Trump’s tactics stoke worry among naturalized citizens
On the day Donald Trump was inaugurated president, Sonora Jha was walking past a group of white men at a work site in downtown Seattle when one told her, “Go home!”
Jha, shaken, didn’t know whether to confront the men or let it go: This was her home. After immigrating from India, the author became a naturalized American citizen in 2016. An equal, or so she thought.
When President Trump’s supporters chanted a new version of that threat against his critic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, calling for Trump to “send her back” to Somalia, the familiar words jolted Jha and other naturalized citizens.
“It does make us afraid,” said Jha, 51. “For immigrants who are naturalized citizens, there’s a sense of shame when something like this happens in the country that you call home.”
Trump has stoked racial animosity unlike any other president in recent history, challenging what it means to be a U.S. citizen by transforming the nation’s immigration policies and accusing opponents of not belonging in America.
Trump first rose to political prominence by questioning the birthright citizenship of Barack Obama, falsely claiming the nation’s first black president was born in Africa. During Trump’s time in office, his administration has waged a wide-ranging battle to implicitly limit both legal and illegal immigration from predominantly black, brown and Muslim countries, with the president saying that “we should have more people from places like Norway.”
Now, as Trump seeks re-election, he has played to his overwhelmingly white base by telling several prominent congresswomen of color who have criticized him to leave the country, even though three were born in the U.S. and the fourth is a naturalized citizen.
If the president is seeking to drive a wedge into the country, it’s worked: He has energized supporters while upsetting many of the nation’s 20 million naturalized citizens, who feel that their identities and equality as Americans have come under attack.
“Everything that has come out of Trump’s policies now makes us feel like we’re not first-class citizens,” said Martin Rosenow, 66, a legal assistant in Florida’s Broward County who immigrated from Colombia in 1979 and was naturalized in 1996.
The “send her back” taunt—implying that Omar should be stripped of her citizenship and deported—particularly infuriated Mariella Farfán, 48, a financial analyst who lives in Miramar, Fla.
“I feel insulted,” said Farfán, who emigrated from Peru at 18 years old in 1989 and became a U.S. citizen in 2005. “He’s trying to change what it means to be a U.S. citizen.”
The crowd chanting “send her back” at a North Carolina rally was inspired by a Trump tweet telling Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who came here as a refugee from Somalia, and U.S.-born Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts to “go back” to the countries they supposedly came from. The insult was instantly familiar to many Americans of color.
“I’m a Chinese American. I grew up hearing this on a playground: ‘Ching chong, go back to where you came from,’” said Mae Ngai, a Columbia University history professor and citizenship expert who was born in the Bronx. “This is just racism.”
Trump has “unleashed something that’s always been just barely beneath the surface for racism against people of color,” Ngai said.
The United States has allowed naturalization since 1790, though racial exclusion long dominated the nation’s immigration policies. New citizenship was limited to “a free white person,” before being expanded to include Mexican Americans under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and former slaves under the 14th Amendment in 1868.
The nation continued to racially restrict citizenship with laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; limits on immigration from countries outside Western and Northern Europe weren’t fully lifted until the mid-20th century.
Today, citizenship requires five years of legal permanent residency, an ability to speak English, “good moral character,” passing a civics exam, and an oath to “support and defend the Constitution.” The nation now swears in about 700,000 naturalized citizens a year; once granted, citizenship can only be revoked if the government finds it was obtained fraudulently.
Naturalized and natural-born citizens are otherwise full equals under the law, thanks to the 14th Amendment, with a single exception: the ability to become president, which the Constitution limits to “a natural born Citizen.”
That is exactly the exception Trump exploited to rise to prominence as a political force among conservatives. He first questioned the birth-by-soil citizenship (a legal principle known as jus soli) of President Obama, who was born in Hawaii; he later questioned the eligibility of his 2016 primary opponent Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who was born in Canada but received natural-born citizenship by blood through his American mother.
Since arriving in office, Trump has opposed amnesty and a path to citizenship for the roughly 10.5 million people thought to be living in the U.S. illegally, and he has threatened to deport them. He has also battled to limit the kind of entry that could precede citizenship by attempting to build a border wall, banning travel from several majority-Muslim countries, cracking down on asylum claims and pushing to end refugee admissions.
Last year, Trump also threatened to attempt to end birthright citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil, though his proposed executive order had little hope of survival against the 14th Amendment.
Mayra Salinas-Menjivar, a Las Vegas attorney who became naturalized after fleeing El Salvador as a child, said it made sense that naturalized Latinos were more likely to vote than those born in the U.S.
“You don’t know what you have until you don’t have it,” she said.
Roberto Rodriguez-Tejera, 66, a Cuban-born naturalized citizen who hosts a Spanish-language radio show on Miami’s Actualidad 1040-AM, said Trump’s provocations have made his listeners feel “hurt.” But Rodriguez-Tejera said it only made him more defiant about defending his American-ness.
“Go back to Cuba? Go back to Venezuela? Go back to Haiti? This is our country, and we’re going to fight for it, and we’re going to fight for what the United States of America stands for.”