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Daily Maverick
26-06-2025
- General
- Daily Maverick
Unlocking the power of words: How writing shapes equality and activism in society
In the past few years, writers have been liberated from traditional publishers with the advent of platforms like Substack, and there's been a mushrooming of individual newsletters. But could it be that paradoxically the explosion in the production and accessibility of writing has led to an implosion in reading for meaning? ' Words got me the wound and will make me well — if you believe it ' Jim Morrison, Lament, An American Prayer 'Sticks and stones may break my bones But words can never hurt me' (Bombs and drones may break your bones… ) Colloquial saying For most of human history writing and reading has been a squarely elite affair. For centuries it was intricately bound up with power and privilege. Only a few people were taught the art of word-fare, and access to the repositories of history, thought and ideation that were stored in writing was strictly controlled. As usual, it took a combination of struggle by poor people — and the growing needs of the capitalist economy for literate workers by the late nineteenth century — to break the rulers' monopolisation of the written word. Once that happened though, education facilitated mass literacy that in turn opened the door for poor people to greater equality and upward mobility through the classes. Not many made it, but enough did to trick people like my father into believing that the key to a good life was getting an education and working hard, 'pulling up your boot straps', as he and others frame it. If only it were that simple. Nonetheless, while the expansion of public education eventually meant that most people learned to read, not everyone could write and be read; for the most part, the ability to publish was still tightly controlled by class and quality of education. When there were breakthrough texts, like Thomas Paine's 1791 The Rights of Man, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), or Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx's 1848 Communist Manifesto, the huge readership they garnered demonstrated the revolutionary potential of the written word. But these books were the exception, not the rule. For the most part the publishing of words remained tightly controlled — mostly by men. It wasn't just political words they were afraid of. Words were also used to censor morals and shape culture, often protecting the dominant views of sex and sexuality. Books such as English writer DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's L over were considered 'indecent' and became the subject of court cases. In addition, as Pip Williams has shown in her beautiful novel The Dictionary of Lost Words, certain words were deliberately left out of the dictionary if their meanings reflected people or subjects that the elites preferred did not exist. In democracies slowly that grip has been relaxed. Today in countries like South Africa or England we can still write almost anything. But in autocracies the control over words and writing is as tight as ever. To an extent the digital and communications revolution of the last few decades has subverted all that. Through social media and online publications, millions more people can write and reach an audience, potentially in millions. Indeed, sometimes it feels as if suddenly everyone is writing. Even accomplished novelists, historians and writers of non-fiction now have their own newsletters. In the last few years, writers have been liberated from traditional publishers with the advent of platforms like Substack, and there's been a mushrooming of individual newsletters, including my own News from JAH. Many of them are outstanding. But here's the rub. Could it be that paradoxically the explosion in the production and accessibility of writing has led to an implosion in reading for meaning? Daily Maverick, for example, publishes dozens of 'Opinionistas' and op-eds a week. But its own statistics show that the average attention span on a page in 2020 was 12 seconds, only a few seconds more than the attention span of a goldfish. So, the problem is do people read for meaning, or do they just — like I often do — first cast an eye over an article, think they get the gist of it and move on? In this context the challenge facing a writer, a person who wants to use writing to persuade others, who wants to use writing for connection, advocacy and engagement is… how do you write in a way that arrests people's attention? How do you write for reading? For social justice activists it is these questions that occasion the need to have a discussion about the obvious: how to write in order to be read! Where do we start? Respect the written word Words are powerful. They must be handled with care. They can carry love. And hate. They can liberate and they can imprison. They can betray. They can hide and reveal. In her book Black and Female, Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga describes her childhood encounters with words and puts it this way: 'Watching the adults around me I developed an intuitive idea that words were power. After adults spoke to each other, things happened… I realised I was powerless which meant I needed power, which in turn meant I needed words. With words I could do things. I could make good what was no more.' Book cover: Faber & Faber The infinite beauty of words Isn't it amazing to think that words will never run out? Words seem to be as infinite as the stars. Words offer limitless forms, vocabulary and meaning. New words are being born all the time, and every year a handful enter into common enough usage to get added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). In 2022 more than 650 new words, senses and sub-entries were added to the OED in its annual update, including ' trequartista, influencer, and