March 25: Biden’s ‘Non-Binding’ Middle Finger to Israel

Trump: Under me, Iran was ‘broke’; Hamas retracts rape story; Biden lies about welder’s penis

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The Big Story

On Monday morning, the United States refused to exercise its veto to prevent the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza for the month of Ramadan, leading to a “lasting sustainable ceasefire,” and the immediate release of all hostages held by Hamas. 

In time-honored Obama-Biden tradition, various administration mouthpieces immediately ran to the press to explain that the U.S. abstention meant, well, precisely nothing. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Monday that the vote “does not represent a shift in policy,” while U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield stressed that the resolution was “non-binding” and that the United States had abstained from voting for it because it failed to condemn Hamas. “This resolution rightly acknowledges that, during the month of Ramadan, we must recommit to peace,” Thomas-Greenfield said. Isn’t that nice?

Despite these disavowals, the message from the White House was a clear “fuck you,” and it was received loud and clear in Jerusalem. Shortly after the resolution passed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a planned trip to the United States by his top aides, Ron Dermer and Tzachi Hanegbi, in protest of Washington’s failure to exercise its veto. The office of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who arrived in the United States on Monday to discuss resupply with his American counterparts, released a statement Monday saying that Israel has “no moral right to stop the war in Gaza” until the hostages are brought home. Benny Gantz, for his part, issued a fairly groveling statement on X praising the United States and urging Netanyahu to visit Washington, but nonetheless insisted that Israel “has a moral obligation to continue fighting until the abductees are returned and the threat of Hamas removed.” 

To cap off a day full of bullshit, the Biden administration then turned around and professed to be mystified as to why the Israelis were upset. At a second press briefing on Monday, Kirby said that the White House was “perplexed” by Netanyahu’s reaction and suggested that the prime minister was “trying to create a perception of daylight here when we don’t need to do that.” One of the ever-reliable anonymous U.S. officials told journalists that Netanyahu’s decision was “likely motivated by domestic politics.” After all, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced after his meeting with Gallant that he had conveyed “President Biden’s iron-clad support for Israel’s security and defense against all threats, including Iran.” Hear that? What part of iron-clad do you people not understand? You J—excuse me, Israelis—are too touchy. 

The Scroll asked several of our regular contributors for their perspective on the resolution and the fallout. Tablet staff writer Armin Rosen wrote us via email:

The administration wants to thread an impossible needle of ending the current war, advancing Israeli-Palestinian “peace,” bringing about détente with Iran, and normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This is policy surrealism, an incoherent and irreconcilable menu of objectives, but one thing links them: In the administration’s view, all four of these goals are harmed if Israel completes its ongoing humiliation of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Hamas is the leader of the Palestinian people and an Iranian ally and an ally of two powerful, putatively Western-aligned governments [i.e., Qatar and Turkey]. With Hamas out of Gaza, there’s no so-called political horizon for the Palestinians, even less of a basis for good-faith negotiation with Iran (they think), and maybe a permanent grievance between the U.S. and one NATO ally (Turkey) and one of the most organically beloved foreign states among the American center-left establishment, Qatar—home to both the Hamas political leadership and to the largest American military base in the Middle East. 

Hamas’ defeat is highly inconvenient to the current policy establishment’s entire worldview, and it threatens too many bigger plans that careers—along with a deeply held self-image of personal, national, and tribal virtue—have been staked upon. They will do anything within the bounds of practicality to prevent it from happening. It is probably impractical to totally cut off weapons sales to Israel, back extensive sanctions in the UNSC [U.N. Security Council], unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state, or take other drastic action that will alienate pro-Israel, anti-jihadist Americans, who still make up something like 70% to 80% of the U.S. population. But there’s plenty they can do that stops short of that, including the non-veto of UNSC resolutions, even when they’re basically Chinese and Russian diplomatic products.

