Republicans are accredited as a political party that ended slave trade while their political rivals the Democrats were the ones who didn’t want an end to slavery.
The main reason behind the US Civil war was slave emancipation, rights of states over slavery and the role of the federal government to coordinate those state rights.
The Democrats who were controlling Southern States defended slavery and waged a civil war for it while the Republicans who were Northerners fought to abolish it.
Times have indeed changed, as the Republicans are now in the minority in the North while they rule the Southern States and the Democrats call the shots in the North.
The relocation of geographical terrain has also flipped their politics as well.
The US president Donald Trump has signed a raft of executive orders that sound more like he is a racist and his Republicans counterpart too are racists to the core.
Three executive orders worth consideration are ending birthright citizenship to aliens and DEI, mass deportations of undocumented aliens and restructuring of development aid.
All these executive backtracking orders target non whites more amounting into institutional closet racism.
Ending of Slavery led to the US civil war.
The American Civil War was caused by many factors, including slavery, states’ rights, and the role of the federal government.
The war began in 1861 when the Confederate States of America fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina.
The Southern states wanted to preserve slavery, while the Northern states opposed it.
The 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford angered Northern anti-slavery forces.
The Fugitive Slave Act put the federal government on the side of slavery.
States’ rights were a factor in the war, but were ultimately tied to slavery. The role of the federal government in the war was tied to slavery. Lincoln’s election in 1860 caused seven Southern states to secede from the Union.
Lincoln opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories. There was controversy over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories.
American values were forged by the civil war.
This is why an understanding of the American psyche is incomplete without a thorough understanding of the US history. After the civil war abridgement of racial, gender and other stratification of classes took a militant posturing.
Birthright citizenship has constitutional history and traditions.
The idea that children born in the United States automatically become citizens of the United States has deep roots in the common law.
But it was not adopted in the constitutional text until 1868, in the first sentence of the 14th Amendment:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United
States and of the state wherein they reside.” That sentence overturned Dred Scott, the 1857 Supreme Court decision that affirmed slavery and helped prompt the Civil War.
The racial impacts of the impugned decision.
In the Dred Scot, the court held that no persons of African descent — including free persons of African descent — and none of their descendants for all time to come could ever be citizens of the United States regardless of their birth in America.
It took civil war that costed the lives of many and counting.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) killed an estimated 620,000 men, which is about 2% of the population at the time. However, the exact number of deaths is still debated. Moreover, there were an estimated 1.5 million casualties reported during the Civil War.
Most casualties and deaths in the Civil War were the result of non-combat-related.
Slavery was unravelling the US economy, identity and sustainability; this is why it was brought to an end.
The American Civil War ended in 1865 after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia on April 9, 1865.
However, President Andrew Johnson didn’t officially declare the war over until August 20,1866.
Following the end of civil war, the 14th Amendment was enacted that essentially ended the classification of Americans based on race.
The Dred Scott decision helped lead to the rise of the Republican Party and one of the ruling’s most bitter critics, Abraham Lincoln.
The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified in 1868.
It was a key part of the Reconstruction era and granted citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States, including formerly enslaved people.
The 14th Amendment also guaranteed equal protection under the law and due process for all Americans.
Why Trump is tinkering with birthright citizenship.
The reason the Republicans want birthright citizenship abridged is for political reasons.
Studies after studies on the US demographics have shown that the white race would be a minority by the year 2044. Illegal immigration has been a major cause to pimp the majority whites in the US.
When the majority feels threatened they invoke nationalism amd xenophobia as tools to maintain the racial status quo.
In this environment, nationalism has experienced a rebirth. In the face of destabilizing demographic change and the uncertainties of globalization, nationalism is a familiar security blanket.
In democracies particularly, nationalism asserts precisely what demographic change threatens: a specific ethno-religious people’s social dominance and entitlement to the state.
For centuries, countries like the United States have been built on the idea of an inviolable nation, implicitly or explicitly united by a common ethnicity, race, or religion.
Large-scale migration fundamentally alters the composition of that nation, and therefore many of today’s political conflicts in the United States—over school curricula, affirmative action, and Confederate monuments—can be understood as attempts to reconcile earlier understandings of the nation’s identity with what it has become.
It now narrates why the Trump administration and most Republicans want to put brakes on illegal immigration and its associated birthright citizenship.
It is an attempt to deprive citizenship to generations of illegal immigrants born on the US soil the very roadblocks the 14th Amendment had unblocked.
Trump administration says it is not against birthright citizenship on children whose parents are legally in the US save for those who are on visitor visas. But the 14th Amendment had protected the citizenship right of a child who was born on the US soil. The citizenship status of the parents was irrelevant.
Trump argue that those rights were truncated by the constitutional stipulation of “subject to jurisdiction.”
His interpretation of jurisdiction repeals a number of US Supreme court precedents that showed only those foreign embassies and their non US citizen staff could not be prosecuted in the US.
The reasons were under international law foreign embassies were not subjects of the US jurisdiction but their countries of origin.
Hence cannot be deemed to be under the US jurisdiction.
That cannot be said of illegal immigrants who if they commit a crime the US laws are applicable to them because the US jurisdiction is applicable to them.
Also war prisoners cannot enjoy birthright citizenship because international laws treat them in a manner that the US laws are inapplicable to them.
Why DEI ended?
DEI which are abbreviation for Diversity, Equity and Inclusiveness were hallmarks of closet reparations against slavery, racial and gender injustices.
Under the US constitution slavery reparations are not permitted. Therefore policy efforts were made to bridge the achievement gap imposed by those injustices.
As the white race begin to feel tje heat of narrowing income gaps, DEI too had to go.
Proponents of ending DEI claim it was discriminatory which is true but injustices are institutionalised discriminatory practices.
By ending DEI, the Tump administration is targeting minorities to gold them back from economic opportunities.
Studies have shown a direct correlation between expansion of DEI and low rates of petty crime.
Petty crime is a means of survival when the road to economic emancipation is under a hammerlock.
Development Aid under reviewal.
Illegal immigration is due to curtailed economic opportunities back home or fleeing persecution.
True, development aid has been squandered, embezzled and looted. Also an undeniable fact, Development Aid has enriched those entrusted to manage the funds more than the intended recipients.
Depending on how the reviewal will manifest itself that too could target the poor of the poorest who are mostly non whites.
It is imperative to note that the US development aid is also being deployed as a leverage to impose a certain conduct or the recipient country stand to lose some or the whole development aid.
Henceforth, those who value sovereignty above everything else will be too happy to see the back of intrusive aid to our sovereignty.
Until the appraisal exercise is complete which may take 90 – 180 days it may be premature take a closer look at it.
Read more insights on How Economic Concern and Political Strategy Brought Donald Trump Back
