Barack Obama has launched yet another campaign to push comprehensive immigration reform called "My American Story".

This latest campaign undercuts one of the most fundamental American concepts of all, that of citizenship. The Whitehouse page for the campaign [1] starts with this quote from Obama:

"Unless you are one of the first Americans, unless you are a Native American, you came from someplace else. That’s why we've always defined ourselves as a nation of immigrants. And we've always been better off for it."

First, the ancestors of Native Americans did come from somewhere else even if some of them think otherwise. The president of the U.S. is denying basic, irrefutable science. He'd probably openly deride someone who thinks the Earth is 6,000 years old, yet he's pretending that Native Americans were here from the very beginning when that's not the case.

More importantly, Obama is undercutting the citizenship of every American citizen. American citizens have more rights and responsibilities than immigrants, yet Obama doesn't see things that way. Someone can't be both an immigrant and a citizen: if they were an immigrant before, they ceased to be one when they became a citizen.

The U.S. hasn't defined itself as a "nation of immigrants", but as a nation of citizens with all citizens being equal. We haven't lived up to that in some cases, but that's the ideal and the underlying concept. Obama seeks to turn that on its head, implying that new immigrants to the U.S. are on equal footing with citizens.

The Obama quote is also an attempt to guilt trip American citizens into supporting amnesty, akin to saying "you have no more rights than someone who just sneaked over the border, so support amnesty."

For more, see the Nation of Immigrants page and these "reconquista"-style comments from Barack Obama. For many other ways Obama has tried to mislead, see Obama immigration.

Want to do something about this? Post your pro-American comments using the hashtag #ImmigrationNation and leave pro-American comments on the Whitehouse videos promoting their campaign [2].

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[1] whitehouse . gov/issues/immigration/stories
[2] youtube . com/user/whitehouse