But beyond the legal arguments there is a pressing moral argument about citizenship and nationhood that lies at the heart of our current debates about the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship. The moral argument engages a different and arguably more important set of questions. What is an American? Who is America for? What is the purpose of immigration? What do immigrants or would-be immigrants owe to the native-born population? //

Contrary to what has been drilled into most of us since grade school, not everyone can really become an American. Being an American means more than simply assenting to live by our laws and paying taxes, because America is more than an idea. (As others have noted, if America is just an idea we can write it down and send it overseas, and foreigners need not come here at all.)

Simply put, America is a nation. We have a common language and a shared history. We have a certain way of life and customs. We have a distinctly American identity. Our system of government is founded explicitly on Christian claims about God and man. For most of our history, Christian morality has been the basis of our civic life. We are bound together by family ties, by our connections to the land, by shared experience, by what Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address called the “mystic chords of memory.”

Every foreigner who comes here understands what this means as it applies to their own homeland. It has been a grave error that we have insisted for so long that none of it applies to us. Making a case against birthright citizenship will mean making a case against the pernicious ideology of multiculturalism, which we have been taught makes us strong but in reality makes us weaker and poorer.

It will also mean asserting that it’s not actually the case that someone whose parents emigrated to America from a foreign country, and whose family has only been here a single generation, is “just as American” as someone who traces their ancestry to the American Revolution. It will mean admitting that America would be much better off not only with zero illegal immigration but with only a very low level of legal immigration, which would help preserve our cultural and community cohesion, and encourage the complete assimilation of all newcomers.

We have to get comfortable saying these things and defending them. Yes, the legal and constitutional arguments against birthright citizenship are very strong, and they might in the end win the day. But regardless of the outcome of the legal battle over the 14th Amendment, we have to insist, without apology, on a fuller understanding of the American nation and the American people. An American is not just someone who happens to be born here. For a foreign national to become an American, he has to thoroughly adopt our culture, language, and way of life — and resolve to pass all of those habits and customs onto his posterity, here in his adopted homeland. Nothing less than his complete allegiance and complete assimilation will do.

Why do I say this? Because America itself is first and foremost for native-born Americans. It’s the only homeland we will ever have or ever can have. As such, our immigration policy should exist solely to benefit us, the American people. Indeed, because the only legitimate purpose of immigration is to create new Americans, our immigration regime should be narrowly tailored to serve the interests of our people. Businesses, especially multinational corporations, should have no say in it whatsoever, nor should legal resident noncitizens or family members of immigrants, whether legal or illegal.

All of these arguments are not really about immigration policy, but about what a nation is and how to preserve it.