I totally agree with you, but I also think it's going to be very difficult to prevent the pendulum from swinging too far in the other direction, whenever it happens. It is certainly a concern to me, even after going through all the hoops to legally come to Canada good 30+ years ago, paying my taxes every since, becoming a citizen, raising my kids with Canadian values, and being as fed up as anyone else with the consequences of the extreme quantity of people let in the country in the last few years.
The best way to prevent the pendulum swinging too far is for good immigrants like yourself to join groups like the Dominion Society. Join forces against the new, criminal, or disloyal migrants, who need to be sent home, and help draw a line between those who should stay and those who must go.
In practice, yes. I think there are many citizens who don't belong here, but the hassle of getting rid of them is large, and there are millions of non-citizens worth going after. But I support the Dominion Society approach of offering substantial bounties for dual citizens who want to voluntarily renounce Canadian citizenship.
And I think it's perfectly legitimate to reverse the Liberals' recent changes extending citizenship to numerous non-residents wth little connection to Canada.
What I won't do is denounce people who want to go farther than me, when the real issue is sending home any of these people at all. We need a broad front to make political progress. But that's a whole other discussion.
While your position has great integrity, a contrary view is that the problems are so intractable that extralegal action is necessary. “He is sovereign, who decides the exception” is a (slightly) more palatable way of putting this.
Right, but that's not unlike arguing that sometimes violence is necessary. It's true but you better make sure its really necessary because the ramifications of being wrong will ruin your life.
Or to put it in political terms, there are people who would argue that the system is so corrupt that the President ought to suspend elections.
Your quote from "A Man for All Seasons" is one of my favorite all time quotes and in this age of left and right both eager to tear down western society, so fundamentally built on universally applied law, it is fitting.
Can we consider treason a reason to revoke citizenship?
Can treason - including, in Canada, *Conspiring to commit high treason or treason, or forming an intention to do so and manifesting it by an "overt act" (such as actively planning or assisting)* be to assist in the takeover by force of the entire world, in the name of ones religion?
No. Treason is a criminal offence. That is sufficient.
I'll add one caveat.
Revocation of citizenship is permissible in cases involving fraud or misrepresentation in obtaining citizenship. So, if you can prove that the person was never loyal to the country (i.e. lied during the swearing in ceremony) then yes, you can revoke the person's citizenship.
I feel like that's unlikely in Canada, and if a person was charged with assisting in a treasonous plot to, say, replace the Canadian government with one loyal to an Islamic caliphate, they would be more likely to serve a couple of years imprisonment, at most?
If they are an immigrant, then, deport them to their home country. (I suppose it's reasonable to conclude they may have lied in taking their citizenship oath, so that puts us in concordance!)
True. I guess I'm saying if the law doesn't allow it, it should be changed. Maybe the law does allow it as is, but I suspect my interpretation is in the minority.
So, the context in which I have seen the term "remigration" most frequently used is in the context of the UK, where it is used both in the context of how you described it, and also to refer to the stripping of what is referred to there as "Indefinite Leave to Remain". Which, obviously, is a significantly less solid piece of ground than "citizenship". I *believe* -- but I am hardly an expert on the nuances of UK immigration law -- that this is roughly equivalent to a US "Green Card".
And while I agree with you that stripping actual citizenship is a dangerous road to travel (although I could probably be convinced that a one time removal of citizenship from various "birth tourism" babies who only spent a few days between birth and departure in the country at all was an acceptable thing) I have no such qualms about green card holders. Their presence is already definitionally a legal status subject to legislation. If the appropriate legislation was passed, I see no reason that people in that group could not be returned to their points of origin.
I will state that I *have* considered the third order potential that I have been *driven* to this position through... I'm not sure if "psy-op" is the appropriate term, but I'll go with it for now, to soften my general inherent resistance to such things, and to convince me to welcome such a thing, through the use of mass, unlimited, illegal migration. I believe I have mentioned previously that I live in New Mexico, and if not, well, I just did. There are four states of the union on the southern border with Mexico. In addition to all of the others who were already *in* the country, during the Biden administration, some truly insane numbers of people illegally crossed that border into the United States.