Tablet’s geopolitical analyst connected the move to the ongoing stalemate surrounding the hostage negotiations: 

As I’ve been saying for many weeks now, my guess is that most or all of the hostages are dead and their bodies are buried deep in tunnels—which is why these “negotiations” don’t and can’t go anywhere. The reason the hostages are dead is that moving them around became a clear strategic liability, while their gruesome accounts of torture and rape at the hands of their captors would only further inflame Israeli and perhaps world opinion against Hamas. The eventual report of their deaths will be merely a “drop in the bucket” next to the “tens of thousands of dead Gazans.” 

The Israelis are obviously constrained from saying this because it is speculative—and giving Hamas an excuse to kill any surviving hostages would be morally questionable and politically explosive, which obligates them to go through the motions. On the other hand, assuming an 80% or higher probability that some version of this scenario is right, which only grows over time, “the fate of the hostages” is no longer sufficient to constrain Israeli action. Hence, the U.N. Security Council resolution backed by the United States.

The Biden administration needs Israel to facilitate two things:

1. Movement toward a Palestinian state

2. A U.S.-Saudi “security pact,” which is basically getting the Saudis to sign on to U.S. realignment with Iran.

Neither No. 1 nor No. 2 is remotely in Israel’s interest. Hence, the big stick. 

The question is, given realignment, what carrots does the U.S. have to offer? “Peace with Saudi Arabia” conditioned on No. 1 is the obvious answer. But again, who cares? So what you are seeing is therefore all stick. 

Lee Smith, meanwhile, was critical of Bibi’s decision to cancel the delegation’s trip to Washington:

I think it was a mistake to cancel the security delegation. The PM might’ve let on that he knew the Biden administration was going to do this, especially after last week’s trial run, but it’s ok. We don’t like the fact that we were betrayed by our longtime ally, but it’s fine: They have their interests, like addressing the needs and desires of their constituents in Michigan, and we have ours, and that’s why Dermer and Hanegbi are going to speak with their counterparts in D.C., to explain the interests of a country in the middle of an existential war, etc. Also, they might have delivered a very graphic message from the PM, designed to be leaked. 

You send the security delegation to show you heard the Americans on Rafah and then move on Rafah to show you ignored them. That’s one of the few things the Israelis have on Biden—make them look weaker by ignoring them.

Netanyahu might have concluded, reasonably enough, that Biden already looks weak enough without his help.

IN THE BACK PAGES: The appointment of a noncitizen Chinese national to a government body in San Francisco is part of ongoing devaluation of citizenship, argues Michael Lind

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The Rest

→On Monday, Israel Hayom published an interview with Donald Trump, in which the former president and 2024 GOP candidate discussed Oct. 7 and Israel’s war on Gaza. Headlines in the United States have focused on some of Trump’s comments that appeared to be critical of Israel—he warned that Israel needed to “be careful” because it was “losing a lot of the world,” albeit in the context of urging Israel to “finish up” and “get the job done” in Gaza—and the interview was full of the usual digressions and potshots against his rivals. But we’d like to highlight the following section, on Iran, which has received comparatively little attention:

If I were president, you would have never been attacked because Iran was broke. They had no money. China couldn’t buy oil from them because otherwise China wouldn’t be able to deal with the United States. I said to China, I said to many nations … If you buy oil from Iran you will not be able to deal with the United States, and we’re going to tariff your products. Every single one of them agreed. I didn’t lose one, not one. And Iran did almost no oil business. … They were broke. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for Hezbollah. They had no money for anybody. And now they’re sitting with $221 billion cash and they control Iraq, which has $300 billion in cash. It’s like a subsidiary. 

Trump also said that Oct. 7 would not have happened under him for a second reason: that Iran would have known that it would face “very big consequences.”

Watch the rest of the interview here: https://www.israelhayom.com/2024/03/25/trump-to-israel-hayom-only-a-fool-would-have-not-acted-like-israel-on-oct-7/ 

→Shot:

The Israelis seemed oblivious to the fact that they are facing major, possibly generational damage to their reputation not just in the region but elsewhere in the world. We are concerned that the Israelis are missing the forest for the trees and are making a major strategic error in writing off their reputation damage.

