What's Your American Citizenship Worth to You? Would You Give It Up for Cheaper College Tuition?

I love classic television programming.

One of my favorites is “I Love Lucy." There’s a great episode (Season 18, No. 5, in case you’re curious) where Lucy and the gang find themselves in Paris on Ricky’s European band tour, and—not unlike every other episode in the series, Lucy finds herself in trouble.

She’s unwittingly purchased counterfeit money, which lands her in a French police station trying desperately to explain the mistake.

“Now you listen to me!” she exclaims, pounding her hand decidedly on the counter, “I am no crook, I AM AN American!”

The chaos continues to unfold as Ricky arrives, and a five-way translation ensues.

Image via Shutterstock

All silliness (and debate over Lucy’s comical tourist mistake) aside, I want to draw your attention to something in particular.

That is, Lucy’s assertion that being an American meant something.

It sure it used to, anyway. (And not because it should somehow get you out of using counterfeit money in 1950s Paris.)

Meet the students at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland, respectively.

Campus Reform decided to run a little experiment with these students to highlight the massive gap between what they (as out-of-state students pay for college), and what illegal immigrants pay.

That's right, you read that correctly: illegal immigrants are granted in-state tuition rates at universities in 22 states.

They asked them what they’d think about saving roughly $80,000 on their four-year degrees.

You can imagine the looks of eager anticipation on the faces of these students as they listened intently for the catch.

It was simple: would they renounce their U.S. citizenship to become “‘undocumented students’ eligible for in-state tuition”?

Answers varied—some enthusiastically agreed; others gave it some thought, but the main point here is this:

Quite a few students at least considered it.

Some even signed fake Social Security cards and ripped them up on camera.

These students are tomorrow’s generation of Americans. And they don’t particularly care.

Sadly, these hypothetical ex-pats are just the tip of the iceberg. A record number of Americans are tearing up their Social Security cards for real.

Photo: Shutterstock

So what gives?

Let’s take a look.

American citizenship has been devalued. After all, in today’s world of uber-corrupt politicians, difficult economic times and dwindling hope for the future, can you blame people’s pessimism about what used to conjure up such pride? Our political process is becoming increasingly less different than the circuses we see in other countries. Our corporate income tax is the highest in the world, pushing innovative brains (and money) to foreign shores. Our young people face the dismal reality that their generation is worse off than their parents’.

The next generation is becoming convinced that American citizenship is something offensive. From Melissa Harris Perry’s belief that American tourists are a “plague” on other cultures, to academia’s insistence that we got where we are because we lied, cheated and stole our way to the top—it’s a growing trend. No more are our young people taught that the idea of “God-given rights” is an unprecedented concept. Instead, they’re taught that our Constitution, which enshrines these God-given rights unlike any other nation before it, is full of “archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.”

We’ve become a joke on the world stage. Did you ever watch “Alice in Wonderland,” a movie that depicts an upside down world of insane realities? That’s just about where we’re at. I mean, we live in world in which Iran can routinely shout “death to America,” and still get the full cooperation of an American president. We live in an America that worries more about what some pizza shop owner thinks about marriage than it does about the fact that there’s an Islamic State training camp just eight miles from the U.S. border. And—we live in an America in which illegal immigrants can receive better education benefits than citizens themselves. We’re not serious anymore. And the world doesn’t take us seriously.

So, what do we do about it?

Chiefly, we need new, bold leadership willing to take on the devaluation I’ve described above. But, none of that is possible without first getting hearts and minds to recognize that there’s something worth fighting for. And here’s why:

1. “Exceptional” isn’t offensive; it’s a precious truth. As Glenn Beck recently noted, America and the freedoms we enjoy are the exception to the rule; that is, throughout the course history, no other nation on earth before the United States ever enshrined the idea of individual, God-given, inalienable freedoms like our Founders did. As Beck further noted, our economic approach “has lifted more people out of squalor, sickness, and slavery than any other system.” THAT is what is meant by “American Exceptionalism.” We broke the world’s societal mold.
2. Ours is truly a “5,000 Year Leap.” As the book by the same name aptly points out, our world went from horse-drawn carriages to walking on the surface of the moon in just under 300 years; from the time of America’s founding to the 20th century. There’s a reason for that, and stating so isn’t arrogant. Something happened over those few centuries that unleashed man’s creativity and ingenuity unlike ever before. See No. 1.

We’re certainly not perfect. Nor are we “better” than others by virtue of holding an American passport.

What I’m trying to point out here is that what we have (or had, at least) IS better than what the rest of the world has offered—and how so much of the world continues to live. By virtue of holding those freedoms, it DOES mean something to be an American. Don’t believe me? Go live abroad for a few years. I challenge you.

This exceptionalism is an anomaly that hadn’t happened before in our world’s history, and probably won’t happen again.

And it should chill us to the bone that our next generation is so carelessly willing to throw it away.

Mary Ramirez is a full-time writer, creator of www.afuturefree.com (a political commentary blog), and contributor to The Chris Salcedo Show (TheBlaze Radio Network, Saturday, from noon to 3 p.m. ET). She can be reached at: afuturefree@aol.com; or on Twitter: @AFutureFree

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