side hustle '. There's even a process by which words gain recognition and a right of entry! But, like black stars, some words are also disappearing. Then there are archaic words that may have been discarded, which find their way back to life by myriad means. Words are the building blocks of meaning. But in addition there are limitless styles, genres and methods for delivering words: whispered or shouted, through poetry, on the page, as part of musical scores. I'm a firm believer in respect for grammatical rules, which is partly showing respect for the reader: but I'm also an anarchist when it comes to disrupting and reimagining styles. Connection is all. The bottom line: as a writer, the word's your oyster. Writing as considered communication We write primarily to communicate with other people, but how we write will vary enormously depending on who we think we are writing to and for. Once upon a time one of the most popular and private forms of writing was letters. For years, at boarding school, every Sunday my school mates and I were made to sit down for an hour and write letters to our parents. As I grew up, my repertoire of recipients expanded to girlfriends and later lovers. Today, I sometimes think of the articles I write as letters, a way of reaching out to unknown people, seeking affinity, hopefully touching hearts and minds, persuading. But in addition to writing for/to another person I have discovered that writing is also the best way to achieve concentrated and deep thinking; it's a way to shape your own thoughts, corral information and tease out meaning from the experiences and ideas you are trying to capture and explain in words. In her book The Purpose of Power, Alicia Garza, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, writes: ' When I write I want to accomplish an outcome… For me, writing is a spiritual practice. It is a purging, a renewal, a call to action that I am unable to defy. It is the way I learned to communicate when there seemed to be no other options.' In this respect, the lonely act of writing becomes a form of self-realisation, a way of learning, of forming and shaping your own opinions, hopefully sometimes changing your own mind, as you bring intense thought to bear on trying to put an idea or a feeling or an observation into words. It's a way of staying human. The art of writing I had the privilege of learning about the beauty of words and their power through having inspirational English teachers at school and studying English language and literature as an undergraduate at Oxford University. Studying literature, however, taught me more about the feeling of words, than how to construct them for readers! Writing arduous essays about every book written between Beowulf in the ninth century and Samuel Beckett in the twentieth also taught me how to really read texts closely to try to understand their meaning. There's a difference, however, between being able to read for meaning and write with meaning. You should never rub your personality out of your writing. How you write should be a part of your personality, like the color of your eyes. It's instinctive. Nonetheless, there are a number of guidelines to consider if you aspire to effective public writing. Let me try and unpack a few that help me. Interestingly, as it turned out, it was not the study of literature (the most refined form of writing) that taught me how to write, but the study of law. For a few years, in the late 1980s while South Africa was in the final throes of rebellion against apartheid, I wrote for an underground journal, Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (meaning the Worker's Fortress in isiZulu), under the strict editorship of Rob Petersen, a distinguished legal and political thinker. Petersen had gone into exile to establish the Marxist Workers Tendency of the ANC. Back in those days words and writing in South Africa were much more subversive. Publications, songs and even books of poetry were banned by the apartheid government because of their power to inflame resistance. In defiance of this, Steve Biko's collection of essays was titled I Write What I Like. Biko wrote under the pseudonym Frank Talk. Petersen was a disciplinarian with words, although often more with the intention to exclude meanings and misinterpretations, than to expand the power and possibility of the word. Revolutionary politics required precision of meaning. The Marxist world was an ideological one and because politics was seen as a science rather than an art form the purpose of words was formulaic, that is to form equations of meaning. A wrong word could give you a wrong meaning! That I think is the nature of legal writing as well. However, being under Petersen's cosh taught me two rules of more general application to writing: Firstly, that no word should ever be superfluous. Every word has a role, and therefore every word in every sentence needs to be examined and questioned. Secondly, the reader of a journalistic article, and even an essay, will always be assisted by finding that there is a logic and structure to an article. The article needs to build a case, to progress, and not to require acrobatics or high jumps from the reader. Don't lead them into a forest of abstraction. Don't think of an article as being about you and how clever you are. I learned that the hard way. After being given a subject to research and write about for an article I would often get carried away in the process. Because I was learning through writing, my articles would be full of what I thought to be extraordinary epiphanies. Thinking and connecting ideas is exciting. But what I thought were new ideas may have been new and exciting to me, but not necessarily to other people. The editorial board meetings of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi were jokingly called the abattoir. Days would be spent pouring over sentences and even words. 