 For many years, this Mother Goose & Grimm comic adorned the wall of my office in the (old) Boston Globe building. |
AS SOME of you know, I am on medical leave from my job at The Boston Globe and have not been able to write my regular op-ed columns or my Arguable newsletter. For several months I have been contending with a number of worrying and seemingly unconnected symptoms — everything from unplanned weight loss to increased clumsiness to difficulties with speech to muscle atrophy. These symptoms are all the more distressing since my doctors so far can't explain what is causing them or why they should suddenly have appeared.
All of which means that instead of spending my days trying to write opinion pieces that are interesting, timely, and thoughtful, I have instead been devoting my hours to blood draws and CT scans, to being examined by specialists, to getting prescriptions filled and dosages adjusted, and to navigating the maze of "patient portals" that even doctors tell me they find maddening.
I'm also spending time reflecting on what this experience can teach me and how I can use those insights to be a better person. One of the great sages of the Talmud, Rabbi Tarfon, said more than 1,900 years ago: "The day is short, and the work is very great." The meaning of those words has always seemed straightforward to me. Only now am I struck by their urgency.
Which isn't to say that I'm not paying attention to the world around me! I haven't stopped following the news or instinctively thinking about what I want to write — especially on the issues that matter most.
Like immigration.
Though I wish the Supreme Court's ruling in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case, had been unanimous, I always knew it was inconceivable that a majority of the justices would let this president — or any president — shatter one of the most sublime promises of the nation that declared its independence 250 years ago this month. From the very beginning of our history as a sovereign country, the rule has been clear: Children born on American soil begin life as equals. That is America at its best.
I wish I had been well enough to pen a fresh column as soon as the court handed down its decision last week. It's a subject I have followed for years, since long before this litigation began. My first column on the topic, which I wrote in 2010, made no mention of Donald Trump, who was still years away from launching a bid for the White House.
But immigration was becoming a political flashpoint, and a number of Republican leaders in Congress were talking about abolishing the constitutional guarantee of citizenship to any child born in the United States.
I was stunned. Could any knowledgeable Republican seriously contemplate such a thing? After all, the 14th Amendment, which enshrined birthright citizenship in the Constitution, was among the Republican Party's greatest achievements. So when John Boehner, then the House minority leader (and a future speaker), claimed that because of that amendment the country was "being overrun by illegal immigrants," I wrote a column noting that he was recycling an age-old bugbear. During the congressional debates on the amendment in 1866, I noted, Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania warned that birthright citizenship would undermine the ability of any state to defend itself "if it were overrun" — that word again — by immigrants of "a different race."
For example, Cowan demanded, "is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration of the Mongol race? Are they to be immigrated out of house and home by Chinese?. . . If another people of a different race, of different religion, of different manners, of different traditions, different tastes and sympathies are to come there and have the free right to locate there and settle among them, and if they have an opportunity of pouring in such an immigration as in a short time will double or treble the population of California . . . are the people of California powerless to protect themselves?"
Cowan's rant about California being swarmed by Chinese migrants was, as I wrote, a classic illustration of nativist fearmongering, hardly different from the rhetoric deployed by "21st-century immigration alarmists fulminating about 'anchor babies' or the 'invasion' of illegal immigrants across the southern border." It is a recurring pattern in American history: Every influx of immigrants is denounced as unwelcome and unassimilable. Yet those immigrants do assimilate — and before long their grandchildren are the ones fuming about why the next surge of foreigners seeking to become Americans ought to be denied entry.
In 2010, I never imagined that the attack on birthright citizenship would be championed by a future Republican president or that the Supreme Court would agree to take up the issue. What I did know was that "the immigration debates may churn, but about this much the Constitution is unequivocal: Anyone born in America is an American."
Happily, the high court ringingly affirmed that principle last week. No one born in the United States can be denied citizenship, no matter how disfavored their ethnicity or how unwelcome their parents.
In the years since that column appeared, much has changed in American life, most of it for the worse. It is good to know that some things haven't. I find that reassuring — these days, in more ways than one.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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