From that AZCentral article:
If lawmakers are able to one day force a reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, which now is recognized as granting citizenship to nearly everyone born in the United States, parents would for the first time in history have to prove their own citizenship before their children could be deemed citizens. Governments would have to verify the citizenship of parents, a process that likely would be costly, politicians say. Even the nation’s military readiness could be affected because without legal status, the children of illegal immigrants would no longer be eligible to enlist in the armed forces.
That’s not true about the armed forces, because by the time those kids are 18, they would have been here long enough to naturalize. Or, does their parents illegal status make it impossible for them to naturalize? Maybe that needs to be changed?
Supporters of the move to restrict birthright citizenship say the longstanding practice of granting automatic citizenship to nearly every child born on U.S. soil regardless of the parents’ status is a powerful lure for illegal immigrants. End it, they believe, and illegal immigrants would be less likely to come to the United States because their children would no longer provide a path to public benefits or legal status for themselves in the future.
Republicans lawmakers leading the charge have zeroed in on a phrase in the 14th Amendment, claiming the passage that says “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” has been misinterpreted. The amendment was ratified in 1868 to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision stating that slaves could not be citizens.
Critics want the Supreme Court to rule that the children of illegal immigrants are not entitled to automatic citizenship because, they argue, undocumented parents are not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S.
Lawmakers in at least seven states – Arizona, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas – have introduced birthright-citizenship bills. But as in Arizona, the South Dakota and Mississippi bills have died, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which is tracking the legislation.
“All you need is one state to pass it to trigger the lawsuit that gets to the Supreme Court,” said state Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, sponsor of the House version of the bill. “So the concept itself may move forward even though there weren’t the votes in the Arizona Senate.”
Legislation also has been introduced in Congress, though it is not expected to pass.
“Arizona, obviously, has been out front on the other aspect of this, SB 1070, and maybe it doesn’t want to be out front on this one,” said John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University School of Law in California, who believes that the 14th Amendment was never meant to bestow birthright citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants and who testified in support of the Arizona legislation.
Nearly 60 percent of Americans oppose changing the Constitution to deny citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, according to a February poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.
Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/news/…
Not as a matter of our need, but as a matter of human rights. Other nations have always put more emphasis on ethnicity, but there is no American ethnicity, unless you mean Native, which of course would count most of us out.
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p>It would require a constitutional amendment or a RADICAL reinterpretation, but as I and others have pointed out repeatedly “subject to the jurisdiction” was intended to apply to the Native population and diplomats are excluded in their person in the same way their embassies are excluded in their property from being US soil.
It’s crazy-talk, straight up.
to recognize that subjects of another country are not “subject to the jurisdiction of the US.”
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p>It would not be about ethnicity here, like it is in some old world countries, but about parent and child connection and loyalty, and immigration policy. It is about the idea that children take on the same citizenship as their parents, and have to naturalize with their parents.
“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.”
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p>I think it would have been a lot better to say “except the children of diplomats” or “except the children of foreign subjects” but they apparently wanted it to be ambiguous, so that Congress could fine tune it, perhaps drawing distinctions between legal and illegal immigrants, or people who have moved here permanently versus itinerant travelers.
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p>The Arizona people want to interpret it to mean that illegal immigrants are not subject to the jurisdiction of the US, but legal immigrants are, which seems reasonable.
Apparently it means “moving from place to place with no fixed home” – but I meant to refer to people with a fixed home in a different country, who plan on returning to their fixed home with their family. Those people remain subjects of their own country, they can be called back to fight in wars and usually have to keep paying taxes and pledging allegiance to their own flag, even if they are not diplomats. It is not radical to think that their children should have their same allegiance and citizenship, no matter where they are born. They can naturalize, and their children can naturalize with them (or if born after their parents have naturalized, be natural born citizens).
From the presidential eligibility standpoint I once again remind you of the additional requirement for 14 years residency in the US.
The real focus of the 14th amendment was of course the recently freed slaves rather than immigrants anyway. Diplomats are internationally recognized as distinct and are even privileged from arrest in their host country. Tourists, on the other hand, are completely subject to the jurisdiction of our laws whilst they are on our soil. To this day we pretend that the Native population are only kind of subject to our jurisdiction through the “sovereignty” of reservations. Personally, I’d like to reform that, but that’s another issue.
Dropping in birther throw-away lines just makes you look silly.
Well, the two subjects both relate to birthright citizenship, is how. I tried to separate the issues, so that this post could focus on birthright citizenship and wouldn’t also have to discuss what natural born citizen means.
odious anti-American diatribe. That someone (or some people) would put this out there with a straight face suggests to me that we have failed MISERABLY in educating our people about American values and ideals. Ugh.
And self-righteous self-serving propaganda that you obviously ate up. Our birthright citizenship policy was not idealistic, it simply was a pragmatic way to fill up the land with American subjects and build a new nation based on capitalism and exploitation.
Are you Lasthorseman’s twin sibling of a different mother?
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p>Based on the “propaganda” you just offered, it would appear that the so-called capitalistic exploiters had as much foresight as Barack Obama’s mother, father, and grandparents at the time of his birth.
DGC’s crusade against letting the “wrong” kind of people become American dates back to at least one joke revue (appropriately enough). S/he also continues the canard that such an idea is uniquely American, even though the doctrine of jus soli exists in India, Brazil, Canada, and other little-known countries. India, now there’s a country that needs more people. Ditto Brazil.
And it’s not about the “kind” of person anyone is, that’s an ugly smear. It’s about respect for family and citizenship, and not claiming babies away from their parents’ country any faster than the parents would naturalize themselves. I support an egalitarian approach to immigration, welcoming all kinds of people, perhaps especially refugees, though I am for limited immigration and moving around in general.
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p>Also, if you look at that joke revue thread, you’ll notice that my original point remains valid, and yet no one did me the courtesy of acknowledging it, preferring instead to continue spreading the ignorance.
…in no way impinges on the right of parents to remove their children back to the home country and get them naturalized there, nor does it stop another country from granting that baby citizenship on the basis of jus sanguine. Our philosophy has always been different because we were founded on a different basis. We believe that all people are born with certain unalienable rights, and if we don’t grant citizenship to everyone the risk is that some will be born with no citizenship anywhere. It also isn’t worth discriminating on the basis of whether the parents home country would grant citizenship or not. It is both simple and moral to say if you are born here, you are part of OUR family – no questions asked.
I’ll let you and your radical right wing buddies take away birthright citizenship if you force ALL Americans to take the same citizenship test immigrants have to take to become US citizens. I’m sure it would thin your sides ranks out real quick.