Definitionally, of course, it is impossible to know precisely how many people are in this cohort. But the common estimates I have seen range from 12 to 15 million, in a four year period. *During Covid*. New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the union, and had a pre-Biden population of roughly 2.1 - 2.2 million people. I don't know what the actual population is now, mid decade and mid census, but I can say that housing prices have gone *insane*, with rents *doubling* between when I became a truck driver in 2019, and 2023 when I returned to Albuquerque to take my current job. I regularly see people camping in empty lots, starting fires to cook with, or fires to stay warm in the winter (Albuquerque has annual temperature swings of 60C, from -15C in the winter, to 45C in the summer; Deserts get *cold*, too) and more buildings burned in the last 3.5 years than ever in my previous 30 years here. The neighborhood I grew up in here, just off the Base, was *already* know as "The War Zone" in the 90's, and while there was a period of some measure of gentrification (which I contributed to) that period is *firmly* over and the "War Zone" appellation has come back with a vengeance. Given that my job is *on* said Air Force base, I drive through this as I go in, every day. So I have a fairly real time view of the annihilation of the closest thing I have to a home town. (As a navy brat, I lived in 8 different cities in the first 13 years of my life.) And... well, if it's a psy-op, it *worked*. I'm sick of it. I'm just *done*.
I grant that it is in no way at all the most rigorous philosophical position I have ever held. It's quite possibly inconsistent with a number of other positions I'd say I firmly hold. Gramsci has been successful. I am demoralized. And I am **FUCKING ANGRY.** I am entirely confident that I am not alone in this.
Anger is justified. Retroactively changing a law is not. If someone became a citizen under a law, whether or not we may agree with it, the government should not be able to strip them of citizenship. For our own safety's sake.
I'm fine with deporting people on visas. I'm (sort of) fine with making a law stripping people of citizenship if they live in a foreign country for, idk, 20 years? I'm even fine with passing a law that eliminates birthright citizenship. Moving forward.
However, passing a law that applies retroactively to people sets a dangerous precedent, as does allowing the government to strip citizenship from people.
Yeah. I mean, I certainly understand the point you are making. The Chinese (and Russian) birth tourism thing, though, is just *such* an egregious security flaw that I have a very difficult time getting over it.
How would you feel about "anyone who has dual citizenship (so we're not leaving people entirely stateless) and has been absent from the country for 15 years"?
Not that any ideas we hammer out here have a whelk's chance in a supernova of being implemented.
I, of course, think we must move *immediately* to curtail that practice moving forward. And prioritize deporting anyone who is here illegally and pregnant, possibly even over people who are here illegally and are violent criminals. Though I see little reason to not do both.
You're confusing many concepts. "Remigration" is the word for "migrants returning home". That could be temporaries, so-called PRs, or naturalized citizens. It need not be any specific group.
The government can legislate to extend citizenship to randomers, so it can certainly legislate to deny it to people who don't have it and send them home. It can also choose to seriously go after people who made a fraudulent oath of allegiance or who didn't meet the criteria, such as language fluency.
If Supreme Court justices get in the way, they can legally be turfed with sec. 99.
We can achieve sufficient remigration perfectly legally, if we win power.
If our people decide that our treacherous government, due perhaps to censorship and media bribes, coupled with past replacement migration, can never be removed democratically, what should they do? Submit to their own destruction? Hopefully it won't come to this. And, for now, few are advocating it.
"Remigration" is used in immigration policy discussions to mean the return of migrants to their countries of origin. However, in recent years the term has also been adopted by some political movements to encompass policies affecting not only temporary migrants but, in some proposals, permanent residents and even naturalized citizens. So the meaning depends on the speaker and context.
My argument is that it is dangerous to allow the government to revoke citizenship, so my use of the term is in that context.
I did not state that sending non-citizens to their country of origin is a danger.
Yes, revoking citizenship because of fraud is permissible. However, the government cannot revoke citizenship based on language fluency unless the person obtained citizenship through fraud or misrepresentation.
I'm not a lawyer but research seems to imply that judges cannot simply be removed because a government dislikes their decisions. Removal requires a formal process for incapacity or misconduct and ultimately action by Parliament following investigation. It is not a mechanism for replacing judges over policy disagreements.
Your last paragraph seems to move from a legal argument to one advocating revolution. Disagreeing with the actions of a legally elected government does not make what they do illegal or treacherous. If "our people" vote to restrict immigration and the government fails to enact this desire you may have an argument however that is difficult to prove given that there are so many different reasons to vote for/against any given party.
Much to think about. An interesting sidelight on illiberal methods is that the Bolsheviks, in the 1920’s decided to manage those peoples of the old czarist empire they were able to keep by declaring everyone a ‘national citizen’ of some homeland of other, rather than a Soviet citizen.
Complicated story, but if they did not like you, you got shipped back where you came from.
