{"id":25161,"date":"2021-10-28T09:58:55","date_gmt":"2021-10-28T13:58:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/?p=25161"},"modified":"2021-10-28T10:41:49","modified_gmt":"2021-10-28T14:41:49","slug":"victor-hanson-book-review-immigrationreform-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/2021\/10\/28\/victor-hanson-book-review-immigrationreform-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Mass Migration, Globalism, And The Diminishing of Citizenship"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Historian Victor Davis Hanson\u2019s latest book may not be the kind of optimistic, feel-good reading that many would wish for at a time when the U.S. is facing multiple crises, from the disaster at the southern border to catastrophe in Afghanistan to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and a bad economy. But as much as The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America<\/a><\/em>may be a bitter pill to swallow, it is nevertheless a much needed wake-up call and a reminder of the importance of citizenship. Immigration and sovereignty are also recurring themes in the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The author \u2013 a senior\nfellow in military history at Stanford University\u2019s Hoover Institution and\nprofessor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno \u2013 traces\nthe historical origins of citizenship, back to the roots of Western\nCivilization in ancient Greece and Rome all the way to its ultimate \u2013 albeit\nimperfect and incomplete \u2013 flowering in the American constitutional republic. However,\nthe idea that a state should be governed by, and accountable to, a body of\ncitizens endowed with inalienable rights has been a rarity throughout human\nhistory, and in many places still is. Mere residents and subjects \u2013 most of\nwhom were poor peasants with local or, at most, tribal affiliations \u2013 ruled\nover a powerful but small elite were the norm.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sadly, Hanson contends\nthat in the U.S., as well as in much of Western Europe, citizenship is now\nbeing undermined and weakened by conflating citizens with residents and aliens\n\u2013 be they legally or even illegally present \u2013 as if simply residing in a\ncertain territory was all that citizenship entailed. This subversion of the\ncentrality of citizenship is exhibited in a variety of ways, including tolerating\nand \u201cnormalizing\u201d illegal migration while simultaneously conflating illegal\nmigrants with legal immigrants. The degradation of the value of citizenship\nincludes allowing non-U.S.-citizens (even illegal aliens) to receive state\nassistance and other benefits; sanctuary policies that explicitly shield those\nwho violate immigration laws; disincentivizing (or at least not promoting)\nassimilation; and otherwise claiming that illegal aliens are no less American,\nand deserve no fewer rights, than U.S. citizens. Concurrently, anti-American\nand anti-Western identity politics \u2013 which Hanson refers to as \u201ctribalism\u201d \u2013\nfurther works to dissolve the bonds that hold our civic nation together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Globalists and leftists\nview the weakening and dilution of citizenship, borders, and sovereignty as a\nvictory of progress, humanity, and cutting-edge modernity over the antiquated,\nreactionary, and stifling. However, as Hanson reminds us, it is actually a throwback\nto the \u201cpre-citizen\u201d days of empires, tribes, and mere residents\/subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, the historian\npoints out that the middle and working class is being crushed and squeezed\nbetween the millstones of globalization (outsourcing U.S. jobs in particular)\nand mass, unending low-skilled migration, which either depresses wages or makes\nthem stagnant. He also emphasizes that, rather than signaling a leap into some\nsort of hip, post-industrial utopia, the hollowing out of the middle strata is\nessentially a reversion to the days of the all-powerful, uber-wealthy few\nruling over a vast mass of \u201cpeasants,\u201d who, in the current age, may have smart\nphones and video game consoles, but are also up to their necks in debt and\ndependent on big government and big corporations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although the author may\nsound gloomy and pessimistic, The Dying Citizen <\/em>is both a sober\ndiagnosis of our country\u2019s current crisis \u2013 of citizenship, sovereignty, and\nborders \u2013 and a call to action, if only because \u201c[t]he stakes [are]no less\nthan the preservation of the American republic itself.\u201d And the fight for\nrational, pro-American immigration policies is a key front in this battle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Historian Victor Davis Hanson\u2019s latest book may not be the kind of optimistic, feel-good reading that many would wish for at a time when the U.S. is facing multiple crises, from the disaster at the southern border to catastrophe in Afghanistan to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and a bad economy. But as much as The<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":24003,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[7],"tags":[758,540,1524,545],"yst_prominent_words":[2019,1938,7258,2909,2386,1978,12430,2731,12431,2703,2013,2008,1963,12434,12433,2737,2373,12432,1939,4662],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25161"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25162,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25161\/revisions\/25162"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25161"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=25161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}