The Meaning of Citizenship

0:00Charlie Kirk understood that before he could lead, he needed to learn. He didn't need a degree, but he did need a teacher. Hillsdale College was there to teach him. Wherever and whenever he wanted to learn. Charlie took many of Hillsdale's free online courses, studying the classics, the American founding, and the Bible. And you can learn like Charlie at Hillsdale.edu slash network. That's Hillsdale.edu slash network. Charlie Kirk strengthened his knowledge and courage by studying the greatest thinkers, writers, and leaders of history. All with Hillsdale College. Visit Hillsdale.edu slash network, and you too can learn like Charlie. That's Hillsdale.edu slash network. To celebrate 250 years of freedom, Hillsdale College is Matthew Spolting,

1:16along with professors from Hillsdale in D.C. Sit down with Larry O'Cutter of WMAL to discuss the truths that make this country great. This is Hillsdale on the Hill. Tuesday is always a fun day to be here, because every several Tuesdays, we pick up our conversation on America's 250 that we're doing all year long with our partners in crime. Hillsdale College specifically. Hillsdale College is Washington, D.C. campus. That's where the Vanandle Graduate School of Government is located, where they have a part-time MA in government degree for young professionals. And one of the professors that you will run into there at Hillsdale is our guest, Dr. David Azarad, assistant professor and research fellow over there at Hillsdale, D.C. Good morning, David. Thanks for joining us. Good morning. Thank you for having me. Well, we're going to shift gears a little bit today and talk about America through the eyes of a well of foreigner, because you are an immigrant to this country.

2:17You came from the country that we frequently now refer to, probably inelegantly, as the evil empire, Canada. So... The 51st state. The 51st state. But you know, it's easy for us to slip into various modes of perspective as Americans, whether you're second, third, fourth generation, whether you're come from the Mayflower era. But when you are born in a foreign country and you're looking at America, and clearly, David, you had a pretty positive outlook on this nation, because you went out of your way to move here legally and become an immigrant. So I'd like to hear from you what America, as a child, what did America represent to you? And what was that journey like? So I was born and raised in Montreal, and maybe a hundred miles from the border, not even. And I think like many foreigners, but especially like Canadians, we all think we know America very well, because we're so immersed in the culture.

3:18You know, you don't watch Canadian movies or Canadian TV shows. You don't very much listen to Canadian music. And even if it is, like, how is Shania Twain Canadian? You know, she might as well be American. So when it comes to say Belgium or Switzerland or Togo, no one thinks that they know these countries unless they've studied them. America is different. I think it's particularly pronounced for Canadians, but I think that people from further away in the world will feel the same. But we all think we know it because we watch so much of the television. And to me, moving to America was a process of, I guess, discovering the large parts of the country of the American East Coast that do not get depicted on television. So I moved here in 2004 at the age of 26 to do a PhD in political theory in Dallas, Texas at the University of Dallas. And I started, you know, discovering, I guess, I don't want to say real America, because what you see on TV is an element of America.

4:21But the parts of America you don't see. So for example, you realize that Americans are religious people. You would never see on an American sitcom someone saying, grace before a meal or going to church, right? That is completely airbrushed out of the pop culture. And to the extent that there are references to Christianity and the news, it's always negative, right? It's the Westboro Baptist Church. It's fundamentalist Christians. And you move here and you meet these absolutely wonderful people. Or church going, who are welcoming, who are civic-minded, who volunteer, who get involved in all sorts of causes. You then meet people who own guns. I mean, as a Canadian, that to me was probably one of the, you know, the biggest distance to travel. Yeah. Like guns are maybe for hunting in Canada. And you're taught that they're dangerous and that Americans are running around shooting each other. And then you meet people with guns and you start to understand the value of guns, right? The civic habits, it fosters, to teach citizens

5:23that they have a responsibility to protect their home. It's not entirely offloaded to the state. In any case, I could go on and on, but I say, I say I came to America with a generally positive view of the country. But I really fell in love with it. Well, really by getting to know American, which is not something you can do from television and brief vacations. And David, when you came here, were you expecting to start the citizenship process? Or was it you coming here, being immersed in the culture? You decided, I think I want to move forward and become an American. I really came here to study political philosophy. I had no real interest in American politics. But I stumbled into the political theory of America until class on the founding and really became interested. And when I came here, I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I didn't know where I was going to live. And I would say it was a piecemeal process of falling in love with the country, discovering the country.

