Is America for its citizens, or is it for its “people”?

That’s the biggest question on my mind right now.

It may sound like a semantic argument, but it isn’t. It is a foundational question, and thanks to constitutional ambiguity, decades of legislative and judicial drift, and a long refusal to enforce immigration law, it is no longer theoretical. It is immediate, destabilizing, and unavoidable because it sits at the center of nearly every current conflict over immigration.

As immigration laws are now being enforced after decades of active and passive neglect by both major political parties, the country is discovering that it never actually decided what its obligations are or to whom they are owed.

The Constitution uses the word “people” in critical places. Representation in the House is apportioned by population, not by citizenship. That decision made sense in an 18th-century agrarian republic with limited migration and no modern welfare state. It makes far less sense today, where population counts translate directly into money, power, and permanent political advantage. Congressional seats, Electoral College votes, and billions in federal funding are all driven by census counts that don’t distinguish between citizens, legal residents, or illegal aliens. The result is a structural incentive to maximize raw population, regardless of legal status.

Blue states did not stumble into their current immigration posture. While conservatives slept, they have openly welcomed, protected, and subsidized illegal aliens — because bodies count. Each additional person increases representation and funding, even if that person is not legally entitled to be in America. Disguised as humanitarian idealism, this is actually a rational exploitation of a flawed system.

The distortion is profound. States that undermine federal immigration law are rewarded with more political power, while states that attempt enforcement are penalized. This flips federalism on its head and turns the census into a partisan weapon. I refuse to believe the framers ever intended representation to be inflated by deliberate lawbreaking, yet that is precisely what the modern system incentivizes. We should all be aware of the admitted errors in the last census that unlawfully advantaged blue states while denying mandated increases in representation to red states (pure coincidence, I’m sure). President Donald Trump has tried to remedy this with executive orders and a call for a new census, but he has been met with a buzzsaw of opposition from an unholy trinity consisting of the Left, RINOs (pretending to be constitutionalists), and open borders libertarians.

Layered on top of this is a decades-long expansion of constitutional protections for noncitizens by the judiciary. Through court rulings and administrative practice, someone who crossed the border illegally last week is increasingly treated, in many contexts, as the legal equivalent of someone whose family has lived under American law for generations.

The opposition will claim this is an assault on human rights, but it is not. It is about erasing a distinction that every functioning nation must preserve. Citizenship is not a symbolic label, but a legal status with reciprocal obligations. When that status is treated as morally or legally irrelevant, citizenship — and its value — begins to dissolve. The UK and EU are in the FO phase of FAFO of immigrant importation right now.

As the old American Express commercials once noted, “Membership has its privileges” — and it should.

Citizens are members of a political community. They vote, hold office, can be drafted, sanctioned, prosecuted, and serve on juries. They are subject to the full tax code and bear the long-term consequences of public policy. Citizens are accountable in ways noncitizens are not. Noncitizens, especially illegal aliens, do not share those obligations. Beyond some local jurisdictions, they cannot vote legally, hold office, be drafted, and often do not pay the full range of taxes that sustain the systems they use, if they pay taxes at all. That is not a moral judgment; it is simply a fact of status.

Modern American governance increasingly pretends that obligations are optional while benefits are universal. We have built a system in which membership rights are extended without the responsibilities of membership, and then we act surprised when social cohesion frays and public trust collapses. This is where the citizens-versus-people distinction becomes unavoidable. A nation can be humane without being suicidal. It can respect individual rights without erasing political boundaries.

In my opinion, America cannot survive if it refuses to prioritize its own citizens, and such a refusal raises the question of whether citizenship has any value at all.

The Left prefers the word “people” because it is elastic. It avoids uncomfortable questions about loyalty, obligation, and legitimacy. It allows moral claims to float free of civic responsibility. Nations and constitutions are not global charities or suggestion boxes. If America is merely for “people,” then citizenship is ornamental, borders are ceremonial, and law enforcement is evil and cruel. Representation becomes a demographic shell game played by political bosses. The social contract turns into a one-way transfer from those who follow the rules to those who ignore them, from the makers to the takers.

If America is for its citizens, then law matters, membership matters, and enforcement is not oppression. It is maintenance.

We have spent decades avoiding this choice, burying it under euphemisms, court rulings, and bureaucratic improvisation. That avoidance has ended. The conflict now unfolding is not really about immigration policy. It is about whether the United States remains a nation of citizens or becomes a territory administered for whoever arrives and demands entry.

That question will be answered because it must be answered. If there is a silver lining to the ongoing insurrection in Minnesota (and the same insurrectionist perspectives waiting to erupt in other blue states and cities), it is that it will force us to find an answer.

The only remaining issue is whether Americans answer it themselves, deliberately and lawfully, or allow the system to collapse into deeper chaos by default.