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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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I'm going to be honest, I'm not a fan of birthright citizenship either. I believe a person born in the US should need at least one parent to be a citizen or lawful permanent resident in order to obtain citizenship, and the system as currently set up is routinely abused (See the Chinese tourist industry as an example). But my personal opinion directly conflicts with the Constitution, and guess which one matters?
There's absolutely no ambiguity here. The Constitution clearly states that any person born on US soil is a US citizen, full stop. There are no disqualifiers listed. Doesn't matter where your parents came from. Doesn't matter if they just showed up in the US 5 minutes ago. If they were born on US soil, they are a US citizen. Any change to that requires a Constitutional amendment. And the chances of that happening any time in the foreseeable future are less than zero.
EDIT: I just want to point out that requirements that at least one parent is a citizen and/or has established long term residency in the country is the standard in the UK, Austrailia, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Spain, and several other countries.
Ending birthright chitizenship is the quickest way to a starship troopers style citizen/non-citizen class divide you can concoct, which is ironically the specific situation the 14th amendment was written to avoid, because prior to that none of the enslaved people were citizens so all their descendants wouldn’t be either
Exactly. Combine that with Native Americans and how we still have a problem with treating brown skinned folks like immigrants even when their family has been in a place since before it was America, especially in the portions of the country that once were Mexico. And we’ve also got the fact that we utilize long term labor from immigrants en masse.
There’s also the logical consistency thing. We’re the nation of immigrants. If you’re born here and raised here you’re one of us. I’d be willing to change it from birth to x time in childhood but that’s a lot of work for something I just don’t see as an issue. I think the way we’re making ourselves unappealing to immigrant labor is a much bigger problem in this country.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this; we already have this now. There are citizens, and there are non-citizens. The law applies to both equally. Nothing would change.
And making sure that descendants of illegal immigrants are also not citizens is kinda the point. Allowing them to become citizens rewards the parents for illegal immigration, and establishes a "back door" path to citizenship through chain migration. The objective would be to disincentivize illegal immigration by removing one of the rewards for doing it.
I suggest we start with your citizenship first. Which of your parents was rightfully citizens? Can you prove it? How? The only acceptable documents are naturalization paperwork or a lineage that goes back to the revolution. Unless you’re suggesting only DAR members be citizens, a great many people (including almost all Black people) will be denied citizenship.
What on God's green earth are you talking about?
It's simple. Were one or both of the child's parents born on US soil or otherwise lawful permanent residents? Yes? They're a citizen. Nobody's talking about grandparents, or great-grandparents, or what happened in 1776. Nobody's advocating to remove the citizenship of those already here. I'm talking about going forward. Nobody is saying that parents would have to recite their kid's entire lineage to the Great Council or anything.
He's talking about applying the change retroactively, which isn't normally how things are done. There is however some historical precedent. The first part of the 14th amendment was specifically written in response to a supreme court decision in 1857 that ruled that black African Americans and their descendants were not US citizens and therefore not protected by the constitution even though they were born in the US.
He's arguing that this could be used as a wedge to retroactively revoke citizenship, and frankly with the monsters currently in the SCOTUS it's a not entirely unreasonable fear. I could easily see the current crop of Judges ruling by a slim majority that in order for a child to have citizenship they must prove not just that their parents had citizenship, but that they must prove their parents had citizenship not through birthright, which would effectively require finding a descendant that either had naturalization papers or else could trace their lineage back to the revolutionary war. Ironically this would make it easier for immigrants to prove citizenship than it would most "Americans". For this reason if nothing else I don't think this is a particularly likely outcome.
It's probably worth while to look at what this would mean in practice though. The motivation for birthright citizenship was specifically to protect the children of slaves and their descendants who were brought to this country against their will (and arguably should have been considered citizens at the point they entered the country, but that's a whole can of worms I don't want to open right now). Their children who were born here had no choice in being here, but spent their entire lives here and I can think of no good argument for why they shouldn't be considered citizens. Likewise in the case of illegal immigrants, while they chose to be here, their children born here would have no say in being here or not and once again I can see no reasonable argument why someone who was born here and lived their entire life here, shouldn't be considered a citizen.