That’s from a leaked State Department memo describing what U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Bill Russo told his Israeli counterparts in a March 13 call, according to a Friday report in NPR. The Israeli foreign ministry’s Deputy Director Emmanuel Nahshon reportedly responded that polling showed a “silent majority” in favor of Israel in the United States and Europe and that the “silver lining” of Oct. 7 was that it “now allows Israel to see who its real friends are.”

→Chaser: 

It was a meeting that shook me. We sat there, talked about the situation, and suddenly she accused Israel of systematically sexually abusing Palestinian women.

That’s from IDF Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi’s account on Israeli radio of a meeting with “the holder of the Israeli-Palestinian portfolio at the U.S. State Department,” reported Sunday in The Jerusalem Post. The report does not identify the U.S. official by name or give her specific title. “This is absolutely disconnected from reality,” Avivi said of the charge. “In the end, I left there with the feeling that they simply don’t talk to us and don’t pass on any information.” 

No date is given for the meeting, so we don’t know if this U.S. official was referring to a widely circulated Al Jazeera Arabic story from last week, in which a Gazan woman claimed to have seen the IDF “raping women, then killing them, then burning entire families alive” in al-Shifa Hospital. As The Jerusalem Post reported Monday, however, both Al Jazeera and Hamas itself have walked that story back. Al Jazeera columnist and former managing director Yasser Abuhilalah posted on X on Sunday, “It was revealed through Hamas investigations that the story of the rape of women in Al-Shifa Hospital was fabricated. … The woman who spoke about rape justified her exaggeration and incorrect talk by saying that the goal was to arouse the nation’s fervor and brotherhood.” The woman, Jamila al-Hessi, had also asked live on Al Jazeera: “Who is the Red Cross? Are they Jews, our enemies?”

→Donald McNeil, The New York Times science reporter fired in 2021 amid the paper of record’s internal “racial reckoning,” writes in his new book that he was “clearly misled” by leading virologists over the origins of COVID-19 during the early days of the pandemic, Semafor reports. Citing an advance copy of McNeil’s The Wisdom of Plagues, Semafor notes that McNeil acknowledges he was lied to by Kristian Andersen and other leading virologists who wanted to bury the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin for fear that it would give ammunition to critics of gain-of-function research (Slack messages leaked last summer revealed Andersen and colleagues strategizing on how to steer McNeil away from the lab-leak theory, despite acknowledging among themselves that it was plausible). McNeil was initially a public opponent of the lab-leak theory but came around to endorsing its plausibility in May 2021, a few months after his January 2021 termination from the Times. 

The larger import of this story is that it shows how the sort of trumped-up cancellations that McNeil fell victim to—he was fired over years-old allegations that he had used “the n-word” in quotations while chaperoning wealthy high-school students on a Times-branded trip to Peru—serve not merely to crush individuals but to enforce ideological discipline within institutions. Yes, McNeil repeated the anti-lab-leak story he’d been fed by his sources, but at least he was skeptical enough to raise the appropriate questions and was early to break ranks when more evidence in favor of the lab leak became available. The same cannot be said of his replacement on the COVID-19 beat at the Times, Apoorva Mandavilli. A few days after McNeil posted his Medium essay, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Lab-Leak Theory,” in May 2021, Mandavilli tweeted this: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” Mandavilli was a co-recipient of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize.

→In his testimony to Special Counsel Robert Hur, Joe Biden repeated a story about how he got into politics: As a young lawyer in Wilmington, Delaware, he successfully convinced a judge to dismiss a lawsuit against a construction company brought by a young welder who had “part of his penis and one of his testicles” burned off in a horrific industrial accident. Racked by guilt over his role in denying justice to the young man, Biden told a partner at the firm that he couldn’t make a celebratory lunch (“the only time I ever lied,” as he told Hur) and then walked across the street to join a public defender’s office, after which he embarked on a career in politics. According to Joseph Simonson of The Washington Free Beacon, however, the story is almost certainly false. Court records and contemporary news reports reveal that there was a case in Wilmington in which Biden’s former firm represented a construction company being sued by a disfigured welder. But Biden wasn’t involved: The case was brought in 1964, when the future president was an undergraduate, and concluded in 1968, when he was still in law school. And the judge didn’t dismiss the case: A federal jury awarded the welder $315,000, the equivalent of more than $2.8 million today.

