After all, none of us born here did anything to deserve our citizenship. On what moral grounds can we deny others rights, privileges and opportunities that we did not earn ourselves? Jose Antonio Vargas’s powerful book “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen” wrestles with the moral, emotional and psychological dimensions of America’s perennial question: Who deserves citizenship? But it does require a certain measure of humility on the part of those of us who have benefited from birthright citizenship. Rather than viewing immigrants as seeking something that we, Americans, have a moral right to withhold from them, we ought to begin by acknowledging that none of us who were born here did anything to deserve our citizenship, and yet all of us — no matter where we were born — deserve compassion and basic human rights.

Source: New York Times December 21, 2018 11:01 UTC