Posted on 09/25/2003 8:03:10 AM PDT by Vindiciae Contra TyrannoSCOTUS
It doesn't happen often, so mark the calendar. The bureaucracy has actually bowed to the wishes of the American people.
Somebody or bodies in the new Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS) planned to celebrate Constitution Day on September 17 by changing the oath of citizenship which new citizens take when they are naturalized. The plan was to make it immediately effective, using it at an immigrant swearing-in ceremony and publishing it in the Federal Register on the same day.
Fortunately, this covert mischief was discovered in time and denounced by the American Legion, former Attorney General Edwin Meese, and Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN). The bureaucrats got the message and announced they are going back to the drawing board.
I hope that's not just face-saving language. The BCIS has a big job to do in keeping terrorists and hatemongers from other cultures out of our country, and they shouldn't be spending any time at the drawing board trying to rewrite the oath of citizenship.
The BCIS spokesman said his agency wanted the oath to be less arcane and more meaningful. That argument is nonsense because the agency's proposed rewrite is less meaningful than the present oath.
There is nothing the matter with the current oath, and there was no public demand to change it. It is really outrageous that the nameless bureaucrats tried to make this change without authorization from Congress and without allowing any public comment.
Those who become naturalized Americans are required to take this oath: "I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen." The redundancy ("absolutely and entirely," "renounce and abjure," "subject or citizen") is clear, emphatic, and essential.
The BCIS revision would substitute: "I hereby renounce under oath all allegiance to any foreign state." That's simply not good enough.
Osama Bin Laden is not a "foreign state," but he does come within the definition of "foreign prince, potentate or sovereignty," and his minions are his subjects, not his citizens. Did BCIS think it is no longer important for naturalized citizens to renounce loyalty to the likes of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda?
The current oath of citizenship further states: "I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law." The BCIS revision is not satisfactory.
It omits the familiar American expression "bear arms" and instead gives the naturalized citizen the option of defending the United States "either by military, noncombatant, or civilian service." No wonder the American Legion objected.
The BCIS revision requires new citizens to perform this service only "where and if lawfully required." Are there occasions when such service is unlawfully required?
The BCIS should not be trusted to produce any substitute revisions. The bureaucrats should be cut off at the pass by congressional passage of Senator Alexander's proposed legislation to make the current oath of allegiance the law of the land, along with the American Flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, the National Anthem, and our national motto.
Our current oath of citizenship is a superb statement of what loyalty to America means: both swearing allegiance to the United States and renouncing all allegiance to wherever and whoever the new American came from. New citizens who swear the current oath, "so help me God," absolutely cannot retain any loyalty to their former country or ruler.
Rather than rewriting the current oath of citizenship, the BCIS ought to be busy revoking the citizenship of those who violate their solemn oath.
The Mexican government has been openly telling Mexicans who have become naturalized Americans that they can also retain theircitizenship and loyalty to Mexico. The U.S. oath of citizenship makes that a moral and legal impossibility.
Yet, on March 20, 1998, Mexico passed a law that purports to reinstate Mexican nationality for Mexican-Americans who have become naturalized U.S. citizens. Mexico has since issued tens of thousands of documents to naturalized Americans who came from Mexico.
On July 9 a naturalized American, Andres Bermudez, was elected mayor of Jerez, a city in Mexico, declaring himself a "candidate of two nations." Our government should revoke Bermudez's U.S. citizenship, as well as the citizenship of all other naturalized Americans who ran for public office in Mexico or voted in Mexico's elections.
If we tolerate duplicity with the solemn oath of citizenship, we are opening the door for more mischief in the future. Dual loyalty is an insurmountable barrier to assimilating naturalized citizens into the American culture.
America welcomes immigrants -- but only if they want to become loyal Americans, respect our Constitution and the rule of law, learn our language, and honor their oath of citizenship.
The BCIS revision would substitute: "I hereby renounce under oath all allegiance to any foreign state." That's simply not good enough.
