The case for denaturalization

If the United States is serious about giving citizenship to worthy immigrants, we also need to be serious about revoking it from the unworthy.

More than 800,000 immigrants became American citizens in FY2024, and a comparable number are expected in FY2025. There are more than 25 million naturalized American citizens — about half the foreign-born population. I welcome those who followed the rules and took the Oath of Allegiance in good faith.

But many didn’t. That’s where denaturalization comes in.

Becoming an American citizen is a privilege, not a right.

The question of revoking citizenship from immigrants is part of a broader debate about what membership in our national community means — a debate made especially urgent by the waves of mass immigration the political class has allowed into our country over the past 50 years.

A vigorous, ongoing, and unapologetic commitment to denaturalization is an important part of the effort to restore integrity to U.S. citizenship. It is not about restricting citizenship gratuitously, but about demonstrating that becoming an American citizen is a privilege, not a right.

Historically, the number of people denaturalized has been quite low. From 1990 until the first Trump administration, fewer than a dozen immigrants a year on average lost their citizenship through a civil or criminal court process.

The most notable targets were not ordinary fraudsters but war criminals, terrorists, and human rights violators who lied on their applications.

The focus broadened in the first Trump term. The Justice Department created a unit devoted to investigating and litigating denaturalization cases, and the number of cases grew to around 40 per year.

An increase in denaturalizations actually first started under Obama due to technological advancements, and the effort has been stepped up even further in Trump’s second term.

Last year, the Justice Department issued a memo promising, among other things, that “the Civil Division shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence.” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the part of the Department of Homeland Security that handles such matters, has set a target of referring 100 to 200 possible cases per month to the Justice Department.

The immigration game

Our relatively easy citizenship process is generally a good thing. Whether the number of newcomers each year is high or low, the goal for admitting foreigners should be their full absorption into American society.

This is not the way citizenship is handled in, say, the Persian Gulf states, where large foreign majorities are not part of the political community and never can be. In a republic like ours, however, the chief goal of immigration must be to turn newcomers into Americans.

Though it also involves a lot of paperwork, becoming a citizen is not like getting a driver’s license or opening a bank account. A better analogy is that the immigrant is “marrying” America, or being “adopted” by her. Such an arrangement should not be entered into lightly, but once consecrated, it should not be dissolved lightly.

If the candidate for citizenship lied or was never eligible for naturalization to begin with, the relationship must be annulled. A federal court ruling on the issue didn’t use the metaphor of annulment, but the parallel is clear:

Setting aside naturalization for failure to comply with the particular prerequisites to the acquisition of citizenship is not a punishment; it merely represents an undoing of that which should not have been done in the first place.

Even now, the number of denaturalizations is lower than you might think, given how pervasive fraud is in every corner of our immigration system

Under current law, the reasons for denaturalization must predate the acquisition of citizenship rather than be based solely on conduct after the swearing-in ceremony, however repellent that conduct might be.

Conduct after naturalization can be considered, but only as evidence that the applicant was lying when he took the oath of citizenship. For instance, if you became a Nazi or communist shortly after naturalization, you were likely lying when you swore to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

But even during World War II, the Supreme Court held the government to such a high standard of proof that the Justice Department found it difficult to denaturalize Nazis. In response, Congress enacted a provision that affiliation with a group that would have precluded naturalization within five years of becoming a citizen is prima facie evidence that the person was not attached to the principles of the Constitution when he took the oath.

This provision has never been challenged in court, mainly because it has seldom, if ever, been used. But it might end up in court soon if certain congressional proposals succeed.

For instance, in response to the revelations of widespread fraud by Somali-born naturalized citizens, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) introduced the SCAM Act to facilitate denaturalization. The bill would expand the five-year window to 10 years and widen the offenses that could lead to denaturalization.

Within 10 years after taking the oath, if the new citizen joins a foreign terrorist organization, defrauds the government, or commits an aggravated felony or an espionage offense, those facts would be considered prima facie evidence that at the time of taking the oath, the person was not of good moral character, was not attached to the principles of the Constitution, and was not well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States — all bars to citizenship.

In other words, commission of the crimes would be evidence that offenders were never eligible for citizenship in the first place, so their acquisition of citizenship would be considered void.

One way to minimize the issue of denaturalization is to do a better job at the front end and not approve applications from unworthy people. To this end, USCIS has resumed neighborhood investigations into certain applicants, “reviewing their residency, moral character, loyalty to the U.S. Constitution, and commitment to the nation’s well-being.”

This is obviously labor-intensive, but it’s better to reject the citizenship applications of liars, fraudsters, and criminals than to try to denaturalize them after the fact.

RELATED: The homicidal empathy of the left’s immigration policies

John Moore/Getty Images

Taking citizenship seriously

Increased focus on denaturalization is but one front in the broader campaign to restore the integrity of American citizenship. President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order — declaring that children born to illegal aliens, tourists, foreign students, and other nonresidents should not be citizens — was recently argued before the Supreme Court, which is expected to issue its ruling this summer.

The administration is also moving forward on an initiative to restrict birth tourism — where pregnant women enter on visitor visas specifically so their children will obtain automatic U.S. citizenship. This is designed to put some teeth in a regulation issued during the first Trump term requiring consular officers to deny visas to pregnant women whose primary purpose in coming to the U.S. is to obtain citizenship for their child.

Other changes necessary to restore the meaning of citizenship have not received the same attention. Foreign-language ballots, for instance, are an absurdity. Why even require candidates for citizenship to pass an English-language test if the core sacrament of our civic religion can be conducted in Korean, Spanish, or Armenian?

New citizens swear to “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.” But that part of the oath is legally meaningless since the Supreme Court in the Afroyim decision ruled that taking away someone’s citizenship for expressions of dual citizenship was unconstitutional.

While restoring the value of citizenship is not an issue confined to immigration, mass immigration exacerbates it in every way. Denaturalization would simply not be as pressing an issue if annual legal immigration were dramatically reduced. A smaller flow of new immigrants, and the consequent reduction in the number of applicants for citizenship, would reduce the number of mistakes and thus the need for denaturalizations.

As with almost every concern regarding immigration, part of the answer is always less, please.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.