Because of mass immigration, and the propaganda to manufacture consent for mass immigration, there is now mass confusion when it comes to citizenship and nationality. Many people now don’t believe the words ‘citizenship’ or ‘nationality’ even mean anything. This essay clarifies the various misconceptions.
The mainstream conception is that citizenship confers membership of a nation-state.
In this mainstream conception, there are three ways to acquire citizenship. The first is ‘jus sanguinis’, which means ‘right of blood’ and refers to those who are born as children of existing citizens. The second is ‘jus soli’ which means ‘right of soil’ and refers to those who are born within a certain legal territory. The third is naturalisation and refers primarily to immigrants.
The problem with this conception is that nation-states are now so diverse that members of them often have little in common with each other. Thus the citizenship itself, regardless of how it was acquired, no longer means anything.
One sunny day in Spring many years ago, when returning home from working in Europe, I was waiting in line at the arrivals terminal at Auckland International Airport. In front of me was a woman in a burka. I couldn’t see her eyes or any part of her body except for – sticking out from under the black folds – one greasy hand clutching a New Zealand passport. In that moment, I realised that New Zealand citizenship was a meaningless concept. If people like this, who had nothing in common with me at all, also belonged to the category, then the category was meaningless.
The argument of this essay is that our existing citizenship system is an ad hoc mishmash of various ideas that needs to be redesigned, rationally, from the ground up.
When I immigrated to Sweden, it was made clear to me by everyone that, no matter my official citizenship status, I would only ever be a “paper Swede”. A paper citizen is someone who is not a member of the biological nation, but who has nevertheless been granted citizenship by the ruling class. In other words, their claim to be part of the nation only exists on a bit of paper.
A roots citizen, by contrast, is someone who did not need to be naturalised on account of that they already had roots in the soil of the country. In this sense, they are inseparable from the country itself.
Paper citizenship can be granted and taken away with the stroke of a pen. Roots citizenship, by contrast, is a biological fact. ‘Naturalisation’ is therefore, correctly understood, a nonsense term: there’s nothing less natural than a bureaucrat in a capital city deciding who is a member of the ingroup and who isn’t. A natural member is someone who is born into it.
If someone would ask me how to clean up the citizenship mess that has been made by decades of globalist immigration policy, here would be my suggestions.
All existing New Zealand citizenship would firstly be converted to paper citizenship. This paper citizenship would primarily confer residency rights and rights to vote in local body elections.
Then, the citizenship of anyone who has ancestors in New Zealand before September 1939 (i.e. before the globalists launched their war of domination that would lead to mass immigration) would be converted to roots citizenship. The logic is that these people are the descendants of those who built the country, and therefore constitute the New Zealand nation proper. It was for these people that the country was built in the first place, and so these people must remain the beneficiaries of it and in charge of it.
Roots citizenship would confer greater privileges than paper citizenship, in particular welfare and voting privileges. Roots citizens would be entitled to a universal basic income and to the right to vote for representatives of the New Zealand nation in the New Zealand Parliament. They would also be able to take on paper citizenships of other countries without losing roots citizenship of New Zealand.
From there, one of two options would be taken depending on national preference expressed at referendum. Either paper citizens would be converted to roots citizens after they could prove a hundred years of ancestry in New Zealand, or they wouldn’t. The logic of not converting them is that the descendants of paper citizens will eventually marry in to the nation of roots citizens anyway, therefore there is no need to naturalise them. And if they are unwilling to marry in to the New Zealand nation, they are obviously not our friends and therefore shouldn’t have citizenship.
This conception of roots citizenship would include 100% of Maoris but would exclude white immigrants, thus is in no way whatsoever a white supremacist policy. Foreigners would still be free to immigrate to New Zealand under the usual visa to residency to citizenship pathway, but only paper citizenship would ever be available (an exception could be made for foreign parents of roots citizens, i.e. those who have had children with a roots citizen, as such parents are committed to the success of the New Zealand nation through their offspring).
The main advantage of this policy is that it would realign the concepts of citizenship and nationality, bringing them back from the globalist free-for-all they have been since World War II. This would strengthen Kiwi identity, as we would once again know who we were: not the whole globe in microcosm, but those with roots in the New Zealand land.
Such a change would make an immediate improvement. If paper citizens did not have voting rights, the 2020 cannabis referendum would have passed, and freedom would have prevailed. New Zealand would be a better country if it was run by roots citizens for the benefit of all who live here.
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