What Makes America Great —While looking at Iowa, past and present
I will ask candidates to answer that question
I’ll take the Tuesday’s victory. We should all take it.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 this week that the Constitution guarantees automatic birthright citizenship to virtually all children born in the United States. Chief Justice Roberts reached back to the abolitionists — the people who wrote the 14th Amendment — and said plainly: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights.” That sentence matters. Hold onto it.
But I do not let Tuesday blur what happened five days before it.
Last Thursday, the same Supreme Court, on a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip Temporary Protected Status from more than 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. People who have lived here for over a decade. People whose children are American citizens — the very children Tuesday’s ruling just protected. The State Department currently warns against traveling to either Haiti or Syria, citing widespread violence, gang activity, and kidnapping. That didn’t move the majority.
One week. One court. Birthright citizenship stands. TPS for Haitians and Syrians falls. And beyond Haiti and Syria, the administration has moved to terminate TPS for people from thirteen countries since January 2025 — Afghans, Somalis, Venezuelans, Hondurans, Nicaraguans — some with protections in place for more than a decade. The targeting is not random. It has a direction.
Estimates put the number of Haitian and Syrian TPS holders in our state somewhere between three and five thousand of our neighbors, likely more when you count family members whose legal status is now entangled with theirs. These Iowans work in our hospitals, our factories, on the roofs of our houses, in our senior care facilities and service industries.
So, this is not somebody else’s problem. Now, a word about who we actually are.
By 1870, nearly one in five Iowans was foreign-born. At the peak in 1890, 324,000 Iowa residents had been born in another country — roughly one in six people living here. Germans, Norwegians, Swedes, Czechs, Irish, Danes, Italians, Russian Jews fleeing persecution. They came because conditions at home were dangerous or desperate, and Iowa needed them and said so — the state literally printed immigration brochures in their native languages to recruit them.
Run that math forward a couple of generations. Depending on where your family landed in Iowa’s history, there’s a reasonable chance that one in four of your grandparents was born in a foreign country. Maybe more. The Iowa PBS history project puts it plainly: without immigration, there is no Iowa as we know it.
The people being targeted today came here under the same basic logic — conditions at home were untenable, America said it had room, and they came. The difference is that their skin is darker and their countries are in the Global South instead of northern Europe.
In the spring of 1846, Frederick Douglass stood before 2,500 people packed into Finsbury Chapel in London — the room was described as filled “to suffocation.” He had crossed an ocean to say what the United States would not let him say safely at home. And what he said was precise: “I expose slavery because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death.”
Douglass today would force people to look at the moral reality underneath.
Trump revoked TPS for Haitian immigrants after publicly claiming they were eating household pets in Ohio. He has called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries.” A federal district judge found it “substantially likely” that the termination of Haitian TPS was driven by “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” In her dissent, Justice Kagan wrote that Trump’s statements “fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.” The Supreme Court’s conservative majority found all of that irrelevant.
To me, that is racial hostility to nonwhite immigrants . Douglass would have named it without flinching. So should we.
History is consistent on this: the law has always been a lagging indicator. The Underground Railroad ran for decades before the 13th Amendment. The HBCUs, the mutual aid societies, the Black church as infrastructure — all of it existed before the Civil Rights Act acknowledged that it needed to. The legal system catches up to organized moral resistance. (Iowa was one of the early states to reject slavery, admit Black residents to public schools through court rulings, outlawed segregation in many public accommodations before the federal government, and was an early supporter of women’s rights. While discrimination persisted, Iowa often translated ideals of equality into law earlier than many other states.)
Tuesday’s birthright ruling is a version of that catch-up. The principle goes back to the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in Wong Kim Ark — it was never ambiguous.
Thursday’s TPS ruling tells us that pressure isn’t there yet — not for Haitians, not for Syrians, not for the 1.3 million people from seventeen countries who held TPS as of 2025. Their faces and their names haven’t been made visible enough, or human enough, to change the political calculus. That is the work for me.
So here is what I ask you to consider doing: the next time you’re at a town hall, a candidate forum, a county fair, anywhere someone is asking for your vote.
Ask one or two questions.
The first: What do you make of the Supreme Court’s two immigration rulings this week — the one that upheld birthright citizenship, and the one that cleared the way to deport 350,000 Haitians and Syrians back to countries the State Department says are too dangerous for Americans to visit? Don’t let them generalize. Ask what they make of them. Both of them. Together.
The second: What makes America great?
Listen to whether diversity comes up. If it doesn’t, ask directly — is the Haitian nurse who has lived here for fourteen years, raised American children, and paid Iowa taxes part of what makes this country great? Is the Syrian engineer who rebuilt his life here after a civil war destroyed his country part of it? Is the fact that some of our grandparents came here speaking no English, from countries people looked down on, and built Iowa anyway — is that part of it?
Because if the answer to “what makes America great” doesn’t include the people we are currently deporting to places we ourselves say are too dangerous to travel — then we are not talking about greatness. We are talking about a very specific and very old idea about whose presence here counts.
Frederick Douglass crossed an ocean to name that idea. We can manage to name it at a county fair.
The light of truth is still death to this. But we have to keep turning it on.
R. Rosenberg Because We Are All In This Together
Ours mostly mumble, speak in whispers, or communicate with us through emails and advertisements paid for by special interests, only wishing to empower themselves through purchasing those who will serve them; not us.
Here's a fundamental question--how do you define who is an American? Sadly too many think it's only white "Christian" males whose ancestors helped hang Salem witches (my ancient grandma Rebecca Nurse was one)...
Lost in the irony is that many blacks have ancestors that were brought here as slaves going back to the 1600s--much earlier than many MAGAT ancestors.