Kirstjen Nielsen Quotes
Up until the point that you're a citizen, we wanna continue to make sure we understand who you are and why you're here.
Nielsen, Kirstjen. "Oversight of the United States Department of Homeland Security." Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, U.S. Government Publishing Office, 16 Jan. 2018.
Various elements of the 14th amendment were being debated. Language referred to “citizens” but many of the abolitionists and reconstructionists were concerned that the slavery forces in the Southern states would not provide protections to the Negro and the grounds that the were not citizens. As long as the states could define who was and was not a citizen, any of the equal protection clauses of the proposed 14TH Amendment could be evaded. Senator Howard then proposed this language which was accepted and became part of the Amendment. In modern times this particular clause was more relevant to the debate about immigration than to civil rights but originally the clause was included to make sure that Blacks would be citizens.
This was the first restriction on immigration and citizenship, and was at the time uniquely directed against Chinese.
Ironically, where national quotas have been used in American immigration policy, it has rarely been used to keep nationals of countries with which we were having difficulty, out. In almost all cases, the national quotas have been used to discriminate against racial and religious minorities in America. Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Catholics, Mormons and Jews have been the most frequent groups targeted. Even when we were in the midst of the Cold War, American policy was to accept immigrants from the Soviet Union and Cuba enthusiastically.
Kirstjen Michele Nielsen is an American politician and attorney who served as United States secretary of homeland security from 2017 to 2019. She is a former principal White House deputy chief of staff to President Donald Trump and was chief of staff to John F. Kelly during his tenure as Secretary of Homeland Security.
