Birthright citizenship is bad enough. No real country is built around the idea that simply being born on a particular spot of soil gives one a sense of community with the rest of the nation. But now the Obama Administration has decided that even this lowest common denominator definition of citizenship is too restrictive. You can now be a citizen of the United States even if you have never actually set foot in the United States or even if your parents have never set foot in the United States.

President Barack Obama’s administration has decided to let the surrogate birth industry sell U.S. citizenship — and access to the U.S. welfare system — to foreign parents who never even set foot in the United States.

The fertility clinics will be able to pocket the profits, after granting access to American education, health, welfare and retirement services to the foreign children and the foreign parents.

The giveaway is accomplished by a surprise change in regulations, which redefined the term “mother” to include women who contract to carry other women’s embryos to birth.

[Obama Administration Allows Fertility Clinics to Sell US Citizenship, by Neil Munro, Daily Caller, October 28, 2014]

What does this mean?

The change means that a woman who is a U.S. citizen can be hired by a reproductive medical clinic to become pregnant overseas and to give birth in China, Saudi Arabia, or anywhere else, and then effectively hand a U.S. passport to the baby.

That’s a huge benefit to the child, because it makes him or her a U.S citizen, even if he or she never breathes American air, or lives among Americans, knows English or shares any American cultural norms or ideas with their natural-born American citizens.

It is also a huge benefit for the parents, because they too can get citizenship once their child becomes an adult. That citizenship allows them — and their other children — to move to the United States in time for them to access Obamacare or Medicare benefits in their retirement.

One of the criticisms that could be made of birthright citizenship is that it reduces the concept of the nation to a purely geographic expression. Instead of a community with common interests, the country becomes a spot of dirt with a random collection of deracinated individuals living on it, trying to cheat each other out of money and accepting welfare payments.

However, now even that is too charitable. "America" is being reduced before our eyes to something less than a geographic expression. Obama is turning it into something like an absurdist piece of performance art, a Dadaist farce that perpetuates itself with no end in sight.