The Democracy Group Best of 2021: Bittersweet Dreams | Democracy in Danger
We continue our Best of 2021 episodes with an episode from the Democracy in Danger podcast, with hosts Will Hitchcock and Siva Vaidhyanathan.
Citizenship determines who is in and who is out, who has a voice in a democracy and who doesn’t. But for the one million young people who have grown up in the United States undocumented, feeling like they really belong here remains a dream deferred. This time, we hear from two of them living in limbo. Plus, legal scholar Amanda Frost unearths the unsettling stories of Americans who have had their citizenship taken away — because of their politics, their race, even because of whom they choose to marry.
As Frost’s research shows, the United States has struggled to define citizenship ever since its founding. In the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, which upheld and expanded slavery, the U.S. Supreme Court found that no African American could ever be a citizen, setting the stage for a bloody war of secession. Until the mid-20th century, Chinese immigrants — and even their children born in this country — were denied basic constitutional protections. And today, as we hear in the stories of two undocumented students interviewed for this week’s show, hundreds of thousands of undocumented young people face demoralizing roadblocks on their pathway to full belonging in the nation they call home.