Practical Advice for a Better World: Real solutions for society's biggest discords, concerns, and hopes for the future.

By Ben LeBoutillier

To his divided countrymen and a tumultuous world, Thomas Paine offered Common Sense to great effect. For our contemporary discord, however, we need Practical Advice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Koehler Books
• Release date: Feb 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9798888242445

Ben LeBoutillier

Ben "LeBoot" LeBoutillier's writings confront ambitious topics and challenge his audiences to grow at every encounter. His background in physics, medicine, education, and information have placed him in a unique intersection of some of the modern world's biggest institutions, and positioned him to explore the requirements for meaningful change. In his current profession, Ben combines several data and programming disciplines to safely manage healthcare information for caretakers and researchers. He additionally hosts Stories of Symmetry to explore the meta themes and deeper meanings behind Christian faith.

Book preview

PART 2

INDIVIDUAL CONCERNS AND

MATTERS OF THE CITIZENRY

CHAPTER 1

PATHWAYS TO CITIZENSHIP

The first requisite of a good citizen in this Republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight—that he shall not be a mere passenger.

~Theodore Roosevelt

One law and one custom shall be for you and for the stranger who dwells with you.

~Numbers 15:16 (New King James Version)

Types of residents

Before embarking on a proper discussion of pathways to citizenship, the differences between visitors, citizens, etc., must be clarified. The Introduction’s note on citizenship and residency treated this point briefly, but to reiterate, the congeries of statuses applied to persons standing on a given country’s soil can be consolidated into four broad categories: citizen, legal resident, visitor, and illegal.

Addressing the last first, regardless of the noun used—immigrant, alien, resident—a person here illegally has entered the country through means other than government-sanctioned channels and, definitionally, has no legal standing in the country, neither as a citizen nor guest.

Visitors are foreigners who enter the country legally without expectations of employment, lengthy stays, or attaining citizenship. Families on holiday, vacationers, and those on business trips fall into this category; they have plans neither to tarry nor plant roots.

Legal residents are students on visas, sponsored employees, asylum seekers, and other long-term residents who are, nevertheless, not citizens. Many in this category are actively working toward citizenship, yet many are not, as large numbers of legal residents, especially students, might plan to return to their countries of origin. For those who aspire toward citizenship, legal residency is the pathway thither. Even still, until attaining that goal, legal residents have no claims to the prerogatives of citizenship.

Citizenship is qualified by full-fledged membership in the country. Citizens, either from birth or through the immigration process, are afforded all constituent and concomitant privileges of citizenship, the most salient of which are voting and receiving aid from the government.

It is worth further noting that the category to which one belongs has no reflection on his or her character or worth. A citizen can be just as deplorable as an undocumented immigrant can be upstanding. The nation, however, must look to its citizenry and country the way that good parents look to their families and houses.

Illegal people have entered the house without invitation or notice. Perhaps they came with good intentions, perhaps they did not know where to knock and came around the back fence, but there is also a chance that they have come as thieves, or worse.

Visitors are dinner guests. Their presence is welcomed, but they were not invited to spend the week.

Legal residents are second cousins who come to spend the summer. They are quartered in the guest room and allowed to put their personal touch to it. They help with the dishes and cover their fair share of the grocery bills; notwithstanding, they are not members of the household. They do not get to excessively rearrange the furniture to accommodate their preferences. The house is not theirs to influence; in the same vein, leaky ceilings and moribund appliances are not their burdens to bear.

Citizens are the family, and the nation is their house. Each member of the family is mutually obliged to care for the house, guard it from malefactors, and see to its prosperity. As they are the ones who live there, they determine its fate.

The final point that needs consideration, or rather reiteration, is that the pathway to citizenship is through legal, long-term residency. It is the bridge between foreigner and citizen. Even though some non-citizens might spend many months or longer in the country, until they become citizens, there is a marked distinction between the two. Such is only appropriate, as the government’s first duty it toward its citizens—those who are vested in the country, contributory thereto, and inextricably bound to its fate.