(If you were lucky)
This approach was taken by the Communist Party, USA. In the 1920’s it explicitly appealed to the white worker, and proposed to solve the ‘color question’ by shipping all the Negroes back where they came from - that is, the South from which many had moved north after the first war, creating unrest among the prejudiced.
The CPUSA was going to create a ‘Negro Soviet Republic’, declare all blacks citizens of it, and send them there. Unless the Party needed a few for one job or another.
They gave this up in the early 1930’s. But other such movements around the world did not. In South Africa, the Nationalists were in alliance with the Communist Party of South Africa. They fought a joint strike on the Rand in the early 1920’s under the slogan “ Workers of the world, unite and fight for a white South Africa!”. They fell out later, but the Nationalists remembered Stalin’s homelands policy. It became the basis for their apartheid policy - homelands, internal passports, and all.
Well, good luck keeping the tattered flag of liberty flying in Canada.
Labels like liberal and conservative tend to get bent, twisted & manipulated to suit the narrative, so to speak. It's especially problematic as most folks tend to be impulsive rather than thoughtful so their "A le carte" ideologies are mixed and match, logically inconsistent, messy.
In a classic sense, those who were liberal sought to liberate mankind from overburdening gubbermint. Those who were conservative sought to preserve the rule of law which necessarily involves some quantity of gubbermint.
So how does one describe a gubbermint who seeks to impose "tolerance" for certain identified "victim" group(s) whilst actively suppressing other identified "oppressors" group(s)? They will claim to be liberal (liberating their pet victims) but they're using the weapons of gubbermint.
Some folks get pissy when I describe the above-noted as being "Cultural Marxist" so perhaps totalitarian would be more palatable.
I appreciated this post, as it hits close to home for me. For context, I am originally from the EU but moved to the UK before the Brexit referendum was even announced, and I naturalized a few years ago. Being of a certain persuasion, some time after getting my passport I joined the British Army because I thought it would be good to give back to the country that has been good to me; I guess in my own mind I am being true to the notion that "service guarantees citizenship". Am I happy? Not really, the army has made my life worse but again, I felt this sacrifice had to be done to earn legitimacy in the eyes of native British people.
When I see Restore Britain I largely agree with most of their intent, including their stance on the differences among cultures; however, repatriation leaves me perplexed exactly because of the points you raise. I look forward to the end of my term of service to regain a bit of happiness and agency in my life, but if anyone in the street ever questions why I am here in the first place after years of taxes paid, blood, sweat and tears they will get an earful.
The irony of it all is all is that the government would probably hate me regardless, whether I had been born here or not.
I would certainly agree that serving in the military is proof of "legitimacy." I don't think it should be necessary though.
Paying taxes is less convincing. I lived in the US for 20 years on various visas and probably paid much more in taxes than most US citizens but I was never a citizen and the country had every right to demand that I leave once I retired. That said, it irks me a little that after 20 years of making a life there there was no simplified path to citizenship for me. In fact progressives would argue that illegal immigrants have more of a right to citizenship than I do. How's that for logic?
These details aside, the time to decide who should "live here" is at the border, not after citizenship has been granted.
“Supporters of remigration see the sentence “compelled return of legal immigrants or naturalized citizens based on ethnicity” and all they see is “ethnicity.” However, the word they should be focused on is “citizens.” If citizenship can be stripped from one citizen, it can be stripped from another, and it would be naïve to think that how long a person has been in the country would matter. When the New Right is done with non-Europeans and turns on you for being the wrong religion or the wrong type of European, what will your defense be, “I have rights?” Newcomers have rights too and it didn’t help them.”
I don't think this argument addresses what supporters of remigration are actually advocating. It seems to rely on a slippery-slope scenario in which any policy allowing citizenship to be revoked in specific circumstances inevitably expands into arbitrary persecution of anyone who falls out of favor. That conclusion doesn't necessarily follow.
Many countries that place a strong emphasis on border control and cultural continuity enforce standards that are considerably stricter than those common in today's Western liberal democracies, yet those standards are still defined by law rather than applied arbitrarily. Treating every stricter immigration or citizenship policy as inherently illiberal overlooks the distinction between clear legal criteria and arbitrary government action.
More broadly, the tendency to view almost any tightening of immigration or citizenship rules as incompatible with liberal values suggests that the current liberal framework in much of the West may have become overly permissive and could benefit from a reassessment.
In short, I don't think what you’re presenting is an example of the indivisibility of freedom so much as a slippery-slope argument. It's one thing to argue that granting a government a certain power creates a precedent; it's another to assume that it will inevitably expand into stripping citizenship from increasingly broader groups without providing evidence for that progression. If the latter claim is central to the argument, it needs to be supported rather than assumed.