Read it here: https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/joe-bidens-political-origin-story-is-almost-certainly-bogus-and-he-just-swore-to-it-under-oath/ 

→Shortly after The Scroll closed on Friday, Tajik militants affiliated with the Islamic State-Khorasan Province killed at least 137 people in an attack on a rock concert at Crocus City Hall in Moscow, similar in style to ISIS’ November 2015 attack on the Bataclan in Paris. Russian security services claimed to have arrested 11 people in connection with the attacks as of Saturday morning, including the four gunmen. ISIS-K, currently headquartered in Afghanistan, is the same group responsible for the January terrorist attack in Kerman, Iran, which killed more than 80 people. The group has also planned attacks elsewhere in Europe: Last July, German and Dutch police arrested several Central Asians for plotting New Year’s Eve attacks on the Cologne Cathedral.

→Quote of the Day: 

“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females” dominating the culture of his party. “‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’

“If you listen to Democratic elites—NPR is my go-to place for that—the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election. I’m like: ‘Well, 48 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?’”

That’s Democratic strategist James Carville talking to The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd in a Saturday interview. He said it, not us. 

→The CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law in August 2022, was meant to strengthen the United States’ domestic semiconductor-manufacturing capacity, but projects have been slow to get off the ground. We’ve previously reported on CHIPS funding being diverted from domestic semiconductor manufacturers to Intel to construct a “secure enclave” for the Pentagon (see the March 8 edition). Now, House Republicans and industry experts are blaming the slow rate of progress on semiconductor manufacturing on a host of DEI requirements attached to CHIPS funding by the Commerce Department. According to a memo circulated last week by Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), these requirements include:

• Submitting a plan to employ “justice-involved individuals,” i.e., ex-convicts

• Developing “an equity strategy” and “expanding employment opportunities” for “economically disadvantaged individuals,” including those with “limited English proficiency”

• Submitting a plan to recruit more women for construction jobs

• Submitting plans to hire “diverse suppliers”—i.e., to contract with minority- and women-owned businesses

• Providing affordable and high-quality child care for all workers 

• Submitting a climate and “environmental justice” plan accounting for all “climate-related risks that may occur over the lifetime of a facility”

As a Friday report in Fox noted, last year South Korea’s then minister of trade, energy, and industry, Lee Chang-yang, mentioned the child-care requirements and other conditions as a reason why investing in the U.S. semiconductor supply chain was “becoming less appealing.” 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Jewish Foreskins, Black Masks, by Marco Roth

A new biography of Frantz Fanon reminds us how the left came to prefer their Jews non-Jewish and their Blacks vocally Black

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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The War on Citizenship

For global elites, countries are merely exotic names for trade zones and labor camps, and citizenship has about as much ethical or emotional significance as a gym membership. Most Americans feel otherwise.

By Michael Lind

Does citizenship still mean anything? The question has been raised again by the appointment of Kelly Wong, a citizen of China who is a legal immigrant but lacks U.S. citizenship, to the Board of Elections in San Francisco. Wong and her colleagues will be responsible for supervising city elections in which, by law, she cannot vote.

The president of the Board of Supervisors that appointed Wong, Aaron Peskin, told The San Francisco Standard: “It’s about bringing a diversity of voices that represent different segments of society to the conversation.” Peskin’s comment illustrates the replacement of national patriotism among most progressives with a weird combination of post-national globalism and hard-edged racialism.

