Impact: What We Stand to Lose “Since the Civil War, America has thrived as a republic of free and equal citizens. This would no longer be true if we were to amend our Constitution in a way that would create a permanent caste of aliens, generation after generation after generation born in America but never to be among its citizens. To have citizenship in one’s own right, by birth upon this soil, is fundamental to our liberty as we understand it. In America, a country that rejected monarchy, each person is born equal, with no curse of infirmity, and with no exalted status, arising from the circumstance of his or her parentage.” Walter Dellinger, assistant attorney general, Office of Legal Counsel (1995) As recently as 2015, legislation was introduced in the United States—and the question of limiting access to jus soli citizenship considered—in congressional hearings, which aired at length the practical and legal debates set out above.712 Such proposals generally focus on prospective changes, distinguishing them from changes in the Dominican Republic, where reinterpretation of the country’s citizenship law applied retroactively to a period from 2013 to 1929.713 Afroyim v. Rusk would seem to foreclose retroactive application of a change, with the opinion’s emphatic defense of the sanctity of citizenship: “We hold that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to, and does, protect every citizen of this Nation against a congressional forcible destruction of his citizenship.”714 But such protections are not always ironclad. Mass retroactive denationalization did happen in the Dominican Republic. Although the 2013 Sentencia decisively changed the legal landscape, the politicized and unsettled nature of citizenship in the country emerged incrementally, over many years. The Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Tribunal pointed to “erratic registrations, forgeries, impersonations and tampering with vital records, and also…deficiencies in the maintenance of books” as key justifications for its decision to retroactively interpret the citizenship and migration laws of the country to denationalize more than 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent.715 According to the court, these “institutional and bureaucratic deficiencies,” had thwarted the proper implementation of the law, which was interpreted by the majority to exclude jus soli citizenship for children born to non-citizens without lawful residence.716 The court traced the “deficiencies . . . in the system” back to 1929, the first time in which the exclusion from jus soli for children of “foreigners in transit” appeared in the constitutional citizenship definition. The opinion cites official 2012 survey data indicating that almost 90% of the “foreigners” affected (defined as “immigrants and their descendants”) were of Haitian descent.717 The opinion stirred criticism for its openly race-based conception of citizenship: 158 UNMAKING AMERICANS