Abolish US Citizenship

By Ryan McMaken, Mises.org, February 14, 2025

SOURCE: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/02/ryan-mcmaken/abolish-us-citizenship/

EDITORIAL:

This is essentially the same position we take. The following document advocates that being a NATIONAL citizen or merely a “national of the United States” may NOT have any CIVIL obligations or a civil statutory status attached to it. Thus, it functions the equivalent of outlawing CIVIL Citizen**+D status in favor of POLITICAL Citizen*. Thus, the ONLY thing you can use to describe nationality is “national of the United States” and never “citizen of the United States” in the context of all dealings with any government:

Self Government Federation: Articles of Confederation, Form #13.002
https://sedm.org/Forms/13-SelfFamilyChurchGovnce/SGFArtOfConfed.pdf

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Except for a small number of diplomatic passports, there is no such thing as an EU passport. In practice, to be a citizen of the European Union means to be a citizen of one of the member states of the EU. It is the EU member states themselves which ultimately determine who is a citizen of the EU. As The Economist put it, “Deciding who is and is not a citizen is a jealously guarded right of EU member states.”

The most rabid Europhiles, of course, would be more than happy to abolish member-level citizenship altogether and have Brussels control it all. Among many Europeans, though, there is a lingering reluctance to hand over powers of naturalization to the central European ruling elite. There is good reason to be cautious. Centralizing the power to grant citizenship has long been important to state building, to consolidating political power, and to erasing allegiance to any political institution except the central state.

This centralization of authority over naturalization has helped expand state coercion through both social and political effects. For example, were the member states of the EU to abandon member-state control over citizenship, being a “citizen of Europe” would soon become far more important in everyday life than being a citizen of, say, Italy or Denmark. Transferring naturalization powers to Brussels would greatly accelerate the Europhile program of creating a European megastate under which places like Italy or Poland or Austria become mere administrative units.

That is, Europe would become like the United States where state power over citizenship is only ostensible and citizenship within any particular member state carries very little psychological or political weight. In modern times, the only passport any American carries is a passport issued solely by the US government.

This is all another way of saying that the Americans foolishly centralized their citizenship under the central state while the Europeans, so far, have been wise enough to resist this. Thanks to this surrender to federal power, US member states must now take orders from the central state on all matters of immigration, naturalization and citizenship. If the federal government decides to naturalize a million violent foreign nationals, all member states have de facto naturalized them as well. No dissent from any state or region will be tolerated.

When Americans finally get serious about reining in federal power—and we clearly aren’t serious about it right now—we should be looking for ways to abolish US citizenship and give naturalization powers back to the member states.

The Early United States

When the American colonies emerged from their war for secession from the British state, the original US Constitution, the so-called Articles of Confederation, did not contain any definition of US citizenship, and the constitution did not empower the US government to define it. Rather, the US member states themselves were in charge of naturalization and citizenship. Nor did this change substantially with the ratification of the new constitution several years later. In his history of US citizenship, Wang Xi sums up the situation:

The usages of the word “citizen”/“citizens” in the Constitution indicated that citizenship was primarily defined by the state constitution or governments. Neither the Articles of Confederation nor the Constitution gave definition to national citizenship.

In many ways the US was originally what the EU is today: a collection of states with free trade and free movement between them. Citizenship and naturalization was regulated by the states themselves, yet it was assumed there would be free movement between states for citizens of any member state.  That, after all, was largely the point of the new confederation: free trade and free movement—with the additional advantage of mutual military defense.

Moreover, because the authors of the new constitution were largely laissez-faire liberals, it was also assumed that property rights were not contingent on citizenship. Xi continues:

[T]he word “citizen” or “citizens” was not used at all in the Bill of Rights … The Bill of Rights used “people” five times and “person”/“persons” four times. The implication is clear: the fundamental rights to be protected here were not the rights to be granted to citizens but rights that had belonged to people before citizenship was created. These rights were beyond the reach of the (federal) government.

Put another way, the property rights protected by the Bill of Rights applied to everyone and therefore property rights could be exercised by any “inhabitant” of the United States regardless of naturalization status.

This has always had important implications for foreign nationals living in the United States, but there are implications here for the free movement of citizens of US states as well. The authors of the Bill of Rights clearly imagined that a traveler from New Jersey to Pennsylvania did not need to apply for citizenship in the new state in order to exercise his natural property rights in the new location.