How can foreign nationals “represent different segments of society” when they are not even members of American society as defined by citizenship? Two answers are possible. One is that “society” for the purposes of “the conversation” in American politics and policy is not limited to American citizens but includes the 96% of the human race who are not Americans. Another, more territorially restrictive interpretation is that American society includes not only American citizens but foreign nationals residing on American soil, including those who are present in the U.S. in violation of U.S. law. Either definition of American “society” erases any distinction between U.S. citizens and people who are citizens of foreign countries but who may happen to reside temporarily on U.S. soil.

San Francisco voters embraced this new vision in 2020, when they passed an amendment to the city charter by a narrow vote of 54% to 46%, allowing noncitizens to serve on city commissions. It is unknown how many other noncitizens, legal immigrants or illegal immigrants, are now serving in San Francisco city government, because the city does not ask appointees about their citizenship or immigration status.

Note that Peskin explained that the appointment of this Chinese national to a U.S. government body was important for “bringing a diversity of voices that represent different segments of society to the conversation.” By “diversity” most progressives mean race and gender, not diversity of class, worldview, or values. Presumably Wong would not object to being characterized as an affirmative action hire, because she is an employee of a left-wing nonprofit called Chinese for Affirmative Action whose name reflects the current progressive orthodoxy—disturbingly similar to right-wing racialism—that citizenship and nationality are unimportant, but biological race is central to your identity. In other words, to use the arbitrary racial categories enshrined in American law and progressive dogma, the most important differences are not among Americans (of all races) and foreign nationals (of all races) but among racial Asians (American and otherwise) and racial non-Asians (white, Black, Hispanic, Native American).

The idea that your biological race, as defined by the U.S. Census, is central to your identity but your citizenship or nationality is of lesser importance is enshrined in the practice and the theory of race-based affirmative action as it has been practiced in the U.S. since the 1970s. For decades Ivy League universities have admitted well-educated and often well-to-do immigrants from Africa to boost the numbers of their “Black students”—over the protests of Americans who call themselves American Descendants of Slaves (ADOS). By this logic, if a wealthy Nigerian or Ghanaian student can “represent” native-born Black Americans for diversity purposes in a U.S. university, then of course a Chinese national without U.S. citizenship can “represent” not only American citizens of Chinese descent, but also American citizens of Indian or Vietnamese or Filipino descent, who despite speaking different languages and having entirely different cultures and histories are nevertheless all lumped together under the racialist category of “Asian American” invented by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Yet strangely, if Ms. Wong does become a naturalized U.S. citizen at some point in the future, she will be required by federal law to recite the following oath:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen [emphasis added]; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

Yet the part of the oath involving renunciation of foreign citizenship has been rendered a dead letter, thanks to the Supreme Court. In Afroyim v. Rusk (1967), the court struck down a section of the 1940 Nationality Act which mandated that U.S. citizens who voted in foreign elections would be stripped of their citizenship. Beys Afroyim, an immigrant from Poland who became a naturalized citizen in 1926, moved with his wife in 1949 to Israel, where he became a citizen under Israel’s 1950 Law of Return granting Israeli citizenship to Jews from anywhere in the world. When Afroyim left his wife and sought to return to the U.S. in 1960, the State Department refused to renew his U.S. passport, on the grounds that by voting in an Israeli election he had renounced his citizenship.

In an earlier 1958 case, Perez v. Brownell, a 5-4 majority chose to grant wide latitude to Congress in defining the rules of U.S. citizenship. Justice Felix Frankfurter, a Jewish American, wrote: “We cannot deny to Congress the reasonable belief that these difficulties might well become acute, to the point of jeopardizing the successful conduct of international relations, when a citizen of one country chooses to participate in the political or governmental affairs of another country.”