Imagine for a moment that we didn't have birthright citizenship. You're an illegal immigrant, you're pregnant and about to give birth. What do you do? If you go to a hospital, you'll have your child, but without immigration papers the child won't be a citizen. How would that play out? I think we can all imagine a world in which ICE would be on hand to "arrest" the newborn and the mother and start deportation proceedings. So, as an illegal immigrant you would decide not to give birth in hospitals, but instead at home. Now you've got generational non-citizens. So, you're the child of an illegal immigrant, born and raised in the US. You're pregnant, and now you're faced with the same decision, maybe you give birth at home, maybe you go to a hospital. In either case at some point one of these descendants is going to get caught by ICE, but now we've got a problem. They were born in the US. Maybe even their parents were born in the US. Where exactly do you "deport" them to? They have no citizenship literally anywhere in the world. Do you just go off their name and features and take a wild guess? You think Mexico or China or whoever is going to just accept their new "citizen" just because the US doesn't want to deal with them? How is this even remotely moral either? You're taking someone who lived their entire life here, where this is all they've ever known, and you're going to send them to some random country they've never been to, and probably don't even speak the language of?
There are definitely already people caught in this loop. It's one of the biggest reasons I think we should allow DREAMers to obtain citizenship, too - they've been here in many cases for as much of their life as they can remember, and may not even speak the language of the country they're citizens of. Meanwhile, they're often educated, productive people who would be even more economically useful as citizens instead of having to work under the table. The last thing I ever heard Mike Huckabee say that I agreed with (circa his 2008 campaign) was "we're a better nation than to punish children for the mistakes of their parents". I'm sure he's horribly against the DREAM act or immigration reform now, of course, but I did like that he said that back then.
I think the birthright citizenship is the way to go. If you're born in the US I think that should be the point where we go "Okay, you're a citizen". We could have a situation where a group of people are perpetually denied citizenship for some reason that's advantageous to another group, and that ensures their children can't becomes citizens either.
We did! It was slavery, slaves and their descendants were not citizens, and if it were not for birthright citizenship from the 14th amendment, would not be citizens today
Yeah :)
That's exactly what I was implying lol
But that's kind of the point, isn't it?
If the child has at least one parent that's a citizen or permanent resident, they're a citizen. So there would be no issues there.
If both of the child's parents are from a foreign country and are just here temporarily, they'd still be citizens of their parents' home country. There's no reason to extend US citizenship to a child who won't be here for long.
If one or both of the parents establish permanent residency in the US, they can establish the same for the child as well, giving the child and the descendants a path to citizenship.
If both parents are here illegally, then the child shouldn't be granted US citizenship (at least until at least one parent establishes lawful residency in the US). Neither should the descendants. Allowing them and the descendants to establish citizenship and give those who would otherwise be denied lawful residency is one of the biggest incentives for illegal immigration in the first place. These would be the only people affected by removal of birthright citizenship in the first place.
There wouldn't be any ambiguity. It's very simple. Was the child born on US Soil? If so, does the child have at least one parent that is a citizen/lawful resident? If the answer to either one of those questions is yes, the child is automatically a citizen. Yes, there are those who could abuse the situation as you described, but those people would do that no matter what. And no matter what your personal position is on birthright citizenship, both sides can say that the other side can be used for political advantage; eliminating birthright citizenship could lead to cases as you described above, where people try to deny others of lawful citizenship for political purposes. But the same can be said in the other direction: allowing automatic birthright citizenship encourages illegal immigration and is advantageous to Democrats because minorities tend to skew heavily left when they become of voting age.
Regardless of politics, I just don't think that people should be rewarded for doing illegally what they couldn't or did not want to do legally. It sucks for the kids, but that's the parents' fault, not the US government.
Hmmm I wonder why that is 🤔🤔🤔
This isn't the kids' fault, why should they be punished by being denied citizenship? Their parent's country is not guaranteed to give them citizenship if they are born abroad. Also if we start making things like this legal then, for example, what's to stop debt from being legally able to be transferred from parents to children upon death? It's their parents fault they are in debt the first place, sucks for the kids but that debt has gotta be paid somehow, ya know?
