"American citizenship as we once knew it is becoming meaningless."

Victor Davis Hanson writes in part in New Criterion,

...Currently there are over five hundred so-called “sanctuary cities” inside the United States, in which federal immigration law has been rendered all but null and void. Those who have violated federal law and resided without legal sanction, who are then arrested and charged with crimes, are protected from federal immigration enforcement and are not subject to deportation. This current annulment is somewhat similar to the nullification crisis of 1832–33, when South Carolina arbitrarily declared federal tariff laws non-binding within its own state jurisdiction—before backing down under threat of force by President Andrew Jackson.

...Salad-bowl multiculturalism has replaced melting-pot multiracialism. The reason why the former Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren and the former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill both faked Native American identities was to find the easiest and quickest way to enhance their respective career advancements. They correctly assumed that employers would favor, or be forced to favor, those who identified as “hyphenated Americans” in general, and in particular those with minority ancestry.

...If the foundations of citizenship are being undermined, so too are its superstructures. Globalism started out with the spread of quasi-capitalism that introduced Western modes of production to the non-West and harmonized the world through technological breakthroughs in transportation and communications. As a result, many of the over seven billion residents of the planet can now call any other instantaneously at reasonable costs, communicate electronically, or within twenty-four hours travel between any two major cities.

But economic homogeneity and global connectedness soon led to the utopian idea of commensurate political uniformity. And here was the problem: while America spearheaded the global wealth creation, its unique constitutional system certainly did not become the model for political emulation. In Europe, the French Revolution and the non-democratic autocracies and state bureaucracies that followed it became more of a blueprint for the European Union than the U.S. Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence did. Poorer nations now look to richer Western systems that emphasize redistribution rather than those that emphasize equality of opportunity. Predictably, transnational institutions like the European Union, the United Nations and its affiliated commissions, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and a host of others devoted to human rights, environmental protection, international commerce and trade, and health and welfare, became politicized. They insist on share-the-wealth policies and redistributive justice contrary to the U.S. Constitution.

In the twenty-first century, America began to relearn that the laws of its republic do not function on autopilot but must instead be carefully nourished and protected in the most practical of ways. The rise of the “cancel culture” of social media, an electronically charged lynch mob that is activated in a nanosecond, means that both individuals and businesses deemed politically incorrect can be threatened with ostracism, boycotts, censure, and ruin.

For example, if rural citizens cannot find ammunition for their legal firearms due to ammunition-selling businesses’ fear of censure, the Second Amendment can be rendered de facto irrelevant in places. In theory there is free speech on campuses; in fact, both students and professors accept that unpopular views voiced on issues such as abortion, affirmative action, or global warming can endanger grades and careers, respectively.

The result is that the United States is becoming a country of pre- and post-citizens. If we wonder why illegal alien residents who commit felonies are rarely deported or must be deported repeatedly, or why few college graduates know much about the Constitution and American history, or why loud social-justice-warrior athletes so eagerly mouth Chinese platitudes about curtailing free speech inside the United States, or why the protections offered by the First and Second Amendments depend largely on where you work or live, one of the reasons is because American citizenship as we once knew it is becoming meaningless.

Read more here.