But nine years later in Afroyim v. Rusk, a different 5-4 majority ruled that “Congress has no power under the Constitution to divest a person of his United States citizenship absent his voluntary renunciation thereof.” Subsequent court cases have narrowed the grounds for stripping citizenship from U.S. citizens, with denaturalization having been limited mostly to Nazi war criminals, terrorists, and immigrants who lied when applying for naturalization. As long as a foreign country is not engaged in active hostilities against the U.S., a native-born or naturalized U.S. citizen cannot be denaturalized for serving in that country’s armed forces, its intelligence agencies, or even serving as its head of state or prime minister. Foreign leaders who also held American citizenship include Golda Meir; Milan Panic, the former prime minster of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; and Boris Johnson, who was born in the U.S.

Is voting a right that can properly be exercised by noncitizens? American citizenship is still a requirement for voting in state and federal elections, although not necessarily in local elections. Since 2016 San Francisco has allowed noncitizens to vote in local school elections. In a perverse and illogical holding in a 1982 case, Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court required Texas public schools to enroll illegal immigrant children. A narrow 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court held that “no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.” If taken to its logical conclusion, this radical holding would require the abolition of all federal and state laws that distinguish legal from illegal immigrants, but the Supreme Court has not gone that far in subsequent decisions.

The citizenship oath that legal immigrants who seek to be naturalized take also includes the promises “that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law …” These clauses of the citizenship oath, too, have been obsolete in practice, since the abolition of peacetime conscription in 1973. Today military veterans make up only 6% of the adult population. Between 1973, when the draft was ended, and 2023, the number of military veterans in Congress declined from 3 out of 4 to 1 in 6; among the latter, in the 118th Congress the 72 Republican veterans outnumber the 25 Democratic veterans by nearly 3 to 1.

The jury is another civic institution in which most Americans never take part. While two-thirds of Americans according to one poll agree that serving on a jury “is part of what it means to be a good citizen,” in 21st-century America, jury duty is as unusual as military service, with fewer than 5% serving on a jury each year. That may explain why only 50% of Americans age 18-29 agree with the statement, compared to 78% of those 65 or older.

Voting is often considered a civic duty, and in some democracies mandatory voting is enforced by a symbolic fine. In 2020, 66% of eligible voters turned out for the election—the highest in percentage terms since 1900. The U.S. lags most other democracies in voter turnout, mainly because the complexity of state registration laws produces a gap between eligible voters (62.8% turnout in 2020) and registered voters who took the trouble to register in advance (94.1% turnout). In any event, most Americans live in districts and states dominated by one of the two national parties, meaning that their individual votes are more likely to be wasted than those of residents of a small number of swing voters in congressional districts and states that are up for grabs by either party.

While federal law still forbids illegal immigrants from access to most federal welfare benefits (they can access some, including WIC coupons), a number of progressive states have showered legal privileges and benefits on foreign nationals who violate immigration laws. In 2022, 16 states and the District of Columbia—most of them one-party Democratic jurisdictions like California, New York, and Oregon—allowed illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses. Having hesitated to endorse driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants during her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2007, Hillary Clinton endorsed the proposal unequivocally in 2015. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the state of California provided illegal immigrants with up to $1,700 in money from law-abiding state taxpayers, including a $500 prepaid debit card and $1,200 from the Golden State Stimulus Fund.

Under President Joe Biden, the IRS is now collaborating with New York state in arranging for illegal immigrants to get taxpayer money through welfare programs through New York’s “Excluded Workers Fund,” which subsidizes both ex-convicts and foreign nationals residing in New York in open defiance of U.S. immigration law. According to the IRS, “The IRS will assist eligible NY residents who are also ITIN applicants meet requirements for the New York State’s Excluded Worker’s Fund (EWF) payments. EWF provides income replacement checks to workers excluded from unemployment insurance most often due to immigration status.”

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The ongoing devaluation of national citizenship in the U.S. by American governments at all levels is not occurring in a geopolitical vacuum. Since the end of the Cold War, the relations between nation-states and their citizens have been transformed by economic globalization. While often misleadingly identified with trade, much globalization has taken the form of transnational production, with different stages of production in a single firm or industry taking place in different countries. Globalization is primarily global territorial arbitrage, defined as the exploitation by firms and individuals of differences in regulations, taxes, or labor costs in different jurisdictions.

