What would our country look like if the Court blesses this new “original meaning”? I call on no less an authority than Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, who explained the stakes in a January post on X: “Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship.”
Miller possesses few virtues, but one is a lack of shame. He will say the secret part out loud. The comment above implies an agenda that extends farther than Trump’s promise to mount “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”
What does “importing a foreign labor class” mean exactly? Which “countries in history” have “experimented” with the import of labor? It’s right there on the tip of my tongue—it’s—it’s—
It’s my birthplace, Virginia.
Colonial Virginia needed labor to grow tobacco—the 17th-century planter’s road to riches. The foreign labor was African.
The first Africans were brought to the colony in 1619. By 1640, Virginia law made African slavery lifelong and hereditary. In 1662, the colony proclaimed that the children of a Black mother, regardless of the father’s race, were slaves for life. This rule guaranteed generations of slaves whose unpaid labor allowed white planters to enrich themselves.
The results were a quarter-millennium of human slavery, a Civil War, and, in reaction, a constitutional revolution to liberate America from the slave society the American South built.
Slaves were Miller’s “foreign labor” class of its day—a class denied “full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote.” “Anti-slavery” southerners like James Monroe trumpeted a solution: Return the slaves to Africa. But that suggestion was never serious—because, if American Blacks were exiled, who would weed the tobacco and pick the cotton? The virtue of a “foreign labor class” is not that it goes away. It is that it stays and propagates.
If American-born children are not U.S. citizens, where would we deport them? Children born in this country aren’t automatically citizens of some other country. They are likely to be stateless. Even if the U.S. wished to deport them, other countries would be unlikely to take them. And do Stephen Miller et. al. actually want to deport them? I suspect not.
The evidence suggests that the Trump project has never been about deportation but about keeping noncitizens working for “real” Americans.