As 16 Republican contenders try to one-up each other on immigration platforms while striving to be as popular as the 17th, Donald Trump, this lexical quintet from the 14th Amendment is taking center stage.
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Earlier today, Judge Andrew Napolitano said that Donald Trump’s immigrant deportation plan, which includes deportation for people born here because their mothers are “here illegally“, is “prohibited by the Constitution”. That’s why I lookedclosely at the 14th Amendment, which states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States“.
Striking directly at the Supreme Court’s verdict that same-sex marriage is legal, Scott Walker and Ted Cruz have both voiced support for a constitutional amendment that would let states decide the definition of marriage. In less abstract terms, they’re affirming an unfounded nativist anxiety that birthright citizenship creates an incentive for child-bearing immigrants to stream across the border and secure all the benefits of citizenship, including welfare, for their offspring-what conservatives derisively refer to as “anchor babies”. You can’t amend the 14th Amendment because it’s against the 14 Amendment. To ensure this Act wouldn’t be upended by a future Congress, legislators proposed adding its provisions to the Constitution. In respect to civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.
What does this clause mean?
Trump’s not the first American politician to take on the Fourteenth Amendment clause, and he probably won’t be the last. That’s all nice and fine when it comes to the parts of the Constitution everyone likes, but taken to its logical conclusion, it would have wreaked havoc on the social progress of the United States. Neither do U.S.-born children of American Indians. This reasoning would seem also to exclude birthright citizenship for the children of legal resident aliens and, a fortiori, of illegal aliens.
Rubio’s amendment would amend the Constitution to say that “Congress shall make no law that imposes a tax on a failure to purchase goods or services”. You see, while some amendments are holy and can never be restricted – like the Second, which preserves all the others at the mere cost of 30,000 dead Americans annually – others have unintended consequences that simply can’t be tolerated, like how the 14th lets Messicans from all over Latin America come here and pop out a bunch of new citizens who have to be treated as if they had rights or something. He said promises to end the policy appeal to extreme conservatives, but because it’s spelled out in a constitutional amendment, the candidates can’t do much about it. Even if they won the presidency, changing birthright citizenship would be fiscally irresponsible and almost impossible to get through Congress, Wilkes said. Should anchor babies be granted automatic U.S. citizenship, even though their parents are illegal immigrants?
Unfortunately, continued misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment has incentivized illegal immigration and worsened our border crisis. This is nearly certainly not feasible, but it lays down a marker for immigration enforcement on the rightmost conceptual end of the policy debate-promising to deport immigrants at such an intense clip that vanishingly few will remain in the country long enough to give birth.
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The United States has always been a relative outlier in the western world in upholding the principle of birthright citizenship.