One form of global arbitrage involves rich people obtaining so-called “golden visas.” Since the end of the Cold War, many countries have competed for foreign investment by granting citizenship or favorable legal immigrant status to foreign investors who spend money in the country. So-called “citizenship by invitation” (CBI) is particularly important for tiny nations that are tax and regulatory havens, like the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica (distinct from the Dominican Republic), which receives half of its government revenue from selling citizenship status to individuals and corporations.

But many large, developed democracies, including all of the Anglophone countries, now offer citizenship by investment. In the U.S. this takes the form of the EB-5 visa. In return for a minimum amount of investment in a commercial enterprise in the U.S. and a plan to create or preserve 10 permanent full-time jobs for qualified U.S. workers, a foreign investor or entrepreneur is entitled to a green card that can lead in a few years to naturalized U.S. citizenship.

As might be expected, the EB-5 program has been plagued by scandal since its creation in 1990. Abuses of the program often take two forms. One involves defining the distressed areas that are supposed to be targets of investment to include sites for luxury real estate. As Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, observed in 2019: “All of a sudden, investment dollars intended for communities in need were being sucked up for glitzy projects in America’s most well-to-do neighborhoods.” Another abuse has involved the bilking of gullible foreign investors—many of them Chinese—by American con artists, as part of real estate investment scams in Vermont, Texas, California, and elsewhere.

Even as globalization has created a global market in citizenship for the rich, mass immigration has also created an incentive for the global rich to encourage national governments to turn a blind eye to massive cross-border flows of illegal immigrants, many of whom work directly or indirectly for the affluent and wealthy in the “world cities” where both the rich and poor immigrants are concentrated. The traditional conception of exclusive national citizenship is being whittled away in the interests of wealthy holders of multiple passports and the immigrants—legal or illegal—whom they are disproportionately likely to employ.

The devaluation of citizenship today is driven primarily by the imperatives of global capitalism, even if starry-eyed left-wing one-worlders hitch a ride on the libertarian train to a borderless global market. A headline in The New York Times captured the phenomenon: “The New American Status Symbol? A Second Passport.” Like multiple homes, multiple passports now distinguish the elite from the parochial proles. In 2015 the average American lived within 18 miles of their mother, and only 20% lived farther than a drive of a few hours (women were chosen for study because they tend to live longer). When college students and military personnel are excluded, 57% of Americans have never lived outside of the state in which they were born, and 37% live in their home town. Fewer than 40% of Americans have a valid, unexpired passport, while 38% have never had a passport at all. As you might expect, passport ownership reflects income and education. Only 21% of Americans with household incomes under $50,000 have passports, compared to 64% of those with households that make $100,000 or more a year. While a majority of Americans of all races with a bachelor’s degree or more have passports, with the exception of Hispanics, a group that includes many immigrants, most Americans whose education ended with some college, high school or less lack passports.

It is these members of the working-class majority, native and naturalized alike, in the U.S. and similar countries in whom contemporary national elites including our own have lost interest. Unlike the rich, there is no reason for national governments to sell them passports in return for private investment or public payments. Unlike desperately poor illegal immigrants, they tend to insist on working for living wages in decent conditions and cannot be used up and sent back to their countries by employers, unlike guest workers (modern indentured servants). Most working-class people price themselves out of the cheap labor market but can’t afford foreign travel, much less citizenship in multiple countries.

For many members of the economic and social elite in the era of globalization, the nation-state—with its shared sense of solidarity and obligation among its citizens—is obsolete. Enlightened progressives and libertarians alike view countries as mere territories—transient labor camps and global investment zones. Citizenship is of no more ethical or emotional significance to the global overclass than a gym membership. For the mostly immobile working-class majorities of all races in all countries, however, their political citizenship is their only claim on the favor of their own national government. The debate about citizenship, then, is not so much one between left and right as it is part of the contemporary class divide within every Western nation, including our own.