The Campaign to Create Second-Class Citizens
· The Atlantic
For Carlos Alemán, the pinnacle of the dozen years since he became a U.S. citizen was the night in 2020 when he was elected to serve on the city council of Homewood, Alabama. One of the lowest moments came earlier this year, when he learned that some of the most powerful people in his state are attempting to ban immigrants like him from pursuing higher office.
“It seems to be part of a project to reject anyone who’s not born in this country as not worthy or deserving of the full rights of citizenship,” Alemán, who was born in Nicaragua, told me.
Visit betsport.cv for more information.
For most of American history, becoming a citizen has meant acquiring the right to participate in virtually all aspects of civic life, including voting, serving on juries, and mounting a campaign for any political office other than the presidency. But in Alabama and other states across the country, Republican lawmakers are now pushing to make an important distinction: Naturalized citizens, they argue, should not have the same right to serve in public office as someone born in the United States.
In recent months, an idea once confined to the fringes has gained mainstream traction across the country. Republican legislators in several states have introduced proposals that would restrict naturalized citizens and dual citizens from running for a range of elected positions, including sheriff and governor. In Congress, at least five Republicans have sponsored various proposals to bar naturalized or dual citizens from serving in roles including federal judgeships, Cabinet posts, and ambassadorships, and in Congress itself. Florida lawmakers this year enacted a law requiring candidates for several state and federal offices to disclose whether they hold another citizenship in addition to being a citizen of the United States.
The movement has been fueled in part by the rise of a new class of foreign-born politicians—most prominently New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Ugandan-born son of parents of Indian extraction, whose ascent has become a favorite target of the right. His victory, along with the success of other progressive candidates born outside the U.S., has come to symbolize something dangerous in the eyes of President Trump’s MAGA base: the ability of people born elsewhere to acquire American citizenship and the possibility of political power. Now Republican lawmakers are pledging to do something about it.
The push began in parallel to Mamdani’s rise. When Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen first floated the idea of barring naturalized citizens from serving in elected office, he cited Mamdani’s mayoral run as one impetus. “We want to make sure that no potential foreign influence or foreign meddling could impact our state’s highest elected leaders,” he told AL.com last year.
Trump’s June defeat at the Supreme Court on birthright citizenship has also been a motivating factor. After his administration failed to convince a majority of the justices that his executive order limiting citizenship for those born in the U.S. to undocumented parents was constitutional, Trump wrote on social media that he would find alternative routes to accomplish his goals “in Congress through Legislation.” Drawing on the president’s “America First” rhetoric, some Trump allies have begun targeting the political rights of naturalized citizens in a broad campaign to continue that fight.
“Even as we have progressed technologically, Immigration Policy has eroded those gains and living conditions for many,” Trump wrote last November on Truth Social, pledging to permanently pause migration from developing countries and denaturalize immigrants he deemed disruptive. “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!”
Trump used to strike a different tone when talking about naturalized Americans. In 2019, Trump welcomed five legal immigrants into the White House, hailing the “beauty and majesty of citizenship” as he conducted what he described as the first-ever naturalization ceremony in the Oval Office.
“No matter where our story begins, whether we are the first generation or the tenth generation, we are all equal,” Trump told the new Americans. During the Republican National Convention the following year, the president again used the trappings of the White House to swear in new citizens and praise them for earning their status the proper way.
“With the rights and freedoms each of you now enjoy as citizens, there is no dream beyond your wildest reach,” he said. The president, and the party he leads, have since soured on such inclusive rhetoric about America as a melting pot where everyone is equal and anyone can achieve anything. For a more up-to-date sense of how the president views America’s legal-immigration process, one need look no further than his Truth Social account. “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World!” he posted in April. A few weeks later, he reposted an anti-immigrant screed from a right-wing podcaster that questioned the loyalty of naturalized Americans and declared that “the idea of the melting pot is long over.” This narrative shift is showing up in policy as well. An analysis in January found that the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies would reduce legal immigration by one-third to one-half over his four-year term, affecting 1.5 million to 2.4 million people.
