Birthright Citizenship and Alice Blue

Rose and Daniel Blue are our family heroes. They graduated from the Holocaust in 1945 and were liberated from Bergen Belsen on April 12. For several years, they waited in Germany for the ashes of millions of Jews to settle, while the Allies decided who would go where. My father-in-law traded on the postwar black market and honed a masterful talent for practicality and survival. My mother-in-law trained as a dental technician, fabricating bridges and full-blown dentures. She gave birth to their first-born child, Sima, in the explosion of baby-making that followed the war.

I want you to imagine what all of this was like, being forced to live among Nazis and their sympathizers, with Polish Jewish civilization in ruins. Belsen was not a world unto itself, but set in a landscape of towns and villages. Contact between survivors and oppressors was an inevitable feature of daily life.

And still they waited for their turn to leave. Daniel and Rose considered Palestine, but like many others decided that they had no heart for another war. It probably meant that their emigration was delayed. My father-in-law used to joke with insistent bitterness that Nazi scientists had to be processed first. He was merely a stateless refugee who had suffered the greatest trauma in Jewish history. But he had nothing to contribute to atomic bomb-making.

Eventually everything ended with a visa. They left by plane in 1949 to join Daniel’s extended family in Chicago. My wife, Alice, was born in 1951, the first member of the family to qualify for automatic citizenship. My in-laws were naturalized some years later, and they went on to their version of the American dream. They bought a house in Rogers Park, acquired English and made a dignified living, and guaranteed that their daughters were college educated. Before it was over, they sent three grandchildren to school: Harvard, Brandeis, and Brown University. Neither of their daughters had to pay a proverbial dime. It was their greatest contribution to creating generational wealth.

I could go on and on about the achievement of their lives, how my remarkable in-laws woke up screaming in the night, but managed to carve out real careers in America. At the end, Daniel was an enormously successful investor. Rose worked for the Canteen Corporation, a huge national firm, designing everything from order forms to org charts and reimbursement slips.

But my purpose here is the part about Alice. One of the great rewards for the exertions of my in-laws—their suffering, their resilience. their energy, their sacrifice—is that their second daughter was an automatic citizen, born in this country as a fully-credentialed American with a Social Security number and a claim on the future. She did not have to qualify herself or wait in line. She certainly never risked deportation. Instead, she became what my in-laws had to struggle for: a fully entitled member of the American tribe.

Some, of course, would put it differently. In the parlance of our period, Alice was an anchor baby whose status contributed to the ultimate credentialling of her family. It may indeed have tipped the balance for Rose and Daniel, muting any questions about their own legitimacy.

But I would describe her experience differently. She became a beautifully educated American woman who has given her life to social service and policy-making. She has worked for decades in harm reduction and prevention, and is regarded as a gifted convenor and decision-maker. She raised two talented children who support themselves beautifully and is the matriarch of a family of five healthy grandchildren. America did right by Alice Blue, and Alice has done her share for America.

She is also a reminder that we need to think clearly, especially about the issue of birthright citizenship. I would have thought that this qualified as stare decisis, the idea that established principles should mostly remain established. But regardless of its promises, our Court says something else: everything is once again up for grabs.

My own common sense tells me that this would be wrong. Birthright citizenship resolved the question of slavery and who would be considered an American citizen. It protected millions of former slaves from deportation and eventually helped confirm their status as Americans. The alternative would have been chaos and endless conflict that no Civil Rights Moment could have resolved.

We are now faced with a similar threat. But it is also a moment of shining opportunity. Persons without documents are exactly that: not rapists or muderers, but law-abiding residents who came to this country for peace and security. If we somehow freed their children from our own dark prejudices and funded public education as we should, they would deliver on their promise of birthright citizenship. Some would become Nobel Prize winning chemists. Some would become honest owners of small businesses. And some would become social servants and policy-makers.

All they need is our trust and our support. The Supreme Court can now either do the right thing, or hand another victory to the tyrant in the White House. Chief Justice Roberts: history is calling your name.