Can Donald Trump Restore American Citizenship?
By Steve McCann
Among the most daunting challenges facing Donald Trump is his determination to restore the value and uniqueness of American citizenship after nearly three decades of unrelenting erosion that has rendered it meaningless and no different than the citizenship of any other nation on the planet.
From 1860 to 1960, 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 were eager to assimilate and attain the most sought-after national status in the world—American citizenship, a special status that a cabal consisting of the current governing class, the American left, and its wholly owned subsidiary, the Democrat party, has been determined to destroy.
As part of that process, virtually all the enumerated rights of the citizenry have been relentlessly and purposefully eroded. The nation’s borders have been deliberately dismantled and flung open to anyone in a concerted effort to undermine and transform the native population. The basic birthright of American citizenship, faith in fair and free elections, has been near-permanently imperiled. And the foundational tenets of assimilation, together with a concurrent belief in the uniqueness of this nation, have been ruthlessly undermined.
As of January 2025, American citizenship and its one-of-a-kind written contract with the government—the Constitution—were teetering on the edge of meaninglessness. The relentless onslaught from the nation’s current governing class, the American left, and the latter’s Marxist co-conspirators in the Democrat Party, all determined to transform the populace into citizens of the globe and not the United States, brought the nation to that precipice.
That process began by eliminating secure, identifiable borders. Citizenship means nothing if untold millions of illegal immigrants openly defy the laws without consequence. It is estimated that at least 22 million illegal aliens resided in the United States as of 2018. Responding to an explicit invitation from Joe Biden, more than 15 million more illegal aliens walked unchallenged across the border.
These absurdly labeled “undocumented immigrants” were becoming indistinguishable from citizens as they openly resided in 500 “sanctuary” jurisdictions, received welfare, education, and medical care, and were granted driver’s licenses, and given tuition breaks at public universities. Simultaneously, unlike American citizens, they were exempt from federal immigration, health, and travel laws.