Gregory Rodriguez: Attack on 14th Amendment: It's Wrong
[Gregory Rodriguez is an Irvine Senior Fellow and Director of the California Fellows Program at New America Foundation, a non-partisan public policy institute. He has written widely on issues of national identity, social cohesion, assimilation, race relations, religion, immigration, ethnicity, demographics and social and political trends in such leading publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. He is the author of Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America, which The Washington Post listed among the "Best Books of 2007."]
against babies "dropped" (in the loving words of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham) by illegal immigrant mothers. These politicians want to change the 14th Amendment so that those U.S.-born children would be excluded from "birthright citizenship."
Their main contention is that the framers of the 14th Amendment did not have the children of illegal immigrants in mind when they explicitly stated that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." And I suppose that has to be true given that there was essentially no restriction on migration to the U.S. back then and, therefore, there was no such thing as an illegal immigrant.
But their argument misses the forest for the trees. Though blacks were the immediate beneficiaries of the 14th Amendment, the principle it promoted was clearly broader. In essence, its framers were seeking to put an end to the social divisions that the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857 had judicially recognized....
So it stands to reason that to deny birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants would serve to reestablish that system: a hierarchical structure in which classes are determined by heredity. Because your father was classified as inferior, you will be too....
Read entire article at LA Times
against babies "dropped" (in the loving words of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham) by illegal immigrant mothers. These politicians want to change the 14th Amendment so that those U.S.-born children would be excluded from "birthright citizenship."
Their main contention is that the framers of the 14th Amendment did not have the children of illegal immigrants in mind when they explicitly stated that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." And I suppose that has to be true given that there was essentially no restriction on migration to the U.S. back then and, therefore, there was no such thing as an illegal immigrant.
But their argument misses the forest for the trees. Though blacks were the immediate beneficiaries of the 14th Amendment, the principle it promoted was clearly broader. In essence, its framers were seeking to put an end to the social divisions that the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857 had judicially recognized....
So it stands to reason that to deny birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants would serve to reestablish that system: a hierarchical structure in which classes are determined by heredity. Because your father was classified as inferior, you will be too....