The first American patriots were people who questioned the legitimacy of public authorities acting with impunity against a population that was not represented in the legislature and which was subjected to military occupation, abusive prosecutions, and summary imprisonment. The country they were loyal to did not exist yet; it was a vision of a place where human rights have primacy over power.

This is why it is so complicated to talk about patriotism in the American context. In some ways, it can mean something different and unique to every one of us.

• Some believe it means absolute loyalty to the state.
• Others believe it means a willingness to sacrifice oneself in defense of everyone else’s shared human rights.
• Some believe it means no government action can be legitimate.
• Others believe it means an officeholder must do their duty, even when their party leadership want them to skirt the law.

But there is a common foundation to the very idea of American patriotism: The patriot is loyal not to a bloodline or a culture, not to a theocratic ruler or a piece of land; the American patriot is loyal to the founding ideal—that all human beings are created equal and endowed with unalienable, irreducible rights, and power can never operate legitimately if it ignores or seeks to violate those rights.

The American patriot looks forward—to a future in which the founding ideal is a real lived experience for everyone.

• You can be deeply conservative, cherish your own favored traditions, and still be a patriot who respects the right of all human beings to remain free from menace, violence, or abuse.
• You can be deeply liberal, fiercely defend the rights and freedoms of all, and still be a patriot who wants the Constitutional order to embody and uphold those values.

There is no reason one’s ideology should condition one’s devotion to the human rights of others.

A grandfather once said to his grandson: When you make decisions from ideology, you are lost.

What he meant was: We are in this together, all of us. Self-government only works if you can work with people who think differently from you, welcome their best ideas, and be trusted to translate them into non-ideological problem-solving.

We are free together, or not at all.

Freedom is also complicated, for this reason: Freedom does not mean you have no duties and no obligations. It means you are free to be yourself, to think and feel as you do, to make decisions about your own life. Freedom is, in that way, individual, but it cannot be real, secure, enduring, and therefore operational, unless it is protected by being a shared reality, made real by a self-governing people.

A free people cannot surrender their moral, political, or spirtual lives to a cult of personality, an authoritarian faction, or a corrupt scheme. A free people must remain loyal to the shared humanity of all people in the society.

The Constitution distributes power not only among the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches, but also among the States, civil society generally, the Press, religious, charitable, and advocacy organizations, and the People. It calls on Congress to support immigration and naturalization, to welcome those who seek and value freedom and human rights—not to shut them out.

This is a foundational vote for human rights over arbitrary power, an expression of the founding ideal—that all people enjoy universal rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is not for a regime-leader to decide whether any particular person has a right to seek a better life; everyone does.

When it comes to immigration law and policy, every bit of it must align with the mandate, infused throughout the Bill of Rights, that government recognize the inherent dignity, value, freedom, and rights of every human being.

We must start there.

A free republic comprised mostly of the descendents of immigrants cannot legitimately decide that zero immigration is a measure of success. Any lawful, Constitutional regulation of immigration must include the commitment to welcome people who seek freedom, bring their human dignity, abilities, values, and aspirations, or flee intolerable persecution, and wh0 follow a legal process.

We should be able to agree that no person who does as the law, and judges, require, should be treated as “illegal”. Most Americans would not have been born in the United States if that had been the standard throughout history.

True American patriotism is welcoming, because it starts from the insight that all people are both rights-holders and allies in the quest to make human rights paramount. Anyone who does not see that has strayed from the nation’s purpose.

We can secure a future of freedom by first rejecting tyrannical violence, arbitrary detention, and bigoted exclusion.

Throughout history, people have used the banner of patriotism to cloak anti-patriotic tendencies—to seek power for themselves, to usurp and degrade the public trust, to deny fundamental human rights, to negate or ignore key provisions of law, to advance corruption and abuse. We have freedom of speech, religion, information-sharing, and association, so we can discover the flaws in that way of doing business, think critically, and reject corrupt schemes.

We must enforce laws that bar public authorities from harming innocent people; we must uphold the right to legal redress.

We must write new laws together that better embody the Constitutional ideal, and not let power fall into the hands of people who mistrust or reject anyone’s human rights.

American democracy is great, because it is open, welcoming of imagination and difference, and committed to rescue and uplift every human being it can.