'The writer must be prepared to slaughter your favourite sentences,' said Petersen, and though it hurt like hell, he was usually right. You can get fixated on a few words or sentences and then find that they unwittingly impede the further flow of the article. But my years studying great literature were far from wasted. As well as writing to convey meanings, a good writer also has a feeling for words. You may not realise it, but words have rhythm and a relationship to each other that adds another layer to their meaning. Reading Shakespeare, or any great writer, can teach you that. Writing is like lovemaking. It should start with some foreplay. My advice is to always look for poetry, even in prose writing. Look for the poetry that flashes in politics and even injustice. Find the angle less seen and explored. When you point it out people will recognise it and realise it was there all the time. Recognition is an important part of reading. But, beware, I am not giving you an excuse for flowery, flabby when you think you have finished read what you have written. Place yourself in the shoes of the reader and ask yourself whether you would have read your article. If the answer's no, then it's back to the writing board. How not to write Unfortunately these days there's a lot of bad writing about. Many people produce bad writing for good reasons, so I bear them no grudge. The problem is that there isn't enough discussion about what we are trying to achieve when we write, and very few of us have the privilege of going on creative writing courses. English writer George Orwell fulminated against bad writing, particularly the bad writing produced by writers on the left. The withering critique he makes in his essay, Politics and the English Language, should be required reading for all social justice activists who pick up the pen. But, as if to prove his point, Orwell shows us the best of writing from his own pen, as well as its power. A beautiful homily to the Common English toad can be turned into a powerful political statement: 'So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.' Orwell's criticisms resonate with the feelings I had for some of the op-eds I used to receive for publication when I was the editor of Maverick Citizen, a section of the Daily Maverick that we had established as a kind of activists' corner. Our journalists tried to tell stories about activists and activism, but we also created a platform to publish opinion pieces. Unfortunately I found that often the articles that came from political activists were dense and dry, jargonistic, didactic and hectoring and poorly structured. Sometimes their authors seem more concerned with their own political correctness, than with reaching out to and engaging with an unknown reader. As a result, one of my pieces of advice to writers is to carefully read back over what you have read, as if you were the reader. Detach yourself from your article, read it through someone else's eyes and then ask whether you would have stayed with it from start to finish. If at first you didn't succeed, get back on the computer and try again! And remember, even the most accomplished writers find writing hard. DM
New York Times
21-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Who's the Mad King Now?
Maybe the mad king, the other one, wasn't so mad after all. 'George III is Abraham Lincoln compared to Trump,' said Rick Atkinson, who is vivifying the Revolutionary War in his mesmerizing histories 'The British Are Coming' and 'The Fate of the Day.' The latter, the second book in a planned trilogy, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for six weeks and is being devoured by lawmakers on Capitol Hill. As the 'No Kings' resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of President Trump to George III. 'George isn't the 'royal brute' that Thomas Paine calls him in 'Common Sense,'' Atkinson told me. 'He's not the 'tyrant' that Jefferson calls him in the Declaration of Independence, and he's not the sinister idiot who runs across the stage in 'Hamilton' every night singing 'You'll Be Back.'' ('And when push comes to shove, I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love!') Yes, George III had manic episodes that scared people — depicted in Alan Bennett's 'The Madness of George III,' a play made into a movie with Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren. Palace aides are unnerved when the king's urine turns blue. 'He was in a straitjacket for a while, that's how deranged he was,' Atkinson said. 'His last 10 years were spent at Windsor, basically in a cell. He went blind and deaf. He had long white hair, white beard.' King George was relentless about his runaway child, America. 'He's ruthless,' Atkinson explained, 'because he believes that if the American colonies are permitted to slip away, it will encourage insurrections in Ireland, in Canada, the British Sugar Islands, the West Indies, in India, and it'll be the beginning of the end of the first British Empire, which has just been created. And it's not going to happen on his watch.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Revolutionary Idea That Remade the New World
