Before I left Las Vegas on an expiring student visa, I called the cable company to cancel my service. After trying to get me to give up on this decision by not answering for twenty minutes, the customer service rep asked me why I was leaving the country. I told him that I was not a citizen and his response was, “But you speak English so well. Why can’t you stay?”
The answer is that the method by which most nationalities are decided is outdated. We live, by and large, in a meritocracy, a world that judges who someone is based upon their actions. Bloodline nobility stays around because people have trouble letting go of traditions, but who you were born as no longer matters much. Outside of genetics, you are not given anything at birth. Why is citizenship any different?
It seems strange that so much of the modern world- where people are allowed to live; what kind of paperwork they need to travel or work elsewhere; what flag they root for at the World Cup (if they care about it)- depends not on personal preference or beliefs, but is simply hinged on where your mother’s vagina was, geographically, when she popped you out. Between what imaginary borders were you and your parents born in?
You don’t even have to be a productive member of the society you were born into to earn the rights provided by it. That’s bizarre, isn’t it? Acutely illogical. That smarter, harder-working, more generous, more open-minded and more polite people might be kept out in favor of people who just happened to pop out of the correctly placed uterus?
I know this is a complicated issue, that it is not easily solved by exposing the problems of the method in place. I wish I were a skilled researcher and strategist, that I could voice a better argument against birthright nationalities other than the very valid but ineffective, why? But there it is anyway: why?
