Attacking Birth-Right Citizenship – The proposal to amend the 14th Amendment to stop children who are born in the US automatically becoming US Citizens
The debate on Immigration Reform has taken a strange twist attacking the 14th Amendment — one of the most sacrosanct in the U.S. Constitution.
Passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment prohibits states from denying citizens their civil and political rights. It is why states and cities could not block blacks from voting it also bequeaths citizenship on children born in the United States. The intent at the time was to stop states from denying citizenship to descendants of slaves.
Given the intensity of our national debate over immigration, it comes as little surprise that the special targets of the attacks on birthright citizenship are children of undocumented immigrants because it gives American birth certificates to the children born here of foreign parents, even if the mother is here illegally.
Opponents argue that it encourages illegal immigration. In fact calls to repeal or amend the amendment are not surprising, given the heated debate over illegal immigration.
Anti-immigration groups enthusiastically support such bills as a means to eliminate what they term anchor babies, a pejorative term for U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. The term anchor baby refers to the speculative possibility that when such children turn 21, they will sponsor their extended families for U.S. residency and thus become an anchor for the entire family to reside legally in the United States.
“People come here to have babies,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “They come here to drop a child. It’s called, ‘drop and leave.’ To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child’s automatically an American citizen. That shouldn’t be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons.”
Trivializing the 14th Amendment as the “anchor baby amendment” is just below par. The 14th Amendment is actually the amendment that added the Equal Protection Clause, state Due Process Clause, national Privileges and Immunities Clause, and the citizenship clause to the Constitution. Also known as the Civil War or Reconstruction amendments: the 13th, ending slavery; the 14th, guaranteeing equal protection under the law and establishing national standards for citizenship; and the 15th, protecting the right to vote these amendments have always been considered the cornerstone of American Democracy.
Eliminating birthright citizenship would not solve the problem of unauthorized immigration.
Since children born to undocumented immigrants would presumably be undocumented, the size of the undocumented populations would actually increase as a result of the new policy. While some children could acquire the citizenship of their parents, others would be left with no citizenship or nationality, leaving them stateless.
Eliminating birthright citizenship is a distraction that moves us away from fixing the real problems with our broken immigration system.
Immigrants come to the U.S. to work, to reunite with their families, or to flee persecution. Denying birthright citizenship will not discourage unauthorized immigrants from coming to the U.S., and it will not encourage those already here to leave.
As such, the 14th Amendment is the first time the notion of equality was explicitly included in the Constitution and is the basis for many of the constitutional rights that we all take for granted. Just a few of the important decisions the Supreme Court has made under the 14th Amendment include:
- Segregated schools are unconstitutional (Brown v. Board of Education)
- Bans on interracial marriage are unconstitutional (Loving v. Virginia)
- Discrimination on the basis of sex is generally unconstitutional (Craig v. Boren)
- Legislative districts must be equally apportioned, i.e., one person, one vote (Reynolds v. Sims)
- The Constitution has a right to privacy, and that right means states may not outlaw access to birth control (Griswold v. Connecticut)
- States, like the federal government, generally must seek a warrant before searching your house (Mapp v. Ohio)
- States, like the federal government, must provide lawyers to criminal defendants (Gideon v. Wainright)
- States, like the federal government, must abide by the Second Amendment individual right to bear arms (McDonald v. City of Chicago)
- States may not pass a law criminalizing homosexual sex between consenting adults (Lawrence v. Texas)
Comprehensive immigration reforms that solve the root causes of undocumented immigration are necessary to resolve our very real immigration problems.