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The United States, Donald Trump says, 'is the only country in the world' that grants citizenship to babies born within its borders. He's wrong, of course. Tanzania, Pakistan, and France all grant some form of birthright citizenship. But birthright citizenship is ultimately an American ideal. That is, all of the Americas. Nearly every country in the Western Hemisphere grants citizenship to children born in its territory irrespective of the nationality of their parents. It's part of the promise of the New World, that the Western Hemisphere would be, as the American revolutionary Thomas Paine said of the United States, an 'asylum' for humanity. 'Open,' echoed George Washington, 'to receive not only the opulent & respectable' but the 'oppressed & Persecuted of all nations.' The children of those oppressed and persecuted would be citizens by right. The legal term for birthright citizenship is jus solis, or 'by right of soil'—in contrast to jus sanguinis, which assigns citizenship to children based on the national identity of one or both of their parents, an identity that could be defined by bloodline, race, or religion. Mexicans were the first to write jus solis into a constitution, in 1814, during their war of independence against Spain. In bright, unambiguous language, the rebels stated that 'all those born in La Mexica América are considered citizens.' By 'all,' they meant all. Having declared the abolition of both chattel slavery and Indigenous tribute and servitude, Mexican revolutionaries intended to make everyone, regardless of skin color, a member of the nation, but Spanish troops retook Mexico before this constitution could go fully into effect. The three-century-old Spanish empire was obsessed with blood—how it conveyed lineage and, in the Spanish view, confirmed virtue. Jus sanguinis had been the law of the land, and a good part of the empire's massive bureaucracy worked to keep track of ancestry, issuing certificates of purity certifying that no taint of Jewish, Muslim, Native American, or African blood flowed in the bearer's veins. Mexico was just one front in a hemisphere-wide war against Spanish rule, which began in 1810 and didn't end until 1826, when revolutionaries overran royalism's last bastion, the Pacific port city of Callao, Peru. With all of Spanish America (save Cuba and Puerto Rico) now free, the region's republican leaders were eager to leave Spain's blood medievalism behind, to create a modern legal system for the Americas. The foundation of that system was jus solis. In a revolutionary act of inclusion, the new nations of Spanish America adopted it universally, to apply to every free resident within a given national territory. In Spanish America, as in the United States, the politics of jus solis was tied to the politics of race and slavery. The historians Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur recently submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court to counter the Trump administration's efforts to abolish or curtail birthright citizenship. They note that free people of color—decades before the Civil War and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868—regularly invoked a common-law version of jus solis: They were citizens of the United States because they'd been born in the United States. In 1848, African American activists in Pennsylvania published a pamphlet demanding constitutional protection, insisting that their 'certificates of Birth and Nativity' provide all the 'evidence' needed to confirm their citizenship. The nation's courts and laws, however, ensured that, in the United States, the bestowal of citizenship at birth remained predominantly a right enjoyed by white people. [David W. Blight: Birthright citizenship is a sacred guarantee] Spanish Americans applied jus solis more generously. In many of the region's new republics, to be born a citizen meant to be born free, as independence leaders moved quickly to repeal a doctrine—partus sequitur ventrem, Latin for 'the child follows the womb'—that defined children born to enslaved mothers as also enslaved. Widely applied during Spanish rule, the doctrine was still the law of the land in U.S. slave states when Chilean insurgents declared their independence in 1810 and passed, a year later, the world's first 'free womb' law. The idea of childbirth as an emancipatory act was Spanish America's unique contribution to the transatlantic antislavery movement. Argentina followed with a similar law in 1813, then Colombia in 1814, Venezuela and Peru in 1821, and Ecuador and Uruguay in 1825. Different nations ended slavery at different times, depending on local politics. Many countries—Chile and Mexico, for instance—did so soon after their break with Spain. Others, including Argentina, took longer. But with independence, the end of human bondage in Spanish America was clearly in sight. 'No one is born a slave,' Mexican abolitionists said. They are born citizens. Racism of course continued throughout the now-free Spanish America, as did a status and class hierarchy organized around racial identity. It was easier to defeat Spain's army than to dismantle the social structure its empire left behind. And jus solis had a dark side. Politicians used generous citizenship and naturalization laws to encourage European migration and campaign to 'whiten' the nation. Still, compared with the expansion of chattel slavery and hardening of racial apartheid then taking place in the United States, Spanish America was exceptional. Its founders were creating something entirely new in the world: a community of sovereign nation-states composed, at least legally, of equal, racially diverse citizens. James Madison noticed. The former president knew that his country couldn't go on subjugating people of color forever, be they, as he put it, 'the black race within our bosom' or the 'red on our border.' Writing in 1826, Madison thought it worth studying how 'the regions South of us,' especially Mexico and Peru, were incorporating emancipated slaves and Indigenous peoples into their newly constituted nations. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina thought otherwise. Spanish America's 'fatal error' was 'placing the colored race on an equality with the white.' 'Ours is the Government of the white man,' he said in 1848, and it needed to remain so. Denying birthright citizenship to people of color was necessary to that vision. The United States eventually caught up with Latin America. In 1865, the Union Army defeated the Confederacy with the help of about 180,000 Black soldiers. Their rights could no longer be denied. