Citizenship has been in the news. Donald Trump wants to abolish “birthright citizenship” for Americans, primarily so he can expel some four million American citizens and their foreign born Central American or Mexican-born parents from the United States. And in Europe there is the sad spectacle of hundreds of thousands of essentially stateless refugees, desperate to flee war-torn Syria and Iraq, making their way to the safer haven of Europe in any way they can, herded like cattle, treated like produce, dying on the water, dying on the land.

The distinction between citizens and non-citizens is perhaps the most fundamental distinction of modern life. In a world of nation-states, it is how the world’s seven or so billion people are divided. Every person is supposed to be a citizen of one of the 195 recognized sovereign nations. It is usually exclusive. There are a fair number of dual citizens, but having citizenship in two countries is about the limit. There are very few triple or quadruple citizens.

Citizenship arose, in a complicated fashion, as the alternative to slavery. This was so in ancient Israel, somewhat ambiguously, and more definitely in ancient Greece, where the language of citizenship originates. To oversimplify, to be a citizen was the obverse of being enslaved. Citizenship was tied closely to membership in a particular tribe, or particular city or polis. There were some ancient philosophers, such as Diogenes, who proclaimed himself a citizen of the world. But for the most part, citizenship was tied to specific places and polities. This remained so even when the polities were enlarged from Greek city-states to vast empires. Paul, in the Book of Acts, proudly proclaims his Roman citizenship when confronted by a Roman centurion in Jerusalem. Although as Howard Thurman, the African American religious thinker, points out, Jesus could not make a similar claim. He contrasts Paul, the proud and somewhat complacent Roman citizen who tolerated slavery, with Jesus, the non-citizen who preached to non-citizens, who understood, in a way that Paul could not, what it meant to be an outsider. And Thurman laments, from the time of Paul to mid-20th century America, to be a citizen was to exclude non-citizens.

Citizenship can be a dynamic force for good. Since the French Revolution, citizenship has been the foundation of national identity. The revolutionaries declared that every French person was a citizen and this became a standard of equality, with everyone was on an equal footing. The nation trumped all internal divisions, all creeds, all distinctions. Even Jews, albeit haltingly, were included. But this inclusive notion of citizenship excluded enemies of the revolution, real or imagined, who were often dealt with harshly and cruelly. And under Napoleon, the cause of inclusive citizenship helped spark a worldwide war.

The contradictions of citizenship perhaps reach their highest tension in the United States, where the promise of equal citizenship, inherent in the Declaration of Independence was jarringly present alongside slavery. And through the Civil War, much as in ancient Greece, to be a citizen was not to be a slave. And after the Civil War Americans were forced to deal with the question of citizenship without slavery. The 14th amendment, which declared that “all persons born in the United States” settled the question, and forever broke the connection between citizenship and slavery. There are no slaves, only citizens.

Sort of. The inclusive citizenship promised in the 14th amendment was hardly realized with its passage in 1868. American Indians were not included in the amendment (and to be fair, many Indians thought of themselves as members of separate sovereign entities outside the jurisdiction of the United States.) And the equality promised African Americans was not achieved. Even the passage of the 15th amendment, guaranteeing voting rights to all male citizens did little to change this. All Americans might have been citizens after 1868, but most white Americans were content with various gradations of citizenship, with wealthy white males on top.

Over the past century there has been a huge struggle to make American citizenship truly inclusive. Second class citizens are not citizens. And blacks, women, the LGBT community, and others have fought for full citizenship. The fight is far from finished, but citizenship, in which, to quote the 14th amendment again, everyone enjoys “the equal protection of the laws” is more fully realized, more genuine, than at any previous time in American history.
But the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, has, if anything become sharper. With the new political power gained by blacks, women, and gays, it is no longer politically or socially respectable to castigate them as outsiders, deviants, enemies to America and American values, but as Donald Trump has shown, for all too many Americans, non-citizen means a person with no rights that other Americans are obliged to respect. Non-citizens have become the only acceptable scapegoat in American politics, to be blamed for all of the country’s ills.

I increasingly feel that the distinction between citizen and non-citizen has become outdated, and that inclusive national definitions of citizenship that exclude outsiders is a problem on almost every continent today. Let us move to open borders, giving everyone the right to move wherever they want, whenever they want. In times of a refugee crisis, as in Europe now, there does need to be some system of control, to ensure that people will have a place to live, but in principle, moving from Damascus to Hamburg should be as unproblematic as moving from Rochester to South Carolina. It is time for a new revolution, and for citizenship to be defined not by membership in a particular nation, but through our common humanity. From South Texas to the West Bank, from Hungary to Bali, from Syria to Guatemala, it is a change that is long overdue.

And while we are waiting for this, why hasn’t there been a demand by Americans to accept some of the teeming and milling refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan? Surely the United States has as much responsibility for the mess in those countries, to say the least, as does, say, Hungary or Croatia. This is a world problem, one that will only be solved when Americans, Germans, and Syrians recognize that we are all citizens together, and our borders should be open to all who need to enter.