UPDATE 12AUG26: as if on cue, Indonesia planning to raise Visa On Arrival fee to $55 to soak tourists.
In Trump v. Barbara, decided 30 June 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to children born in the United States even when their parents are unlawfully present or only temporarily present. The Court rejected President Trump’s Executive Order 14160, which tried to redefine such children as not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.
In plain English: the Court said the old rule still stands—birth on U.S. soil generally makes you a U.S. citizen, with only narrow historic exceptions such as children of foreign diplomats. The ruling reaffirmed the constitutional principle of jus soli and treated the executive order as incompatible with both the Citizenship Clause and the statutory language of U.S. nationality law.
We will set aside the extensive history of the Fourteenth Amendment, whose sole purpose was to repatriate citizens of the Confederacy and grant citizenship to former slaves. The interested reader can find ample discussions online. Suffice it to say that the interpretation and application of the Amendment has been greatly expanded over the last century and a half.
The whole concept of “citizenship” is a scam in any case. The fundamental rationale for such a thing is taxation and military service. Granting various rights and privileges is merely a means to entice folks to keep their nascent citizenship and not find somewhere else to hang their hats. Citizenship is also a means to sell various visa packages to “non-citizens,” creating an entire industry of passport stamps, not to mention forcing citizens to buy passports every few years, itself a marketing scam.
The visa industry is just one aspect of the whole “rights” illusion that is sold as innate and indelible guarantees of birthright, but are obviously just branded privileges that can be bought, sold and traded at a whim by governments that treat freedom and liberty like commodities and rewards for good behavior. As Black’s law dictionary reminds us, a license is state-issued permission to possess or do something that would otherwise be illegal. If you need a license to live, travel, own, operate, or do something, it’s not a right.
Indonesia does not allow dual citizenship, with a very specific exception: a child born to parents of mixed nationality can be considered a citizen of two countries until the age of majority, when he or she must choose one of the other. Most choose anything but Indonesia. Many Indonesians will happily surrender their citizenship for a passport from many other countries. We’ll come back to this in a minute.
Indonesia’s visa system is organized into categories designed A/B/C/D/E. Various visas are issued for specific purposes at various costs (naturally) and for various lengths of time, with various “rights” attached to each. The most common types are Visa-On-Arrival (30 days), Extended Stay (45 days), ITAS (1 year), ITAP (5 years), Multiple Entry-Exit (I call this the Old In-Out, 2 years), and the IMTA (‘job’ permit, a contentious distinction from ‘work’ permit).
Note that the Old In-Out is deliberately less than half the time of the ITAP, so you have to buy 3 of them for every 1 ITAP renewal.
Over the last 18 years, I’ve held all of these visas. Even now, with permanent residency, I can not go to Singapore on holiday and come back unmolested without the Old In-Out, which of course is an additional fee and bureaucratic process. My passports are brimming with stamps and stickers with various alchemical symbols that basically grant the government the power to tax me, and little else. The cost of all this is extortion-level, and if I want to surrender my US passport and get an Indonesian one, it would cost another USD10,000 at least, with both sides claiming a chunk of my pitiful ‘wealth’ for the privilege.
As an immigrant myself, who follows the letter of the law to maintain my residency (taxpayer privilege), I feel zero sympathy for illegal immigrants in the US and EU who, by some immense stroke of bad luck, get deported. Most of them receive copious benefits like free social safety nets, NGO largesse, and essentially legal immunity across the board.
Thanks to the recent Supreme Court decision, the US has essentially issued a gilded invitation to pregnant women around the world to avail themselves of maternity services in Merka. Once they deliver their precious cargo, they are granted tax-free, cost-free living in the “land of opportunity”.
Do I feel sorry for hard-working Merkins who pay for all this free stuff? Not one bit. It is Merkins who keep electing the flim-flam artists who keep giving away all this stuff. It is Merkins who refuse to take action because they’re afraid of some deranged stranger disapproving of their ‘diversity and inclusion’ principles. It is Merkins who keep paying for all this free stuff, because it’s their ‘duty and fair share’. You get what you pay for and put up with.
As someone with strong libertarian instincts, I’m all for the right to move to and set up stakes anywhere on the planet folks choose to live—with one important caveat: no freebies.
I have survived in Indonesia with my skill set and work ethic. There have been zero freebies along the way, and other than Mrs. FarSide, no one has lifted a finger to make it easier for me.
As long as Merkins continue to elect the same tired old idiots year after year, and allow them to accumulate debt on the backs of unborn generations, they will continue to get more of the same. Government doesn’t care how much you complain, as long as you leave your wallet open on the table and buy the sweet marketing lies we call propaganda.
I used to see the open-door immigration policies as a means to increase the tax base, but the folks allowed in are cost centers, not revenue centers. I now see it for what it is: a national looting scheme. The government takes your money in taxes, grants it to NGOs who nominally assist (illegal) immigrants, then the pols get kickbacks, er…donations from all that loot laundered through the system. It’s a giant legalized scam and you are the target.
Think about that the next time you notice your tax bill and/or read the names on the ballot.
Si mundus vult dicipi, ergo dicipitatur.
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Our top pick for today’s topical film fest is an old British offering: Passport to Pimlico (1949). An old treaty surfaces that makes a London neighborhood foreign soil. Oh so topical in the UK’s current situation. For a tonal treat, add on Mel Brooks’ long-forgotten farce The Twelve Chairs (1970), that highlights bureaucratic insanity. Worth a revival, and unlike Brooks’ later style.
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