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified three years later, finally granted citizenship to free people of African descent: 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.' The middle clause of that sentence—'and subject to jurisdiction thereof'—is U.S. birthright citizenship's potential Achilles heel. It shouldn't be, because congressional debates from that time make clear what the drafters meant by that phrase. As the historian Eric Foner writes, Congress intended that clause to exclude not migrants but specifically Native Americans, who, the argument went, were ineligible for U.S. citizenship because of their subordination to tribal jurisdiction. (Congress would grant them citizenship in 1924.) Also excluded were foreign diplomats and soldiers, who were protected by their home country's jurisdictional immunity. (Most Spanish American nations likewise exempted foreign envoys from their jus solis clause, though none excluded Native Americans.) Migrants began arriving in the United States in massive numbers toward the end of the Civil War—mostly from Europe but also from Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Asia. Most came undocumented, without visas, passports, or formal permission to enter the country. Mexicans crossed the border at will, to work and to live. If the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment wanted to exclude the children of these people from the benefit of birthright citizenship, they would have said so. But as Congress moved toward ratifying the amendment, whenever a nativist legislator proposed excluding this or that pariah people—the Chinese, say, or the Romani—from birthright citizenship, their colleagues pushed back with the broadest interpretation possible of jus soli, generous enough to cover, said California Senator John Conness, even 'the children born here of Mongolian parents.' There is no doubt that the amendment's authors understood that the offspring of foreign migrants in the United States were subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. But starting in the 1990s, activists and politicians seeking to restrict U.S. immigration policy interpreted the clause to apply to undocumented migrants. The first to formally do so was Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat, who in 1993 introduced the Immigration Stabilization Act, arguing that a baby born to an undocumented mother who was a citizen of another country was, by definition, subject to that country's jurisdiction, not the United States'. Reid's proposal ignored the legal status of fathers and focused exclusively on the nationality of birth mothers, a curious resurrection of partus sequitur ventrem: The child follows the womb and is condemned to return to the country the mother fled. Reid's bill died in committee (and Reid later regretted his proposal, calling it the 'biggest mistake' he'd ever made). But it foreshadowed bad things to come. The Trump administration today is similarly asking the Supreme Court to interpret the clause to mean that children born of foreign nationals are not 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States, and therefore not eligible for citizenship. Most of Latin America holds fast to birthright citizenship today. 'All people born in Mexican territory,' Mexico's constitution states, 'regardless of their parent's nationality,' are Mexican, an identity that can 'never be revoked.' Colombia is one of the few nations that restricts jus solis, requiring at least one parent to be a nationalized Colombian. But with Venezuelans pouring into Colombia, fleeing their country's worsening situation, Bogotá—fearing the creation of a large class of gente apátrida ('stateless people')—has waived restrictions on jus solis. While the Trump administration seems to be set on making life miserable for Venezuelan refugees, Colombia has issued an estimated 27,000 birth certificates to babies born of Venezuelans in its territory. Chile likewise liberalized its jus solis requirements to support the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees, allowing many of their children to become Chilean citizens. The one woeful exception to the rule is the Dominican Republic. For decades, courts interpreted the constitution's exemption of people 'in transit' from jus solis as pertaining to diplomats. Then, in 2013, the country's Constitutional Court, stocked with right-wing nationalists and inflamed by rising anti-Haitian racism (the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti), ruled that 'in transit' applied, retroactively to 1929, to Haitian migrant sugar-field workers. Overnight, 200,000 individuals born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents were stripped of their citizenship. At least 80,000 people were deported into Haiti; most of them had lived their whole lives in the Dominican Republic, and few spoke French or Creole. These deportees were born poor, in rural communities, in many cases at home, and have no official documentation whatsoever to mark their existence. If the United States follows the Dominican Republic and limits or does away with birthright citizenship, the result will likely be the kind of chaos seen in the Dominican Republic on an even greater scale. Trump's executive order is aimed at exempting from citizenship not just the children of undocumented parents but also the newborns of those in the United States legally, on work or student visas or awaiting their asylum hearings. The enforcement of such a restriction would require the re-creation of something like the blood-obsessed Spanish colonial bureaucracy, with officials demanding to see not just an individual's birth certificate to prove citizenship but at least one of their parent's birth certificates. The United States already has an underclass of millions of stateless workers. If their children and grandchildren were to be denied