[The American Conservative] Righting Citizenship

The question of birthright citizenship is far from settled. Despite lawyers’ hesitancy, the issue is as relevant as ever today.

The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State. By Edward J. Erler. Encounter Books; 184 pages; $27.99.

Few policy issues are more central to a nation’s sovereignty than determining who gets to be a citizen and how; every other problem or question flows, one way or another, from that crucial, binary determination. The way our country bestows citizenship, argues Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Edward J. Erler in The United States in Crisis (2022), has progressively lost its grounding in popular consent, which remains, at least in principle, the only legitimate source of American sovereignty. As one generation of Americans has given way to the next, this process of de-anchoring has gradually undermined the nation’s ability to shape who gets to belong to it and how.

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