Perhaps one of the reasons Rudy Giuliani or other Republicans wonder how much President Obama loves America is that his definition of “American” does not align with American citizenship. President Obama, speaking in the Oval Office Tuesday:

We’ve got 11 million people here who we’re not all going to deport. Many of them are our neighbors. Many of them are working in our communities. Many of their children are U.S. citizens. And as we saw with the executive action that I took for DREAMers, people who have come here as young children and are American by any other name except for their legal papers, who want to serve this country, oftentimes want to go into the military or start businesses or in other ways contribute — I think the American people overwhelmingly recognize that to pretend like we are going to ship them off is unrealistic and not who we are.

The president is asserting that the nationality listed on a person’s legal papers isn’t really that important in determining whether someone is an American. If being an American is simply a state of mind, and where a person was born or whether a person entered the country legally are mere trivialities, there really isn’t such a thing as citizenship anymore.

If everybody’s an American just by virtue of being here, then being an “American” is simply a matter of geography.