citizenship, that class would grow exponentially. [Read: Stephen Miller has a plan] Apart from the Dominican Republic, the nativist right in Latin America hasn't launched the kind of full-on assault on birthright citizenship we see in the United States. But the slurs niño ancla and bebê âncora—'anchor baby'—have entered the Spanish and Portuguese languages, mostly through social media, as far-right figures, including Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and José Antonio Kast in Chile, whip up anger against refugees. Kast's anti-migrant party, Partido Republicano, is rising in the polls ahead of next year's presidential election, promising to tighten immigration laws and generally menacing Haitian migrants. In Argentina, Javier Milei has called for an end to the country's historic liberal immigration policies, in order to, he said, 'make Argentina great again.' The first batch of jus solis constitutions in Spanish America were drafted following a bloody, two-decade-long independence war, with fighting sprawling across the continent, scattering millions far from home. The men who led those wars were idealistic, but they also had pragmatic motives for embracing birthright citizenship: It was a way of re-rooting people, of settling a hemisphere in tumult. The granting of citizenship to all children born within its territory does not, as Trump insists, make the United States exceptional. It makes it American. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Birthright Citizenship Is a New World Ideal
The United States, Donald Trump says, 'is the only country in the world' that grants citizenship to babies born within its borders. He's wrong, of course. Tanzania, Pakistan, and France all grant some form of birthright citizenship. But birthright citizenship is ultimately an American ideal. That is, all of the Americas. Nearly every country in the Western Hemisphere grants citizenship to children born in its territory irrespective of the nationality of their parents. It's part of the promise of the New World, that the Western Hemisphere would be, as the American revolutionary Thomas Paine said of the United States, an 'asylum' for humanity. 'Open,' echoed George Washington, 'to receive not only the opulent & respectable' but the 'oppressed & Persecuted of all nations.' The children of those oppressed and persecuted would be citizens by right. The legal term for birthright citizenship is jus solis, or 'by right of soil'—in contrast to jus sanguinis, which assigns citizenship to children based on the national identity of one or both of their parents, an identity that could be defined by bloodline, race, or religion. Mexicans were the first to write jus solis into a constitution, in 1814, during their war of independence against Spain. In bright, unambiguous language, the rebels stated that 'all those born in La Mexica América are considered citizens.' By 'all,' they meant all. Having declared the abolition of both chattel slavery and Indigenous tribute and servitude, Mexican revolutionaries intended to make everyone, regardless of skin color, a member of the nation, but Spanish troops retook Mexico before this constitution could go fully into effect. The three-century-old Spanish empire was obsessed with blood—how it conveyed lineage and, in the Spanish view, confirmed virtue. Jus sanguinis had been the law of the land, and a good part of the empire's massive bureaucracy worked to keep track of ancestry, issuing certificates of purity certifying that no taint of Jewish, Muslim, Native American, or African blood flowed in the bearer's veins. Mexico was just one front in a hemisphere-wide war against Spanish rule, which began in 1810 and didn't end until 1826, when revolutionaries overran royalism's last bastion, the Pacific port city of Callao, Peru. With all of Spanish America (save Cuba and Puerto Rico) now free, the region's republican leaders were eager to leave Spain's blood medievalism behind, to create a modern legal system for the Americas. The foundation of that system was jus solis. In a revolutionary act of inclusion, the new nations of Spanish America adopted it universally, to apply to every free resident within a given national territory. In Spanish America, as in the United States, the politics of jus solis was tied to the politics of race and slavery. The historians Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur recently submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court to counter the Trump administration's efforts to abolish or curtail birthright citizenship. They note that free people of color—decades before the Civil War and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868—regularly invoked a common-law version of jus solis: They were citizens of the United States because they'd been born in the United States. In 1848, African American activists in Pennsylvania published a pamphlet demanding constitutional protection, insisting that their 'certificates of Birth and Nativity' provide all the 'evidence' needed to confirm their citizenship. The nation's courts and laws, however, ensured that, in the United States, the bestowal of citizenship at birth remained predominantly a right enjoyed by white people. David W. Blight: Birthright citizenship is a sacred guarantee Spanish Americans applied jus solis more generously. In many of the region's new republics, to be born a citizen meant to be born free, as independence leaders moved quickly to repeal a doctrine— partus sequitur ventrem, Latin for 'the child follows the womb'—that defined children born to enslaved mothers as also enslaved. Widely applied during Spanish rule, the doctrine was still the law of the land in U.S. slave states when Chilean insurgents declared their independence in 1810 and passed, a year later, the world's first 'free womb' law. The idea of childbirth as an emancipatory act was Spanish America's unique contribution to the transatlantic antislavery movement. Argentina followed with a similar law in 1813, then Colombia in 1814, Venezuela and Peru in 1821, and Ecuador and Uruguay in 1825. Different nations ended slavery at different times, depending on local politics. Many countries—Chile and Mexico, for instance—did so soon after their break with Spain. Others, including Argentina, took longer. But with independence, the end of human bondage in Spanish America was clearly in sight. 