I also find it difficult to reconcile the concern about potential future abuses of state power with your use of reply rules that prohibit or hide viewpoints based on subjective ideological standards rather than objective criteria such as civility or factual accuracy. If arbitrary exercises of power are the concern, then that principle should apply consistently, whether the authority is a government or the moderators of a public discussion.
I agree, nothing is inevitable. However, the political principle, often stated as, "never give the government a power you wouldn't want your opponents to wield," is a rule we should be living by.
"I think it'll be ok this time" is a risky position to take.
Also, no where did I state that "every stricter immigration or citizenship policy as inherently illiberal." I said revoking citizenship is dangerous.
I'm all for strong borders. I'm against, "we're taking back you citizenship because we changed our minds."
Once you're a citizen, in the absence of fraud, you remain one. That or none of our citizenship is worth the paper it's printed on.
I do not understand your last paragraph. What reply rules are you talking about? Where have I been inconsistent in my position with respect to the law and individual rights?
It is not a "slippery slope" argument because, citizenship is the basis of liberal democracies. The citizens are the *source* of the legitimacy of the government. So, stripping someone of citizenship would be a dictatorship of the majority. You can restrict the criteria for new immigration or naturalization.
But once you remove established rights from your fellow citizens, the democracy is gone.
I think you’re arguing for a principle in absolute terms without defending the absolutism itself. If your position is that citizenship should never be revocable under any circumstances, that’s a coherent normative position, but it requires an argument. Simply asserting that any revocation ends democracy doesn’t follow automatically, especially when existing liberal democracies have narrowly defined citizenship revocation laws.
Existing citizenship revocation laws in full democracies are of two types. Treason/terrorism or proven fraud/*intentional* misrepresentation during the obtaining process.
Any revocation process that's not heavily limited to *intentional* criminal behaviour would definitely infringe on the essence of democracy itself.
Running your answers through an LLM doesn't change this fact.
You're acting as though "the essence of democracy" has only one component, but democracy is also about the capacity of a political community to govern itself. Preserving the continuity of that political community is itself a legitimate democratic objective. We may argue and disagree on where a balance should land on how to maintain the native population and how to accommodate immigrants, but presenting your flawed self-righteous conclusion as an uncontested fact doesn't resolve the debate.
As for your "running your answer through an LLM" accusation, not only is it unfounded but it also shows how you have no actual argument against my own so you're trying instead to find a moral excuse to delegitimize it. Relying on relativist and speculative arguments and unfunded accusations doesn't change this fact.
By definition, the "essence" of something are the few key elements.
I don't dispute "preserving continuity of the community" as a legitimate democratic objective, but it's not a foundational element. A country can change and still be democratic. It can't disempower citizens that have committed no crimes and still be democratic.
Regarding the LLM, do you deny using them for the past two replies ? It has nothing to do with "delegitimizing" your arguments, it is simply tiresome to distill them out of the unnecessary LLM fluff.
I think the idea is that if you have citizenship, it can not be arbitrarily revoked. It must be by some standard, equally applicable to all the other citizens.
If you are not a citizen, you have no human right to be admitted, or to stay. The citizens decide who enters, for what reasons they like.
Republicans are referred to as the stupid party for a reason.
They never cease to amaze me.
They appear to be the party of limited, Constitutional government, but every time they get in power, they increase the power of government “to do good”.
This is the reason Democrats have had so much power since Woodrow Wilson.
If they push and implement this, just give Democrats both houses and make Newsome the next President.
The Nordics are paying muslims to go home, I don't see why we shouldn't be doing that here.
If someone got citizenship through some bullshit (fake refugee claim, originally illegal and they got citizenship, children of illegal born here) then I think its legitimate to kick them out.
I totally agree with you, but I also think it's going to be very difficult to prevent the pendulum from swinging too far in the other direction, whenever it happens. It is certainly a concern to me, even after going through all the hoops to legally come to Canada good 30+ years ago, paying my taxes every since, becoming a citizen, raising my kids with Canadian values, and being as fed up as anyone else with the consequences of the extreme quantity of people let in the country in the last few years.
Honestly, I think the chances of repatriation/remigration coming to pass are slim but it's best to draw a line in the sand now.
The best way to prevent the pendulum swinging too far is for good immigrants like yourself to join groups like the Dominion Society. Join forces against the new, criminal, or disloyal migrants, who need to be sent home, and help draw a line between those who should stay and those who must go.
When you talk about migrants are you making a distinction between those who have citizenship and those who don't?