This is insane and cruel and a just society would punish you by stripping your citizenship
Of the countries that have birthright citizenship, many have similar or the exact same restrictions I'm mentioning here: One parent must be a citizen or have some form of long-term residency in the country. I am not suggesting anything here that isn't being done by literally every other first-world nation on Earth. Unrestricted birthright citizenship is almost nonexistent in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Austrailia.
Since you decided to delete your comment before I posted it mine appeared up thread, I'm reposting it here
at no point in the history of america has "but yurop does it" been a suitable justification for a policy. We are specifically trying to do better than europe
...so? does this mean it's good?
Citation needed. Economic uncertainties and climate change are pretty big reasons for illegal immigration, afaik, and those are much more short-term survival considerations... it's not necessarily a plot to have anchor babies in most cases.
Every white person in America is under the same standard here illegally.
This debate has been ongoing in Canada for a while now, but personally I'm going to hold off on forming an opinion until someone can actually prove it's an issue, because in Canada only ~500 births per year are from mothers who don't live in Canada. It's not even worth forming an opinion over, it's just another polarizing distraction. Not sure if it's as much of a non-issue in the US as well, but honestly it's not even worth thinking about until someone shares some actual data.
Much, MUCH different in the US.
There were just shy of 800,000 births by undocumented immigrants between 2010 and 2016, or over 110,000 births per year. So several orders of magnitude above Canada.
Technically only a single order of magnitude in terms of total births (3% vs 0.1%). Up to Americans to determine whether 3% of all births is worth worrying about though.
It’s not worrying, only racists are upset about this. A growing, working, tax-paying population is only good for a nation. Almost every single one of those 110k a year will spend 5-7 decades contributing to the American economy and workforce, that’s a plus in my book regardless of how they got here.
What's interesting is back in the day Republicans supported this. Milton Friedman, Reagan's infamous economic advisor, advocated for open borders. It's essentially what we had in the 1800s. Chicago was 80% immigrant or child of immigrant in 1880s.
Hell, Reagan even gave amnesty to millions of illegals.
I think we should have more or less open borders. Block criminals and extremists.. but everyone else let them in. Give them a trial period of like 5 to 10 years. If they pay taxes during that time period and don't commit serious crimes.. let them join the country.
We're gonna need the population to compete with China. There's plenty of space in this country for many more people. And more people = more demand for goods and services = more jobs = more opportunities = more GDP
I really don't see many good reasons why not. Sure, the price of labor will go down but illegals are already doing much of the menial labor already anyways.
That's a pretty big problem to gloss over when the country is still fighting for a living wage for the lowest earners.
When would be a good time, then? 25 years from now?
Like, maybe when we have a thriving working class?
It goes by factors of 10
So it would be a bit over 3 orders of magnitude above Canada.
With that said, it doesn't matter anyway because it would require a constitutional amendment to change, which is nigh on impossible in today's political climate on any topic.
That's actually not how orders of magnitude work, the definition is a change by a factor of 10, which means that if a number is n orders of magnitude larger than another it's 10^n times larger. 2 orders of magnitude = 100 times larger, 3 orders of magnitude is 1000 times larger, etc.
The exact order of magnitude of a ratio is log base 10. So log10(3/0.1)=1.4771 orders of magnitude.
3 orders of magnitude greater is 10 × 10 × 10 = 1000x larger... which refers to 100~999% compared to 0.1%.
Or just deny travel visas to pregnant women, add in an investigation for people who aren't living in the US but have a baby here. If you are really worried about that, there are better ways than wholesale removal. It just doesn't really seem like a problem.
Right, cause that's a situation we really want to give CBP power over... pregnancy tests for all women at the border? Pregnant women who can't travel for business anymore? At that point, just make us 2nd class citizens and get it over with.
Oh don't worry, they're working on that already.
I think the issue is maybe not all countries recognize children of their citizens as also being citizens if born in another country? I could be wrong though, all countries might recognize the children, I'm not that well versed in global citizenship rules.
If that were the case though, someone born in the US would technically not be a citizen anywhere if not for birthright.
I feel the same