The campaign to bar naturalized citizens from public office is a lesser-known manifestation of this broader push. Although the Constitution has always required aspirants for the presidency—and, by extension, the vice presidency—to be “a natural born Citizen,” it makes no such demand for any other government position. Some Republicans are now seeking to change that.
State lawmakers in Alabama introduced legislation earlier this year that would require natural-born citizenship of those seeking to run for governor, legislator, sheriff, or a handful of other elected positions. Republican legislators introduced similar bills in Kentucky and Tennessee this year. Although the proposals—which face significant constitutional questions—have not yet passed, the effort is nevertheless building momentum. When the law in Florida requiring disclosure for dual citizens takes effect next year, it will mark the first time such a proposal has become state law.
Many Republican-base voters have taken a sharp turn against legal immigration in recent years, in some cases even outpacing Trump himself in their rebellion against foreigners’ influence on American culture and commerce. The kind of racist rhetoric the president has long used against undocumented immigrants from developing nations—“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said in 2023—is now regularly being directed against legal immigrants too. Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, said that he would bar public schools in his state from hiring H-1B-visa holders. He described the first-of-its-kind proposal as a way to reduce “foreign influence” and “indoctrination in the classroom.”
That push has dovetailed with the ascendance of Mamdani and other liberal, foreign-born politicians. The combination of their leftist views and their status as naturalized Americans has provided fodder for right-wing voices who have tried to blame America’s immigration policies and increased diversity for a growing list of the country’s problems. Representative Nancy Mace—who has introduced resolutions this year seeking to disqualify naturalized citizens and dual citizens from serving in Congress, the federal judiciary, and dozens of federal offices—has pointed to her left-leaning colleagues as motivation.
[Read: Mamdani is the foil Trump wants]
“We have been called racist, xenophobic and hateful,” she wrote in a Newsweek op-ed that was published on the nation’s 250th birthday. “But when you see a pattern of foreign-born officials who have proven time and again they are not America First, what is wrong with wanting them out of power?” Mace told me that because the actions of members of Congress have “enormous consequences” for national security, “the American people deserve to know the people holding them have one allegiance: America.” She did not say what specific risks her proposals would address.
According to congressional records, 26 House members and six Senators were born outside the U.S., though some were born to American parents living abroad. Democrats dominate the list, but there are several Republicans who hail from other nations, including Cuba, Ukraine, and Mexico.
Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, a Republican who was born in Colombia and became a U.S. citizen when he turned 18, will be barred from serving if Mace’s proposal becomes law. But he has introduced legislation of his own that aims to crack down on the concept of dual citizenship, proposing to ban any American from claiming the citizenship of another country. He did not respond to a request for comment about Mace’s legislation. When I asked Mace about the fact that her proposal would block Moreno and other Republicans from serving, she said, “This isn’t personal. It’s about what standard we want for the people entrusted with enormous power over the American people.”
The Constitution already lays out specific qualifications for members of Congress, including a stipulation that any House member be at least 25 years old and have been a U.S. citizen for at least seven years. Any effort to add new requirements without amending the Constitution—as some of the recent proposals have attempted—would run into legal roadblocks, Pamela Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School, told me. “Those qualifications are exclusive,” she said. “The state can’t add qualifications on top of those, nor indeed can the federal government.”
After walking me through the nuances of the legal framework and the relevant case law, she offered a more frank perspective on the political backdrop that had made our conversation necessary in the first place: “It’s just incredibly ugly, stupid, and unconstitutional.”