In practice, yes. I think there are many citizens who don't belong here, but the hassle of getting rid of them is large, and there are millions of non-citizens worth going after. But I support the Dominion Society approach of offering substantial bounties for dual citizens who want to voluntarily renounce Canadian citizenship.
And I think it's perfectly legitimate to reverse the Liberals' recent changes extending citizenship to numerous non-residents wth little connection to Canada.
What I won't do is denounce people who want to go farther than me, when the real issue is sending home any of these people at all. We need a broad front to make political progress. But that's a whole other discussion.
While your position has great integrity, a contrary view is that the problems are so intractable that extralegal action is necessary. “He is sovereign, who decides the exception” is a (slightly) more palatable way of putting this.
Right, but that's not unlike arguing that sometimes violence is necessary. It's true but you better make sure its really necessary because the ramifications of being wrong will ruin your life.
Or to put it in political terms, there are people who would argue that the system is so corrupt that the President ought to suspend elections.
Also, a sure and certain way to cure a nosebleed is to put a tourniquet around the neck.
Never give the government a power you aren't happy to see your political opponents possess.
.
Yeah, but usually if a nosebleed is extreme enough to potentially warrant that, they'll at least *try* cocaine first. And electrocautery.
Your quote from "A Man for All Seasons" is one of my favorite all time quotes and in this age of left and right both eager to tear down western society, so fundamentally built on universally applied law, it is fitting.
Mine too. It should be required reading in all high schools.
Can we consider treason a reason to revoke citizenship?
Can treason - including, in Canada, *Conspiring to commit high treason or treason, or forming an intention to do so and manifesting it by an "overt act" (such as actively planning or assisting)* be to assist in the takeover by force of the entire world, in the name of ones religion?
No. Treason is a criminal offence. That is sufficient.
I'll add one caveat.
Revocation of citizenship is permissible in cases involving fraud or misrepresentation in obtaining citizenship. So, if you can prove that the person was never loyal to the country (i.e. lied during the swearing in ceremony) then yes, you can revoke the person's citizenship.
If not feel free to hang the traitor.
I feel like that's unlikely in Canada, and if a person was charged with assisting in a treasonous plot to, say, replace the Canadian government with one loyal to an Islamic caliphate, they would be more likely to serve a couple of years imprisonment, at most?
If they are an immigrant, then, deport them to their home country. (I suppose it's reasonable to conclude they may have lied in taking their citizenship oath, so that puts us in concordance!)
Upholding the law is a requirement. Aside from that everything is debatable.
True. I guess I'm saying if the law doesn't allow it, it should be changed. Maybe the law does allow it as is, but I suspect my interpretation is in the minority.
Force, if you like. If someone advocates it, you can’t stop them. Just work to see that no one is fool enough to vote for it.
Actively planning and assisting ...
So, the context in which I have seen the term "remigration" most frequently used is in the context of the UK, where it is used both in the context of how you described it, and also to refer to the stripping of what is referred to there as "Indefinite Leave to Remain". Which, obviously, is a significantly less solid piece of ground than "citizenship". I *believe* -- but I am hardly an expert on the nuances of UK immigration law -- that this is roughly equivalent to a US "Green Card".
And while I agree with you that stripping actual citizenship is a dangerous road to travel (although I could probably be convinced that a one time removal of citizenship from various "birth tourism" babies who only spent a few days between birth and departure in the country at all was an acceptable thing) I have no such qualms about green card holders. Their presence is already definitionally a legal status subject to legislation. If the appropriate legislation was passed, I see no reason that people in that group could not be returned to their points of origin.
I will state that I *have* considered the third order potential that I have been *driven* to this position through... I'm not sure if "psy-op" is the appropriate term, but I'll go with it for now, to soften my general inherent resistance to such things, and to convince me to welcome such a thing, through the use of mass, unlimited, illegal migration. I believe I have mentioned previously that I live in New Mexico, and if not, well, I just did. There are four states of the union on the southern border with Mexico. In addition to all of the others who were already *in* the country, during the Biden administration, some truly insane numbers of people illegally crossed that border into the United States.
