It’s not crazy to suggest that if immigrants will not assimilate then they shouldn’t be allowed to serve in Congress.
This week, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a joint resolution to bar foreign-born U.S. citizens from serving in Congress, the federal judiciary, and as Senate-confirmed political appointees. The Constitution already prohibits foreign-born citizens from serving as president and vice president, but Mace, who is currently running to be South Carolina’s next governor, wants to extend that to other high levels of government.
Her targets are Democrats like Reps. Ilhan Omar, Shri Thanedar, and Pramila Jayapal — all of whom, according to Mace, have divided loyalties. If the measure were to pass, however, it wouldn’t just bar these left-wing Democrats from serving in Congress, it would also affect several sitting Republicans who are naturalized citizens.
Of course, Mace’s proposed amendment has almost no chance of passing. It would require a two-thirds majority vote in both chambers of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of U.S. states. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. Prohibiting foreign-born citizens from Congress and the federal judiciary would have the salutary effect of keep radicals like Omar and Jayapal away from power, as well as the cadre of radical foreign-born federal judges, many appointed under the Biden administration, who have worked ceaselessly to undermine President Trump’s agenda since the day he took office.
More important than the merits of the proposal, however, are the reactions to it, which serve as a timely reminder of how thoroughly we’ve been propagandized into believing the false liberal narrative that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.”
Take for example columnist and law professor Jonathan Turley, a man of the establishment right, who said in an X post that he “cannot think of anything more antithetical to our founding than barring foreign-born citizens from Congress. As a nation of immigrants, it is a reaffirmation of our heritage to have these citizens serve in government.” Later, he declared “the founders themselves were immigrants.”
There’s a lot to unpack there, but to that last point, no they weren’t. Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, only eight were not born in the American colonies — they were born in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. All of them were subjects of the British crown, and each of them came to the colonies as colonists and settlers, not immigrants. They traveled from one part of the British Empire to another. When in 1776 they broke away from the mother country, one of their chief purposes was to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” as stated in the preamble to the Constitution. Indeed, the Constitution says almost nothing about immigrants — except that no foreign-born person may serve as president or vice president.
It’s odd, then, that Turley says he can think of “nothing more antithetical to our founding than barring foreign-born citizens from Congress.” Every member of the first Congress (1789-1791) was born in the British Empire, and only nine were born outside the American colonies, in Ireland, England, Canada, and Scotland. None of them were immigrants.