So, the original schema for citizenship and rights was this: property rights exist everywhere and for everyone. On the other hand, when it comes to legal “rights” like voting or other forms of political participation, it was up to the states to determine the laws governing naturalization and citizenship.

The End of State Control of Citizenship

The centrality of member states in determining citizenship soon began to erode, however. Thanks to westward expansion and the annexation of new non-state territories to the United States, the US found itself with many thousands of “US citizens” who were not citizens of any state. The link between state citizenship and US citizenship was therefore severed.

The centralization of citizenship powers was further facilitated by the fact that the US constitution granted the US government a monopoly on foreign affairs. Even then, citizenship documentation sometimes was issued by state and local governments. It was not until 1856 that Congress passed legislation giving the US government’s State Department a monopoly on the issuance of passports.

This monopolization of citizenship, however, has always been totally unnecessary in securing the economic advantages of free movement and free labor among citizens of member states. For evidence of this, we need look no further than the EU itself. Although each EU member state retains its own naturalization powers, citizens of EU member states may travel freely and obtain employment in any other EU member state. Moreover, for any citizen of a member state within the Schengen area, there is free travel with no border controls. Are we really to believe that a Schengen-area-like agreement among US states is too hard a nut to crack? Top-down federal citizenship laws provide nothing that can’t be had through interstate agreements.

Moreover, by keeping naturalization to the member-state level, residents can take advantage of decentralization in naturalization laws while member states are simultaneously better able to preserve their own political culture, institutions, and self-determination.

As far as decentralization goes, it is important to remember that so long as the US government has the power to grant citizenship, it also has the power to deny it. The State Department has the power to issue passports, but it also has the power to deny you a passport and thus legally deny your right to travel.

The situation is far more flexible if naturalization is decentralized to the states. In that case, if one is denied naturalization in one state, the person in question potentially has options in forty-nine other states.

State-level control of naturalization also addresses another problem: while freedom of movement among all member states is clearly a good thing, it is less clear that it is a good thing that everyone who relocates should immediately participate in the full political life of the community in his or her new locations.

This is presently a matter of debate in the EU where many question whether citizens of one EU member state ought to be able to vote in whatever member state one happens to live in at any given time.

As one centralizing Europhile activist puts it: “Acquiring a country’s passport should not … be a prerequisite in order to vote in its national elections if one is already an EU citizen within the Union.” This is what many advocates of a stronger EU state want. They want to ensure that a citizen of France can move to Hungary and then start voting in Hungarian elections the next day.  This sort of thing has long been a key step in building larger, more powerful, and more centralized states. As with the state builders of old, who wanted uniform citizenship across every inch of each state’s territory, this would do much to eliminate political diversity within the EU and ultimately help forge a single unified EU state. Lewis, C. S. Best Price: $0.95 Buy New $7.00 (as of 06:06 UTC – Details)

Top-down citizenship mandates also lessen a community’s ability to politically insulate itself from carpetbaggers and foreign political activists. This has already happened in the United States where every state is forced to grant automatic voting rights to any resident who is passing through. In the US, after all, top-down citizenship mandates allow a resident of, say, California to move to Florida and vote within 29 days.1 When it comes to voting, it is legally irrelevant if that person has lived and paid taxes in the community for 20 years, or if he just showed up last month and moved into public housing while freely spending the state’s Medicaid funds.

Some might complain that this somehow denies “civil rights” to new arrivals who, of course, would retain their citizenship in their member-state of origin. To this I say “who cares?” Who cares if Californians can’t show up in my home state and immediately start voting here without ever having established any skin in the game of our local community? Who cares if homeless criminals granted citizenship by the State of New York can’t automatically vote in elections in every single other state? This is no more a denial of civil rights than is a prohibition on German citizens voting for members of the Italian Parliament.

Certainly, there is nothing novel about the idea that a resident ought to become invested in the community in which he proposes to become politically active. That is a common-sensical notion long advocated even by laissez-faire libertarians.

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1 In the United States, the federal courts have ruled that state governments must grant voting rights to new residents within 30 days.   https://www.infoplease.com/us/government/elections/residency-requirements-for-voting