Definitionally, of course, it is impossible to know precisely how many people are in this cohort. But the common estimates I have seen range from 12 to 15 million, in a four year period. *During Covid*. New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the union, and had a pre-Biden population of roughly 2.1 - 2.2 million people. I don't know what the actual population is now, mid decade and mid census, but I can say that housing prices have gone *insane*, with rents *doubling* between when I became a truck driver in 2019, and 2023 when I returned to Albuquerque to take my current job. I regularly see people camping in empty lots, starting fires to cook with, or fires to stay warm in the winter (Albuquerque has annual temperature swings of 60C, from -15C in the winter, to 45C in the summer; Deserts get *cold*, too) and more buildings burned in the last 3.5 years than ever in my previous 30 years here. The neighborhood I grew up in here, just off the Base, was *already* know as "The War Zone" in the 90's, and while there was a period of some measure of gentrification (which I contributed to) that period is *firmly* over and the "War Zone" appellation has come back with a vengeance. Given that my job is *on* said Air Force base, I drive through this as I go in, every day. So I have a fairly real time view of the annihilation of the closest thing I have to a home town. (As a navy brat, I lived in 8 different cities in the first 13 years of my life.) And... well, if it's a psy-op, it *worked*. I'm sick of it. I'm just *done*.
I grant that it is in no way at all the most rigorous philosophical position I have ever held. It's quite possibly inconsistent with a number of other positions I'd say I firmly hold. Gramsci has been successful. I am demoralized. And I am **FUCKING ANGRY.** I am entirely confident that I am not alone in this.
Anger is justified. Retroactively changing a law is not. If someone became a citizen under a law, whether or not we may agree with it, the government should not be able to strip them of citizenship. For our own safety's sake.
I'm fine with deporting people on visas. I'm (sort of) fine with making a law stripping people of citizenship if they live in a foreign country for, idk, 20 years? I'm even fine with passing a law that eliminates birthright citizenship. Moving forward.
However, passing a law that applies retroactively to people sets a dangerous precedent, as does allowing the government to strip citizenship from people.
Yeah. I mean, I certainly understand the point you are making. The Chinese (and Russian) birth tourism thing, though, is just *such* an egregious security flaw that I have a very difficult time getting over it.
How would you feel about "anyone who has dual citizenship (so we're not leaving people entirely stateless) and has been absent from the country for 15 years"?
Not that any ideas we hammer out here have a whelk's chance in a supernova of being implemented.
I, of course, think we must move *immediately* to curtail that practice moving forward. And prioritize deporting anyone who is here illegally and pregnant, possibly even over people who are here illegally and are violent criminals. Though I see little reason to not do both.
You're confusing many concepts. "Remigration" is the word for "migrants returning home". That could be temporaries, so-called PRs, or naturalized citizens. It need not be any specific group.
The government can legislate to extend citizenship to randomers, so it can certainly legislate to deny it to people who don't have it and send them home. It can also choose to seriously go after people who made a fraudulent oath of allegiance or who didn't meet the criteria, such as language fluency.
If Supreme Court justices get in the way, they can legally be turfed with sec. 99.
We can achieve sufficient remigration perfectly legally, if we win power.
If our people decide that our treacherous government, due perhaps to censorship and media bribes, coupled with past replacement migration, can never be removed democratically, what should they do? Submit to their own destruction? Hopefully it won't come to this. And, for now, few are advocating it.
"Remigration" is used in immigration policy discussions to mean the return of migrants to their countries of origin. However, in recent years the term has also been adopted by some political movements to encompass policies affecting not only temporary migrants but, in some proposals, permanent residents and even naturalized citizens. So the meaning depends on the speaker and context.
My argument is that it is dangerous to allow the government to revoke citizenship, so my use of the term is in that context.
I did not state that sending non-citizens to their country of origin is a danger.
Yes, revoking citizenship because of fraud is permissible. However, the government cannot revoke citizenship based on language fluency unless the person obtained citizenship through fraud or misrepresentation.
I'm not a lawyer but research seems to imply that judges cannot simply be removed because a government dislikes their decisions. Removal requires a formal process for incapacity or misconduct and ultimately action by Parliament following investigation. It is not a mechanism for replacing judges over policy disagreements.
Your last paragraph seems to move from a legal argument to one advocating revolution. Disagreeing with the actions of a legally elected government does not make what they do illegal or treacherous. If "our people" vote to restrict immigration and the government fails to enact this desire you may have an argument however that is difficult to prove given that there are so many different reasons to vote for/against any given party.
Much to think about. An interesting sidelight on illiberal methods is that the Bolsheviks, in the 1920’s decided to manage those peoples of the old czarist empire they were able to keep by declaring everyone a ‘national citizen’ of some homeland of other, rather than a Soviet citizen.
Complicated story, but if they did not like you, you got shipped back where you came from.