The key concepts of transnationalism can be described as follows: The primary political unit is the ascriptive group (racial, ethnic or gender) and not the individual. Groups are divided into oppressors versus victims, which is largely the Hegelian-Marxian dichotomy between privileged versus oppressed groups. Institutions within society must provide representation to the diverse groups, i.e. group proportionalism is to substitute for the individual vote that heretofore formed the basis of constitutional democracy in the United States. On the global level, transnationalism, as the word conveys, advocates termination of the nation-state in favor of world citizenship that will construct some form of world governance subject to "international law." ANTI-ASSIMILATION ON THE HOME FRONT
Two leading law professors (Peter Spiro from Hofstra and Peter Schuck from Yale) complain that immigrants seeking American citizenship are required to "renounce all allegiance" to their old nations." Spiro and Schuck even reject the concept of the hyphenated American and endorse what they call the "ampersand" citizen. Thus, instead of traditional "Mexican-Americans" who are loyal citizens but proud of their ethnic roots, they prefer postnational citizens, who are both "Mexican & American," who retain "loyalties" to their "original homeland" and vote in both countries.
University professor Robert Bach authored a major Ford Foundation report on new and "established residents" (the word "citizen" was assiduously avoided) that advocated the "maintenance" of ethnic immigrant identities and attacked assimilation as the "problem in America." Bach later became deputy director for policy at the INS in the Clinton administration.
The financial backing for this anti-assimilationist campaign has come primarily from the Ford Foundation, which made a conscious decision to fund a Latino rights movement based on advocacy-litigation and group rights. The global progressives have been aided-if not always consciously, certainly in objective terms-by a "transnational right." It was a determined Right-Left coalition led by libertarian Stuart Anderson, who currently holds Bach's old position at the INS, that killed a high-tech tracking system for foreign students that might have saved lives on September 11. Whatever their ideological or commercial motives, the demand for "open borders" (not simply free trade, which is a different matter altogether) by the libertarian right has strengthened the Left's anti-assimilationist agenda. View as HTML Liberal Democracy vs. Transnational Progressivism: The Ideological Civil War Within the West Hudson Institute ^ | October 26, 2001 | John Fonte
A California college professor who grew up in a heavily Hispanic-populated area says there has been a major paradigm shift in the type of immigrants that live in California now.
Dr. Victor Davis Hanson teaches classics at California State University, Fresno, one of the 23 campuses in the California State University system. He says when he grew up in the nearby San Joaquin Valley, the majority of the population were Mexican immigrants who had become Americans and who made a genuine effort to become "acculturated" and to assimilate into mainstream American society.
Hanson believes that type of immigration established a healthy pattern for all concerned. "When people came from Mexico in numbers that were smaller and would allow greater chance for assimilation -- along with legalities so that they didn't live in the shadows of society -- they were less likely to be exploited by employers, they were more likely to vote, and they were more likely to learn English," he says.
But now, the professor says, thanks to uncontrolled immigration, the region's population is composed mostly of illegal aliens who live in separate communities, isolated from mainstreaming influences. California Scholar Says Most 'New Immigrants' Fail to Assimilate
The purpose of the ideology known commonly as "multiculturalism" is to destroy America. In the 21st-century world of fourth-generation warfare, it is likely to succeed.
As war between states fades away, one of the older forms of conflict returning is war between cultures. With the death of state loyalties and identities, identification and loyalty to a culture is coming back strongly. Cultural differences are one of history's main reasons for war. Human nature being what it is, when cultures rub up against each other, the resulting friction often leads to fire. BELIEFS Multiculturalism Threat to National Security - William S. Lind, December 31, 2001
A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author is warning that widespread ignorance of American history among students and teachers at high schools and colleges is a major threat to the nation's security. EDUCATION - Senate Panel Hears that Ignorance of U.S. History Poses Major Security Threat
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