'No one is born a slave,' Mexican abolitionists said. They are born citizens. Racism of course continued throughout the now-free Spanish America, as did a status and class hierarchy organized around racial identity. It was easier to defeat Spain's army than to dismantle the social structure its empire left behind. And jus solis had a dark side. Politicians used generous citizenship and naturalization laws to encourage European migration and campaign to 'whiten' the nation. Still, compared with the expansion of chattel slavery and hardening of racial apartheid then taking place in the United States, Spanish America was exceptional. Its founders were creating something entirely new in the world: a community of sovereign nation-states composed, at least legally, of equal, racially diverse citizens. James Madison noticed. The former president knew that his country couldn't go on subjugating people of color forever, be they, as he put it, 'the black race within our bosom' or the 'red on our border.' Writing in 1826, Madison thought it worth studying how 'the regions South of us,' especially Mexico and Peru, were incorporating emancipated slaves and Indigenous peoples into their newly constituted nations. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina thought otherwise. Spanish America's 'fatal error' was 'placing the colored race on an equality with the white.' 'Ours is the Government of the white man,' he said in 1848, and it needed to remain so. Denying birthright citizenship to people of color was necessary to that vision. The United States eventually caught up with Latin America. In 1865, the Union Army defeated the Confederacy with the help of about 180,000 Black soldiers. Their rights could no longer be denied. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified three years later, finally granted citizenship to free people of African descent: 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.' The middle clause of that sentence—'and subject to jurisdiction thereof'—is U.S. birthright citizenship's potential Achilles heel. It shouldn't be, because congressional debates from that time make clear what the drafters meant by that phrase. As the historian Eric Foner writes, Congress intended that clause to exclude not migrants but specifically Native Americans, who, the argument went, were ineligible for U.S. citizenship because of their subordination to tribal jurisdiction. (Congress would grant them citizenship in 1924.) Also excluded were foreign diplomats and soldiers, who were protected by their home country's jurisdictional immunity. (Most Spanish American nations likewise exempted foreign envoys from their jus solis clause, though none excluded Native Americans.) Migrants began arriving in the United States in massive numbers toward the end of the Civil War—mostly from Europe but also from Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Asia. Most came undocumented, without visas, passports, or formal permission to enter the country. Mexicans crossed the border at will, to work and to live. If the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment wanted to exclude the children of these people from the benefit of birthright citizenship, they would have said so. But as Congress moved toward ratifying the amendment, whenever a nativist legislator proposed excluding this or that pariah people—the Chinese, say, or the Romani—from birthright citizenship, their colleagues pushed back with the broadest interpretation possible of jus soli, generous enough to cover, said California Senator John Conness, even 'the children born here of Mongolian parents.' There is no doubt that the amendment's authors understood that the offspring of foreign migrants in the United States were subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. But starting in the 1990s, activists and politicians seeking to restrict U.S. immigration policy interpreted the clause to apply to undocumented migrants. The first to formally do so was Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat, who in 1993 introduced the Immigration Stabilization Act, arguing that a baby born to an undocumented mother who was a citizen of another country was, by definition, subject to that country's jurisdiction, not the United States'. Reid's proposal ignored the legal status of fathers and focused exclusively on the nationality of birth mothers, a curious resurrection of partus sequitur ventrem: The child follows the womb and is condemned to return to the country the mother fled. Reid's bill died in committee (and Reid later regretted his proposal, calling it the 'biggest mistake' he'd ever made). But it foreshadowed bad things to come. The Trump administration today is similarly asking the Supreme Court to interpret the clause to mean that children born of foreign nationals are not 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States, and therefore not eligible for citizenship. Most of Latin America holds fast to birthright citizenship today. 