A group of congressional Republicans have joined Democrats in an effort to push through an amnesty bill by performing two cheap tricks: repeat the tired trope that we’re a “nation of immigrants” and redefine “amnesty” as “dignity.”

The bipartisan bill, dubbed the DIGNITY Act, was introduced this week by Republican Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, who has lately been on a media tour to promote what she calls, falsely, “a revolutionary bill that offers the solution to our immigration crisis.”

But of course Salazar’s bill isn’t “revolutionary,” and it doesn’t offer a solution to our immigration crisis. It offers amnesty wrapped in platitudes. The key part of the bill is an “earned opportunity for long-term immigrants to stay here and work.” How long-term? Seven years. That means people who illegally snuck across our border as recently as 2018 would be allowed to remain in the United States forever — without any of the obligations and responsibilities that come with full citizenship. That’s amnesty, no matter what Salazar says.

It’s also a miscarriage of the rule of law. As my colleague Brianna Lyman noted yesterday, “no one deserves to be rewarded for violating our sovereign borders simply because they want to ‘pay taxes’ and ‘work.’” Billions of people all over the world would very much like to come here and pay taxes and work, our laws be damned. But our economy is not a possession of the world, it belongs to the American people. Foreign access to it, to the extent we allow it at all, should first and foremost serve the interests of the American people, not a contingent of foreigners who managed to get into our country and remain here for at least seven years without getting caught.

Lyman also correctly pointed out that we tried this one-time amnesty gambit before, in President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration reform that gave amnesty to nearly three million illegals in exchange for vague promises about border security, which of course never materialized. When promoting his immigration reform, Reagan trotted out the line that we’re a “nation of immigrants,” which is exactly what Republican Rep. Mike Lawler said in support of the DIGNITY Act this week.

This is wrong. We’re not a nation of immigrants, we’re a nation of settlers. The people who founded America came to settle it, and settle it they did. They were not immigrating to an established nation, they were forging a nation out of a vast, largely unpopulated wilderness. Those who came after, in subsequent waves throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most often pushed west, further into the wilderness, expanding the frontier of our nation and settling it along the way. Indeed the phrase itself, “nation of immigrants,” is nonsense. Immigrants by definition don’t create a nation, they become part of an established nation by assimilating into it.

The relevant history, as well as the difference between an immigrant and a settler, are clear enough. The thing to understand right now is why the “nation of immigrants” line is being deployed at all. I would suggest that it’s being deployed for the same reason it was deployed in 1986: as propaganda to justify mass amnesty for illegal immigrants and bolster the notion that it’s somehow “un-American” to insist on secure borders, assimilation, and citizenship.

Indeed, the Salazar bill throws out citizenship entirely. Instead of citizens who have solemn obligations to their adopted country, the tens of millions of illegal immigrants who have been here for at least seven years would, under the DIGNITY Act, constitute an entirely new legal class of non-citizens with “legal status” to live and work here, as though America is merely an economic opportunity zone.

This is a recipe above all for mass non-assimilation and, ultimately, civic conflict. Allowing foreigners to reside permanently in your country without requiring them to become citizens — with all that citizenship entails — means we will eventually have what Europe now has: huge enclaves of unassimilated foreign nationals whose loyalties lie elsewhere and whose customs and habits are alien to the host country. The European governments who have embraced mass immigration with the most zeal are now on what is probably an irreversible course to civil war.

Worse, the reduction of the nation to an economic opportunity zone, which is the end that Salazar’s DIGNITY Act would serve, will mean the degrading of citizenship for everyone, including the native-born, and eventually the abolishment of the nation as such. Why? Because the vitality of our nation depends on the faithfulness of its citizens to discharge their duties — to vote, to be informed about public affairs, to serve on juries, to hold office if needs be, and to serve in the armed forces to defend the country in times of crisis. If citizenship becomes some kind of ceremonial honorific that newcomers don’t really need to get along and even do well in America, then there’s no need to have citizens at all. We will all just be cogs in a GDP machine, and America as such will cease to exist.

Ultimately, the DIGNITY Act is woefully misnamed. The only real dignity America can offer to foreigners is the dignity that comes with full U.S. citizenship. Without that, illegal immigrants and citizens alike will be reduced to nothing more than wage-earners for a global empire. Earlier generations of Americans — whether settlers, native-born, or immigrants — would have called this by its true name: slavery.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.