6:23Also, I should have, you know, traveling. So it's not just the people, it's not just the books, but it's the unbelievable natural wonders of America going to the national parks, going to civil war battle sites. And I'd say it was a piecemeal process of laying down roots here. You know, it also helps to have married an American. I mean, that's the want to stay here. And then, you know, I really, it pains me to say this, but I think Canada has kind of finished. I don't really see a hope for Canada. I think the immigration situation, the repressions on Liberty, it's not encouraging. I never had particularly deep ties to it because both of my parents were immigrants. So I think the decision to become an American happened gradually. And I was finally naturalized in March of last year. So a little over a year ago, I finally took the oath of citizenship and became an American.

7:23And I'm just curious on this, David, so you are falling in love with the country. Obviously, falling in love and getting married to American as well. At the same time that America is being torn down by the left in this country. And you've gone through the era of statues being torn down and our founding fathers not being looked up to and wanting to change the entire culture. Your path was the exact opposite of really where our news media has taken us and other elected officials. What is that process been like for you? The juxtaposition of the two is just an interesting one. Yeah, but you know, if only it started with the tearing down of the statues. I mean, you know, I do a lot of work on the political series of the 1960s and what goes on there. I mean, the attempt to radically transform America. You know, at this point is almost the real meaning. The only progressives, the new deal is not so much a cultural change.

8:24I don't go after statues and the Christian faith. But in terms of the understanding of the size, scope and reach of the government. It is a colossal transformation. But the 60s is really where you get the cultural transformation. And since then, you know, it's been a gradual unfolding of these radical ideas where I would say America today is a mixed regime. So to some extent, America is still connected to the sounding. There is a clear line. You know, we still have a first amendment. We are the only Western nation that has not criminalized so-called hate speech. I say so-called because you think someone saying malicious racial slurs. Of course, the way it's used in Europe and Canada is the silent political dissent. We still have a second amendment. We still have that American energy, right? The daring, the boldness. There's something that's still there. And yet, we also have the sad pernicious legacy of the 60s

9:28and the two are intertwined. But there's still, I think, plenty of hope because there's still plenty in America that is still good and connected to what I would call the real America. Hold that thought, David, as a Rod. I was doing David, as a Rod, assistant professor and research fellow at Hillsdale College is Van Ando, graduate school of government, as we have our semi-regular conversation here about America is 250, because the idea of an immigrants view of America and immigration to America, it came out in a congressional hearing last week where a certain Democrat congressman from the area likened one of our founding fathers to an illegal immigrant. I want you to listen to that and then give us your perspective as a legal naturalized citizen to this country circa the 21st century. Invoking Tom Payne, who was an undocumented immigrant, who came to this land in 1774, two years before the revolution, and wrote common sense. Remember said, I think his opening sentence was, he said, Thomas Payne was an illegal immigrant.

10:29My understanding was Mr. Payne was born in the UK, came to America, then a British colleague in 1774. So I was just struggling to figure out how he was doing. I didn't say he was an illegal immigrant. I said he was an undocumented immigrant, just like Thomas Jefferson's family was. Most of our ancestors did not arrive here with documents. Yeah, okay, well. I love to, you love Jim Jordan. Okay, dude. But you hear this all the time. If you go see Hamilton on Broadway, they talk about, all through it, about how Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant, because he came from Macribean Island. He was Scottish, born in a British colony, and he moved to another British colony before it was its own country. But even still, David, did our founding fathers consider themselves immigrants in the way that we would consider people immigrants here 250 years later? No, they were settlers, they were maybe colonists. And more importantly, they would have never described America as a nation of immigrants.

11:29That's why it's game popularity with a short book that was ghost-written for JFK in the 60s. And it has now become part of the national identity. And what it, in effect, teaches Americans is that to be an American is to believe in a set of ideas, and that you could be born in Ghana or Sri Lanka, or Togo, or Canada, or Chile. And so long as you believe these ideas, you're already an American. Maybe you don't even need to be already, and that we should be open to the whole world. And that America doesn't really have any kind of cultural coherence. And that if you challenge any of this, you must be a white supremacist. You must be a racist. And I'll say two things in responses. Obviously, we have been open to immigration for, let's say, a large part of our history. I will also say that, you know, we've had some pretty impressive success in assimilating immigrants.

