To no one’s surprise, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger (D) emphasized federal immigration policies while delivering the customary Democratic response to President Trump’s 2026 State of the Union address Tuesday night. However, her speech did surprise by describing illegal immigrants as “people who aspire to be Americans.” The assumptions undergirding that phrase, as well as questions over whether it is even true, strike at the root of the worldview divide underlying the current immigration debate.

Near the midpoint of her speech, Spanberger said, “Our president has sent poorly trained federal agents into our cities, where they have arrested and detained American citizens and people who aspire to be Americans — and they have done it without a warrant.”

The line raises legitimate issues, such as the quality of training received by federal law enforcement officers, the detention of American citizens by immigration officials, and warrantless searches. Each of these issues would find Americans in broad agreement on the level principle, though they may debate whether the policies of the Trump administration live up to the expected standards.

At first glance, the phrase, “People who aspire to be Americans,” appears to share a similar character, appealing to America’s long history of immigration and assimilation. Indeed, this choice of phrase, as opposed to other descriptions like “undocumented persons” or “foreign residents” or simply “immigrants,” deliberately claims for these immigrants the mantle of assimilation. At the very least, the phrase pays lip service to the fact that Americans look most favorably upon foreign immigrants who wish to assimilate and becomeAmericans themselves.

“We are to welcome the sojourner and love our neighbor as ourselves,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) explained when asked to biblically defend the Trump administration’s immigration policies. “But what’s also important in the Bible is that assimilation is expected, and anticipated, and proper. When someone comes into your country, comes into your nation, they do not have the right to change its laws or to change its society. They’re expected to assimilate. We haven’t had a lot of that going on.”

Indeed, the same Mosaic law that taught Israel to welcome the sojourner anticipated both political and religious assimilation. The Lord commanded Moses, “Assemble the people, men, women, and little ones, and the sojourner within your towns, that they may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God and be careful to do all the words of this law” (Deuteronomy 31:12).

However, the context of Spanberger’s words gave the phrase an opposite meaning. She used the phrase to create sympathy for illegal immigrants, thereby condemning the Trump administration for arresting them.

Of course, this rhetoric assumes away a couple of key facts. First, it is the job of federal immigration agents to arrest and deport foreigners who are illegally present in the United States. Spanberger pairs this fact with several controversial ones to make it seem so too, but it is only controversial to the fringe minority that wants to “abolish ICE.”

Second, and closely related, federal immigration agents arrest and deport foreigners under both Republican and Democratic leadership. During the last full fiscal year of Biden’s presidency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested more than 113,000 immigrants and deported more than 271,000.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s set those facts to the side for a moment to ask whether the point Spanberger is trying to make is even true. That is, can illegal immigrants legitimately be described as “people who aspire to be Americans?”

The phrase is dangerous because it comes close to imputing motives. This is hazardous when one person is the object, but it becomes utterly impossible when the motives or millions of people are in view. Obviously, we can’t know the motives of every person who is illegally present in the U.S., but neither does Governor Spanberger; only God knows. Given these limitations, we can only assess the aspirations of illegal immigrants by their actions.

A second difficulty arises over the definition of what it means to “be American.” If being American means becoming an American citizen, then illegal immigrants have not shown any aspiration to become Americans because they have not followed the necessary steps. Besides marriage or descent, a person who wants to become an American citizen must “show you have been a lawfully admitted permanent resident of the United States for at least five years,” according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. By definition, the term illegal immigrants only applies to immigrants who are not Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs) and therefore not on the pathway to citizenship.

Some proposals have circulated to create a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. To date, those proposals are not reflected in U.S. law. If an immigrant wants to become a citizen, he or she must go through the necessary process. Bypassing the line by entering the country illegally and then hoping for — or worse, agitating for — a change in America’s laws is not (or should not be considered) a legitimate strategy.

Of course, there may be many illegal immigrants who aspire to become American citizens, despite their actions being inconsistent with that goal. Yet, since their true motives cannot be known, their aspirations can only be judged by what they have actually done. And the actions of illegal immigrants show that they value the benefits of living in America — good jobs, generous welfare benefits — more than the civic privileges and responsibilities of actually becoming an American citizen by naturalization.

But perhaps a different definition of “being American” was in view. Perhaps Spanberger meant someone who shared the ideals of America, such as individual freedom, representative government, and chasing the American dream. Such a definition would be inferior to one based on citizenship because it is less objective, but it at least seems like a plausible leap to make for someone deeply devoted to American ideals.

But, even on this more existential definition, the actions of many illegal immigrants are strangely dissonant from their purported American identity. This week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) released a Spanish-language video encouraging New York parents to enroll their children by Friday “in free 3-K or Pre-K … regardless of your occupation, income, or immigration status.” (In November 2025, the Center for Migration Studies estimated that nearly 600,000 illegal immigrants resided in New York City.)

This is only the latest of many examples of public welfare programs being open to illegal immigrants. If illegal immigrants “aspire to be Americans” by embracing American ideals and working hard to advance themselves, why is this even a conversation? Is getting on welfare the American dream?

Perhaps the greater test of American identity is what illegal immigrants do with the welfare money they receive. Do they invest it in building better lives, careers, and communities here in America? Or do they ship it back home?

Earlier this year, the Transportation Security Administration revealed that passengers departing the Minneapolis airport had left the country with nearly $700 million in cash over the past two years. These passengers appeared to be pairs of Somali men acting as couriers to abscond with the proceeds of the now-infamous daycare fraud. All the way back in 2018, local news investigations raised concerns that rampant welfare fraud could be funding foreign terrorist groups like al-Shabaab.

Not every illegal immigrant is scamming the state, but many send money back home to other countries. Is that what it looks like to “aspire to be Americans”? Jesus gave this general principle, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21).

By either definition, then, Spanberger’s attempt to portray illegal immigrants as aspiring Americans fails to fit the facts. If this is true, why did she make the attempt?

The answer lies at the root of the worldview clash that creates a fault line for today’s immigration debates. On one hand, progressives believe that nations are bad, obsolete relics that belong to an age of racism and xenophobia. They press towards an unrealized utopia of universal brotherhood, global citizenship, and one-world government. To the extent that they must deal with the reality of nations, they view them either as temporary inconveniences until power can be further centralized in global institutions or as localized subdivisions responsible for administering their universal socialist policies.

On the other hand stands a variety of perspectives that view nations as good and patriotism as virtuous. In biblical terms, God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:27, see Genesis 10). And distinct nations will remain until the end (Revelation 7:9). Christianity is not the only worldview that affirms national identity, but it does do so.

Christianity recognizes that every person belongs to some particular nation and thus comes under the authority of some particular government. There is nothing inherently wrong with governments, as a matter of good administration, erecting barriers around their citizenry so they know who and how many people are under their authority. There is nothing inherently wrong with governments requiring foreigners to take certain steps before they can join a certain people.

To make this explicit in an American context, Christianity finds nothing wrong with the U.S. government defining its citizenry and excluding foreigners from membership unless they follow a standard process. There is nothing wrong with excluding foreigners who refuse to follow the process, even if, in some unexplained sense, they “aspire to be Americans.”