Sovereignty

No nation should feel guilted by the proposition of its own sovereignty. No scruple, compunction, or obloquy can avert the verity that every nation is its own master. While international cooperation is often to a nation’s benefit, it remains incontrovertibly sovereign. As such, each nation has the privilege of determining its visitors, residents, and—indeed—its citizens.

The United States has a rich history of immigration. Its eclectic citizenry is united neither by race nor origin, but by values, uniquely American values that draw people from around the world—liberty, industry, enterprise, moxie, and others. To those who share such principles, the United States should—with judiciousness—be welcoming, but to those who abhor them, the United States should be wary and—if warranted—rejective.

Under the current system, immigration and the pathways to citizenship are egregious and unjust. Journeying through the process honestly is lengthy, convoluted, and expensive. Exploiting loopholes is far easier. There is also the alternative of living in the country under the guise of legality, enjoying its privileges and protections, while actually being illegal and guilty of affronting the nation’s immigration laws, even if those laws are impractical or otherwise nonsensical.

The current system has made legal immigration and attainment of citizenship so slow and difficult that many long-time residents and valued members of communities are tragically illicit. They are American in spirit, values, and locale, but not in documentation. The failings of the current system have pushed many citizens who sympathize with their illegal counterparts to circumvent immigration altogether and make misguided proclamations that citizenship and non-citizenship should have no distinctions, that the United States should turn a blind eye to its borders or dismiss borders altogether, that no crime can be severe enough to warrant deportation, and more.

These are the wrong paths to tread. Citizenship is qualified by prerogatives denied to non-citizens, borders are important safety measures, and foreigners who reveal themselves as deplorables have overstayed their welcomes and relinquished their privileges of visitation. The appropriate solution lies in abolishing the broken ways of the current system and installing a new one that welcomes wholesome people, rejects those who are execrable, and does so in a timely manner.

Acceptance of new citizens

Because a nation is shaped by its citizenry, it should extend the privilege of citizenship with cautious circumspection. Accordingly, the United States should guard citizenship carefully and refuse to extend it for trifling and senseless reasons. For example, granting citizenship to anyone born on US soil, regardless of circumstance, is an abhorrent affront to the country’s own sovereignty, good sense, and duty to act justly toward its current citizenry.

But this is not to suggest that the US should become ungenerous in welcoming new citizens nor forget that its foundations—and indeed every step of the construction—have been laid by those whose ancestors, not many generations ago, lived in other countries. Rather, the US must balance generosity to the immigrant with right action toward its own. Since the current policies accomplish neither of these, we must alter the approach drastically, remembering that the appropriate course of action is not to abolish distinctions between citizens and non-citizens, nor to desultorily extend citizenship to all, but to create a functioning system in keeping with the country’s values.

For such a system, the following minimum attributes are proposed:

At birth, citizenship be granted only to individuals who are born to at least one citizen.

Between birth and childhood, citizenship be granted if the child’s legal guardians are citizens, such as when parents who were not citizens at the time of the child’s birth have attained citizenship, or the child has been adopted by citizens.

From adolescence onward, citizenship be granted only to applicants who have lived in the country several years and are law-abiding, debt-free, self-supporting, proficient in the country’s language and history, and recommended by several citizens.

A note on amnesty

Amnesty, in this context, is the proposition that all undocumented immigrants currently living in the US be granted citizenship and pardons from any crimes associated with having resided in the country illegally. Some proponents of amnesty support it because of genuine desires to allow upstanding, but undocumented, members of the community to come out of hiding and officially join the US that they have called home for so long anyway. Some support amnesty because they feel that it’s easier than remedying the current fractured system. Those people might be correct, but the purported solution will undeniably create even worse problems than we currently have. Still others champion amnesty for nefarious purposes, usually political