(If you were lucky)
This approach was taken by the Communist Party, USA. In the 1920’s it explicitly appealed to the white worker, and proposed to solve the ‘color question’ by shipping all the Negroes back where they came from - that is, the South from which many had moved north after the first war, creating unrest among the prejudiced.
The CPUSA was going to create a ‘Negro Soviet Republic’, declare all blacks citizens of it, and send them there. Unless the Party needed a few for one job or another.
They gave this up in the early 1930’s. But other such movements around the world did not. In South Africa, the Nationalists were in alliance with the Communist Party of South Africa. They fought a joint strike on the Rand in the early 1920’s under the slogan “ Workers of the world, unite and fight for a white South Africa!”. They fell out later, but the Nationalists remembered Stalin’s homelands policy. It became the basis for their apartheid policy - homelands, internal passports, and all.
Well, good luck keeping the tattered flag of liberty flying in Canada.
Very interesting Frank. Thanks for providing some real world examples of the dangers of this type of policy.
Labels like liberal and conservative tend to get bent, twisted & manipulated to suit the narrative, so to speak. It's especially problematic as most folks tend to be impulsive rather than thoughtful so their "A le carte" ideologies are mixed and match, logically inconsistent, messy.
In a classic sense, those who were liberal sought to liberate mankind from overburdening gubbermint. Those who were conservative sought to preserve the rule of law which necessarily involves some quantity of gubbermint.
So how does one describe a gubbermint who seeks to impose "tolerance" for certain identified "victim" group(s) whilst actively suppressing other identified "oppressors" group(s)? They will claim to be liberal (liberating their pet victims) but they're using the weapons of gubbermint.
Some folks get pissy when I describe the above-noted as being "Cultural Marxist" so perhaps totalitarian would be more palatable.
Favoring one group of citizens over another is a form of tyranny. We are all equal or there is an aristocracy in everything but name.
I appreciated this post, as it hits close to home for me. For context, I am originally from the EU but moved to the UK before the Brexit referendum was even announced, and I naturalized a few years ago. Being of a certain persuasion, some time after getting my passport I joined the British Army because I thought it would be good to give back to the country that has been good to me; I guess in my own mind I am being true to the notion that "service guarantees citizenship". Am I happy? Not really, the army has made my life worse but again, I felt this sacrifice had to be done to earn legitimacy in the eyes of native British people.
When I see Restore Britain I largely agree with most of their intent, including their stance on the differences among cultures; however, repatriation leaves me perplexed exactly because of the points you raise. I look forward to the end of my term of service to regain a bit of happiness and agency in my life, but if anyone in the street ever questions why I am here in the first place after years of taxes paid, blood, sweat and tears they will get an earful.
The irony of it all is all is that the government would probably hate me regardless, whether I had been born here or not.
I would certainly agree that serving in the military is proof of "legitimacy." I don't think it should be necessary though.
Paying taxes is less convincing. I lived in the US for 20 years on various visas and probably paid much more in taxes than most US citizens but I was never a citizen and the country had every right to demand that I leave once I retired. That said, it irks me a little that after 20 years of making a life there there was no simplified path to citizenship for me. In fact progressives would argue that illegal immigrants have more of a right to citizenship than I do. How's that for logic?
These details aside, the time to decide who should "live here" is at the border, not after citizenship has been granted.
“Supporters of remigration see the sentence “compelled return of legal immigrants or naturalized citizens based on ethnicity” and all they see is “ethnicity.” However, the word they should be focused on is “citizens.” If citizenship can be stripped from one citizen, it can be stripped from another, and it would be naïve to think that how long a person has been in the country would matter. When the New Right is done with non-Europeans and turns on you for being the wrong religion or the wrong type of European, what will your defense be, “I have rights?” Newcomers have rights too and it didn’t help them.”
I don't think this argument addresses what supporters of remigration are actually advocating. It seems to rely on a slippery-slope scenario in which any policy allowing citizenship to be revoked in specific circumstances inevitably expands into arbitrary persecution of anyone who falls out of favor. That conclusion doesn't necessarily follow.
Many countries that place a strong emphasis on border control and cultural continuity enforce standards that are considerably stricter than those common in today's Western liberal democracies, yet those standards are still defined by law rather than applied arbitrarily. Treating every stricter immigration or citizenship policy as inherently illiberal overlooks the distinction between clear legal criteria and arbitrary government action.
More broadly, the tendency to view almost any tightening of immigration or citizenship rules as incompatible with liberal values suggests that the current liberal framework in much of the West may have become overly permissive and could benefit from a reassessment.
