America Should Massively Expand Denaturalization to Remove Unworthy Citizens
Source: Breccan F. Thies. "Why Doesn't America Denaturalize In The Thousands Like It Used To?." June 11, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author argues America should go back to denaturalizing thousands of citizens per year like it did before 1967. He claims a Supreme Court case made this too difficult, allowing unworthy people to keep citizenship they shouldn't have gotten in the first place.
Conclusion
The United States should implement a massive denaturalization effort to strip citizenship from those who have proven themselves 'civilizationally unequipped' or unworthy of American citizenship
Premises
- Between 1907-1967, America denaturalized 22,000 citizens (367 per year average), but from 1990-2018 only 130 proceedings were filed (7 per year average)
- The 1967 Supreme Court case Afroyim v. Rusk severely limited the government's ability to revoke citizenship, effectively overruling Congress's constitutional power to establish naturalization rules
- President Clinton's 'Citizenship USA' initiative in 1996 resulted in at least 6,000 foreigners being naturalized despite having criminal histories or disqualifying factors
- Current denaturalization is limited to narrow cases like fraud and abuse, making the citizenship oath meaningless since violations cannot be enforced
- Modern naturalization applications are outdated, addressing threats like Nazism and communism but not adequately screening for 'Third-World' threats to Western civilization
- Citizenship has become a 'transactional' process that works only in 'high-trust societies populated by Westerners who take civilization seriously'
Assumptions
- Some naturalized citizens are 'civilizationally unequipped' to retain citizenship
- Western civilization and Western-minded individuals are superior for American society
- The Supreme Court wrongly interpreted constitutional powers in Afroyim v. Rusk
- Mass denaturalization would benefit American society
- Non-Western immigrants pose inherent threats to American constitutional order