Judges have checked efforts to curb the rights of naturalized citizens; in the process, they’ve also become targets. When U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled in June that the Trump administration had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens” with a federal database of citizenship information, her own citizenship status became an object of attack. Representative Abe Hamadeh of Arizona, a Republican, introduced articles of impeachment against Sooknanan, pointing out that the judge “holds dual citizenship in the United States and Trinidad and Tobago.” Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, a Republican, wrote on X: “If judges can stop Presidents, they should not also be citizens of foreign nations.” Mace added, “No one born in another country should be serving in our government. Judges included.” Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s broader immigration crackdown, chimed in as well, sarcastically writing, “Judge Sparkle decrees that America belongs to any random alien on planet earth, just like our founders intended.”
Miller has been a leading proponent of the idea that many of America’s modern-day problems can be traced back to its immigration policies. After Mamdani’s primary victory last year, Miller took to social media to decry how “unchecked migration fundamentally remade the NYC electorate,” branding New York “the clearest warning yet” of the downside of allowing so many foreigners into the country.
Trump has also seized on the ascendance of Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidates such as Mamdani, linking their policies to communism and foreign ideology. With Miller’s help, he has implemented dozens of new restrictions on legal immigration, tightening virtually every avenue through which foreigners obtain visas and become Americans.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about whether the president supports barring naturalized citizens from public service and whether he agrees with lawmakers who are trying to do so.
Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order attempting to restrict birthright citizenship and warning about the “risks posed by malign foreign actors who attempt to swindle American citizens by taking advantage of the generosity of our Nation.” Trump’s focus on such proposed risks echoes a sentiment that has become popular with his MAGA base: that America’s legal immigrants represent not, as the poet Emma Lazarus wrote, “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but instead national-security threats yearning to impose radical ideology on the masses already here.
Muslim immigrants have received particular hostility. “We need more Islamophobia, not less,” Representative Randy Fine of Florida, a Republican, wrote on social media in March, a few months after he filed legislation to ban dual citizens from serving in Congress. “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic,” Mace posted online earlier this month in response to the primary victory of the Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat.
[Read: Islamophobia has corroded American values]
Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, a Republican who is running for governor, took to the Senate floor last month to warn about Muslim immigrants, who, he said, are trying to “radically change the ethnic, religious, and political makeup of our country.” He declared that “Islam is not a religion; it’s a death cult.” In March, he reposted an image of Mamdani next to an image of the 9/11 attacks, declaring that the “enemy is inside the gates.” He has proposed the ASSIMILATION Act, which aims to impose new ideological restrictions on those seeking to become citizens. The bill has almost no chance of passing Congress, but Tuberville could have more success turning his ideas into legislation if, as expected, he wins his race for governor in November. He could also unstick efforts to block naturalized citizens from running for office in Alabama that stalled earlier this year.
Former Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, a Republican, told me that although he supports much of Trump’s immigration agenda, he opposes discriminating against U.S. citizens based on their place of birth. In a country that is growing more diverse, telling certain Americans that they should not be eligible to run for office is an easy way to ensure that they will never vote for your party, he said: “It is one of the dumbest tactical moves I’ve ever seen politicians make. It’s extraordinarily unwise to try to win elections based on this racist appeal.”
There are more than 77,000 naturalized citizens in Alabama, accounting for 1.5 percent of the population, according to the American Immigration Council. With one of the lowest proportions of foreign-born residents in the country, the state is an odd place to be leading the charge against naturalized citizens in public service, Steven Taylor, a retired political-science professor at Troy University, told me. “On one level, it seems incredibly trivial,” he said. “On another, it seems kind of serious because of the ongoing, disturbing nationalism in our politics right now.”
Alemán, who recently opted not to run for reelection to the Homewood City Council, told me that it is exhausting to constantly have his loyalty to America questioned. “My daughter has a southern twang. She pronounces words differently than I do. This is home to her,” he said, adding that he is proud that his children could see his community of mostly white residents choose him as their representative. “Alabama can surprise you sometimes.”
If some policy makers have their way, the outcome could be surprising in a more alarming sense: Alemán’s children may grow up to see their father deemed American enough to vote, pay taxes, and raise a family here—but not American enough to serve as an elected official.