Notably, he did not appeal to race, sex, economic class, or any other such thing that modern Democrats insist that Americans use as the most fundamental societal identifiers today.
In his book, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, Mark Steyn references Samuel Huntington and his thesis in The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington’s conclusions are less appealing for most, Steyn argues, because they’re less sedating for the multi-culturalist cult. He writes:
A man in a factory on the other side of the world may make parts for an electronic gizmo [NY Times’ columnist] Thomas Friedman plays with while waiting for the VIP lounge to call his flight, but that does not mean they share anything like the same worldview. It seems sad to have to point out something so obvious. Which, after all, is more central to a man’s identity? The fact that he makes trinkets for Thomas Friedman? Or the fact that he’s an Indonesian Muslim?*
Again, back to Mayor Mamdani in New York. He is a Ugandan-born communist Muslim. What is more central to his identity, after all? That he now calls himself an American, or that he is a Ugandan-born communist Muslim who seems to hate everything about this country?
Even more to the quick, if we look to preserve the bond that Washington and Lincoln dreamed would exist in the future among Americans, does it not make sense to stop importing unvetted people from countries that hate us, and particularly to stop importing unvetted millions who will exploit the taxpayer-funded welfare systems that Democrats have legislated into existence in the past 100 years?