In short, I don't think what you’re presenting is an example of the indivisibility of freedom so much as a slippery-slope argument. It's one thing to argue that granting a government a certain power creates a precedent; it's another to assume that it will inevitably expand into stripping citizenship from increasingly broader groups without providing evidence for that progression. If the latter claim is central to the argument, it needs to be supported rather than assumed.
I also find it difficult to reconcile the concern about potential future abuses of state power with your use of reply rules that prohibit or hide viewpoints based on subjective ideological standards rather than objective criteria such as civility or factual accuracy. If arbitrary exercises of power are the concern, then that principle should apply consistently, whether the authority is a government or the moderators of a public discussion.
I agree, nothing is inevitable. However, the political principle, often stated as, "never give the government a power you wouldn't want your opponents to wield," is a rule we should be living by.
"I think it'll be ok this time" is a risky position to take.
Also, no where did I state that "every stricter immigration or citizenship policy as inherently illiberal." I said revoking citizenship is dangerous.
I'm all for strong borders. I'm against, "we're taking back you citizenship because we changed our minds."
Once you're a citizen, in the absence of fraud, you remain one. That or none of our citizenship is worth the paper it's printed on.
I do not understand your last paragraph. What reply rules are you talking about? Where have I been inconsistent in my position with respect to the law and individual rights?
It is not a "slippery slope" argument because, citizenship is the basis of liberal democracies. The citizens are the *source* of the legitimacy of the government. So, stripping someone of citizenship would be a dictatorship of the majority. You can restrict the criteria for new immigration or naturalization.
But once you remove established rights from your fellow citizens, the democracy is gone.
I think you’re arguing for a principle in absolute terms without defending the absolutism itself. If your position is that citizenship should never be revocable under any circumstances, that’s a coherent normative position, but it requires an argument. Simply asserting that any revocation ends democracy doesn’t follow automatically, especially when existing liberal democracies have narrowly defined citizenship revocation laws.
Existing citizenship revocation laws in full democracies are of two types. Treason/terrorism or proven fraud/*intentional* misrepresentation during the obtaining process.
Any revocation process that's not heavily limited to *intentional* criminal behaviour would definitely infringe on the essence of democracy itself.
Running your answers through an LLM doesn't change this fact.
I would argue that only fraud committed during the citizenship process warrants removal of citizenship.
If someone commits treason send them to jail or hang them.
You could send them to jail *and* strip the citizenship. I'm against capital punishment, due to the absence of recourse for miscarriage of justice.
No recourse for wrong jailing either. You don’t get the time back. Capital punishment just ups the ante.
You're acting as though "the essence of democracy" has only one component, but democracy is also about the capacity of a political community to govern itself. Preserving the continuity of that political community is itself a legitimate democratic objective. We may argue and disagree on where a balance should land on how to maintain the native population and how to accommodate immigrants, but presenting your flawed self-righteous conclusion as an uncontested fact doesn't resolve the debate.
As for your "running your answer through an LLM" accusation, not only is it unfounded but it also shows how you have no actual argument against my own so you're trying instead to find a moral excuse to delegitimize it. Relying on relativist and speculative arguments and unfunded accusations doesn't change this fact.
By definition, the "essence" of something are the few key elements.
I don't dispute "preserving continuity of the community" as a legitimate democratic objective, but it's not a foundational element. A country can change and still be democratic. It can't disempower citizens that have committed no crimes and still be democratic.
Regarding the LLM, do you deny using them for the past two replies ? It has nothing to do with "delegitimizing" your arguments, it is simply tiresome to distill them out of the unnecessary LLM fluff.
I think the idea is that if you have citizenship, it can not be arbitrarily revoked. It must be by some standard, equally applicable to all the other citizens.
If you are not a citizen, you have no human right to be admitted, or to stay. The citizens decide who enters, for what reasons they like.
Republicans are referred to as the stupid party for a reason.
They never cease to amaze me.
They appear to be the party of limited, Constitutional government, but every time they get in power, they increase the power of government “to do good”.
This is the reason Democrats have had so much power since Woodrow Wilson.
If they push and implement this, just give Democrats both houses and make Newsome the next President.
I think "stupidity" is a bipartisan issue. Of course it's only stupid if they don't realize that's what they're doing.
Both parties want more power and they're willing to risk giving their opponents more power down the road provided they can use that power now.
The Nordics are paying muslims to go home, I don't see why we shouldn't be doing that here.
If someone got citizenship through some bullshit (fake refugee claim, originally illegal and they got citizenship, children of illegal born here) then I think its legitimate to kick them out.
Yes, it is permissible to revoke citizenship obtained fraudulently.