12:30I think, you know, one way to tell the story of the Ellis Island wave, the people who came from about 1880 to 1920 was these Italians, these Jews, these Poles. Today they're Americans. They're all intermarried. No one speaks Italian and America. No one speaks English anymore. They became Americans. That being said, since 1965, when we opened up the floodgates of immigration, we have had the largest wave of migration in recorded human history. And I think we need a pause to digest, to assimilate, and to make them into Americans. And that it's too much, too quickly, and it's compounded by two facts. One is, today when you leave the home country, you're still saying, catch with it. Because of what's up, cheap air travel, the interest. And second, we don't have the same self-confidence we once did as a country. There was a time when people came to America and we demanded that they assimilate. Today, because of multiculturalism, white guilt, the 60s, you name it.

13:34We, as Americans, don't have that self-confidence. And so the combination of the size of the immigration waves, the provenance, multiculturalism, I think, is too much. And again, if you push back against this, you get called a racist, or you get these idiotic stories that get Thomas Jefferson, is the equivalent to someone who crosses the border illegally from El Salvador. Well, David, I'm curious about your process of becoming a citizen. I know it's very common for those on the right, like myself, to say, we want people to do it the right way. We want people to do it legally. I then will hear people say that the process is very costly, time-consuming, cumbersome, from your perspective, broken, yeah. From your perspective, what was it like to go through the process? And I know you naturally assimilated just based on who you are, but is there assimilation, is that taught as part of the legal immigration process? I got to tell you, I found it quite depressing.

14:37It was, you know, the paperwork was not that hard. There's lawyers who doesn't cost a fortune. What I found so depressing was the citizenship exam. It was ten multiple-choice questions. You need to get six out of ten right. You're going to not believe me, or laugh if you want. The first one was, name the ocean to the east of the United States of America. That's the caliber of questions. Well, to be fair, I don't know if a high school graduate out of Baltimore schools would be able to answer that. You know what, I have the same thought too, but then that's an argument for shoring up our education. Yes, different argument, correct, yes. And then you get an English language test where she gives me an iPad, and there's a sentence written says, the White House is in Washington, D.C., and I have to read that. And then I have to write down a sentence, like, I don't know, the equivalent of what a seven-year-old might learn. Maybe not in Baltimore public school, but maybe in Baltimore private schools.

15:38And that was it. I mean, there was no substantive questions about anything hard. If anything, you want to make it more challenging to become a citizen. Yeah, because I want to, you know, in the same way that, look, we deplore the fact that native-born Americans don't know their own history, don't understand their own government, right? We want to make school more rigorous. Yeah. Well, then I want to do the same thing for immigrants, not because I hate them. I'm an immigrant, but because I want them to know this country. Yeah, and have some greatness. Have some bias. Yes. Yeah, the test is just way too easy. It's a joke. I would also add, look, the fact that we don't require people to give up their foreign citizenship, that's also a joke. America should have demanded you want your American citizenship. We demand that you rescind your Canadian citizenship, and bring us the proof from the Canadian embassy.

16:38They don't do that. I think that's not serious. Most naturalized American citizens, like Dr. David Ezorod, will repeat exactly what you're hearing right now. They love this country, and they are the ones that are angriest about our current flux of illegal immigrants who are not doing it the right way. And I think one thing we've definitely learned here, David, is that your students are going to get much harder tests in your classes at Hillsdale College's Vanando Graduate School of Government than you got on your way in. Congratulations. Thanks for joining us. I'm glad you're a citizen, and I'm glad that you're finally on the winning side as some hockey matches here between our two countries. Indeed. Well, thank you for having me. Thanks, David. Thanks for listening to Hillsdale on the Hill, presented by Hillsdale College. To learn more about the Vanando Graduate School of Government and Hillsdale's work in our nation's capital, visit dc.hillsdale.edu.

17:41That's dc.hillsdale.edu.