USA, Alegi (Luiss): ”Trump is a juggler who will draft the ius soli so as not to lose the midterm vote”

Trump, ”like a juggler” explains Alegi, ”threw many balls in the air” and ”at first it went well for him”, but now ”he can’t keep them all together, they’re falling a bit. One is called Iran, even the Gaza border peace is going nowhere. They rejected duties”, they rejected ius soli, they rejected the attempt to severely limit postal voting” and also ”the power to remove members of the Fed”. Therefore, ”I don’t think that at this moment, with the polls going terribly, with the war, with the fool that the war has made in Iran, we are going to look for another problem” by insisting on the abolition of the ius soli, underlines the historian.

Alegi analyzed the 192 pages of the Supreme Court decision and explained that ”120, therefore 60%, are from the opposition”, which shows ”how tough the clash was”. According to the analyst, ”Trump wanted to speed up the process of keeping an electoral promise, but it was the wrong shortcut, from a formal point of view”. While ”from a substantial point of view” it was an attempt to change the Constitution, ”the fourteenth amendment which defines citizenship and rights” in ”a country of heavy immigration which in the mid-nineteenth century had very vague borders”, for which ”the idea that anyone born in the United States automatically became a citizen was almost a necessity”. But ”the Fourteenth Amendment defines American history” and ”to think about changing it means rewriting history”, ”this was what was at stake”. So ”not just a technical thing” and we have to ask ourselves ”would it have only been applied to the children of illegal immigrants?”, asks Alegi, recalling the ”conspiracy theories according to which Obama was not really born in the United States” and warning of the risk that banning ius soli ”would become an uncontrollable weapon”.

Alegi also reflects on the fact that in the United States ”the minority par excellence are Latinos”, as demonstrated by ”the last two censuses. So from the point of view of the ethnic composition and unfortunately of a certain widespread racism, they are more worrying”. Furthermore, adds the historian, ”Latinos are Catholic”, therefore ”they are not evangelicals, not Protestants, they are not the Maga race”. Therefore, he continues, ”the change in the composition of the United States revolves around the ius soli, because immigrants, the humblest strata of society, usually have a higher fertility rate”. Alegi cites ”American demographic projections” which show that ”whites are destined in a short time to become a relative majority, that is, no longer 50%, perhaps 49.9%, but no longer 50% plus one”. Therefore, ”beyond the technical question, there was a huge political question behind it” and abolishing the ius soli ”was the first step for this redesign wanted by the republican right. A first step to redesign the United States”. (By Melissa Bertolotti)