'All people born in Mexican territory,' Mexico's constitution states, 'regardless of their parent's nationality,' are Mexican, an identity that can 'never be revoked.' Colombia is one of the few nations that restricts jus solis, requiring at least one parent to be a nationalized Colombian. But with Venezuelans pouring into Colombia, fleeing their country's worsening situation, Bogotá—fearing the creation of a large class of gente apátrida ('stateless people') — has waived restrictions on jus solis. While the Trump administration seems to be set on making life miserable for Venezuelan refugees, Colombia has issued an estimated 27,000 birth certificates to babies born of Venezuelans in its territory. Chile likewise liberalized its jus solis requirements to support the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees, allowing many of their children to become Chilean citizens. The one woeful exception to the rule is the Dominican Republic. For decades, courts interpreted the constitution's exemption of people 'in transit' from jus solis as pertaining to diplomats. Then, in 2013, the country's Constitutional Court, stocked with right-wing nationalists and inflamed by rising anti-Haitian racism (the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti), ruled that 'in transit' applied, retroactively to 1929, to Haitian migrant sugar-field workers. Overnight, 200,000 individuals born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents were stripped of their citizenship. At least 80,000 people were deported into Haiti; most of them had lived their whole lives in the Dominican Republic, and few spoke French or Creole. These deportees were born poor, in rural communities, in many cases at home, and have no official documentation whatsoever to mark their existence. If the United States follows the Dominican Republic and limits or does away with birthright citizenship, the result will likely be the kind of chaos seen in the Dominican Republic on an even greater scale. Trump's executive order is aimed at exempting from citizenship not just the children of undocumented parents but also the newborns of those in the United States legally, on work or student visas or awaiting their asylum hearings. The enforcement of such a restriction would require the re-creation of something like the blood-obsessed Spanish colonial bureaucracy, with officials demanding to see not just an individual's birth certificate to prove citizenship but at least one of their parent's birth certificates. The United States already has an underclass of millions of stateless workers. If their children and grandchildren were to be denied citizenship, that class would grow exponentially. Apart from the Dominican Republic, the nativist right in Latin America hasn't launched the kind of full-on assault on birthright citizenship we see in the United States. But the slurs niño ancla and bebê âncora —'anchor baby'—have entered the Spanish and Portuguese languages, mostly through social media, as far-right figures, including Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and José Antonio Kast in Chile, whip up anger against refugees. Kast's anti-migrant party, Partido Republicano, is rising in the polls ahead of next year's presidential election, promising to tighten immigration laws and generally menacing Haitian migrants. In Argentina, Javier Milei has called for an end to the country's historic liberal immigration policies, in order to, he said, 'make Argentina great again.' The first batch of jus solis constitutions in Spanish America were drafted following a bloody, two-decade-long independence war, with fighting sprawling across the continent, scattering millions far from home. The men who led those wars were idealistic, but they also had pragmatic motives for embracing birthright citizenship: It was a way of re-rooting people, of settling a hemisphere in tumult.
New Indian Express
30-05-2025
- Business
- New Indian Express
Borne identity: Looming AI threat
This erasure will be deepened if AI culls jobs on a scale not seen for decades―and across the rank and file this time. AI was supposed to take over basic and repetitive tasks, leaving workers free to supervise machines or turn to higher things. Exactly the opposite is happening. AIs can write words and code, create images from words, analyse gigantic datasets and work in mathematics, science and music. Because they learn by mimicry, they can even write poetry and literary fiction in the manner of acclaimed writers. But for want of manual dexterity, AIs are no good for everyday work. They can make fast food because it's standardised, but they can't make a home-cooked meal. Disappointingly, while the household robot has been a stock character in science fiction, intelligent machines can't perform any household function reliably, except for keeping floors somewhat clean. Jobs deemed to be low-quality may prove to be durable while a lot of white-collar roles go to machines. Even industries like the press, which depend heavily on human instincts and originality, are being affected. The buzz is about 'liquid content'―text, graphics and other components formatted to be widely shared, which can be decanted into various formats and channels. Until fairly recently in India, there were curbs on cross-media holdings for fear that media houses would do precisely this, narrowing the variety of news sources and opinion. Besides, it was assumed that the 'nose for news' on which the whole business runs is a uniquely human attribute. But some Nordic media houses are training their own AIs by a simple process: their desk staff give a thumbs up or thumbs down to incoming news to teach the AI to be a news editor. The most persuasive evidence that AIs could take white-collar jobs comes from changing attitudes to universal basic income. The idea dates back to Thomas Paine in the late 18th century and enjoys some popularity in times of economic uncertainty. At other times, it has been dismissed as a handout. But over the last decade, as AI has surged, it is again being talked up. Elites drive policy everywhere, including in technology, and the change could suggest that they know that their own AIs could make them redundant. Speakeasy Pratik Kanjilal | Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University (Views are personal) (Tweets @pratik_k)
