Birthright Citizenship: Setting The Record Straight

What it means in the US, what other nations make of it, why it has no place in the country today. With a full complement of attentive listeners at the Penn Club’s elegant Tarnopol Room in midtown Manhattan, this month’s presentation by the Center for Immigration Studies offered analyses, figures and insights of legal policy analyst Jon David Feere, juris doctor.

The icy temperatures of a particularly cold winter’s eve did not prevent a full room of interested listeners. The stats rolled out, startling in their cumulative power. Feere indicated offhand, during the post-talk Question-and-Answer, that decades ago, the porous borders of our southern states let in some illegal aliens, but not at the rate and volume that have marked our current flood to such an extent that states bearing the brunt of this influx are either bankrupt or verging on insolvency.

While the figures are somewhat hazarded, an annual 300,000 to 400,000 children are born to illegals in the US, with the US then recognizing these territorial intruders in the legal thicket known as ‘birthright citizenship’ that hails from a misconstruction of the 14th amendment. Temporary visitors, diplomat families and tourists–as well as, one supposes, extraterrestrials here for the bonfires of July Fourth or body probes–have all been the glad recipients of US largesse—when the application of the US 14thamendment was clearly intended for freed slaves and their progeny, or the Native Americans who of course predated the founding of the country in 1776.

Feere outlines in turn every country that permits a new citizen merely by the accident of a mother’s bearing a child while on US soil. Every other country has rather straightforward conditions for such a privilege, but no nation is so besieged by throngs seeking the conferred benefits and value of belonging as does the United States.

Those countries that once did offer automatic citizenship (Australia, Ireland, India, New Zealand, the UK, Malta and the Dominican Republic) have years ago rescinded those policies. Of advanced countries, says Feere, only the US and Canada grant automatic citizenship to offspring of illegal immigrants. It is worth noting that Canada, with a population of some 30 million, is far less overrun than is the US, with a current population of some 308 million, ten times the people, and ten times the worries, and seeming expenses, as our friends to the north.

Feere notes that only 30 of the world’s 194 nations grant citizenship to children of illegals, called in legal terms jus soli—the right of citizenship by being born ‘on the soil’ of the country in question. The balance of 164 countries accord citizenship by right of jus sanguinis, or ‘right of blood,’ one’s parentage.

But there is no question but that population transfers are not noticeable for the majority of these nations as it is for the Paved Golden Road of the United States.

The numbers are staggering. While Feere acknowledges that we surely have room to welcome more citizens, as we have a landmass large enough to accommodate far more people, in the way that India and China accommodate well over one billion in areas roughly similar to ours, as many as one of every ten births in this country are to illegal immigrant parents.

The costs borne by the federal and state governments are both currently unmanageable, and mushrooming. Beyond the unwieldy number of illegal ‘anchor babies’ sustained by the country without accurate tallies, such births augur a future tsunami of siblings, parents and other kin being ‘grandfathered’ into the country when the baby citizen comes of age. Welfare benefits, education systems, health care and other costly entitlements and supports strain the system, Feere notes with supporting facts and figures.

One of the major features of this massive and unwonted population transfer, according to Feere, but one that few on the other side of the aisle acknowledge, is that this alien population is admixed into our population in a non-assimilating sludge that is altering the makeup of the country without the consent of its actual citizenry. From a small percentage of the total populace, illegals now constitute a potential voting bloc that will tip the balance in many an election, if such aliens are absorbed into the political party that is currently wooing them by means unfair and sly. A permanent fait accompli will thus be achieved by the political party that curries these millions of ‘new’ people, perhaps altering the balance of power for decades, if not forever. This is already happening to some degree, although the voting-bloc infiltration is not complete.

Political correctness now renders the entire issue of keeping this country for its own citizens a virtual quagmire of definitional delicacy. ‘Undocumented workers’ is now the favored phrase, but it carries the uncomfortable freight of being inaccurate and unfair, since  certainly not all of those clambering over our deserts and littering our southern border states are ‘workers,’ or even wannabe workers. The 14^thamendment has such magnetism, in fact, that, as Feere indicates, ‘birth tourism’ is a booming industry, with its own high-end hospitals and hotels at a heavy rent of $45,000 for accommodations, all the way down to fly-by-nights for the strapped but scrappy at attractive suboptimal rates.

While it is common to characterize the aliens as largely Mexican (some 60%, according to Feere), we have no way of knowing who we are entertaining and domiciling. Many such entrants are from countries below Mexico, as we all know. But of late, persons from countries as far afield as Nigeria and the Middle eastern principalities are to be found feigning Spanish accents along with specially tended camouflage mustaches, in a bid certainly to bypass border scrutiny. Such invaders are not being secreted in the boots of incoming cars and among the fence-jumpers merely to solicit agri-jobs. Many such unknowns come for reasons entirely less savory than hourly incomes to remit back to their so-called families ‘back home.’

While most suppose that the country’s vaunted benefits are unavailable to these uncitizen families, in point of fact, taxes, fees, withholdings, and all manner of impositions incumbent on citizens are not expected or taken from illegal alien families, while faked documents, drivers licenses, and other credit-conferring goodies enable these illegals to rape the system of its welfare, healthcare, educational and other respected American baubles. Chief among these incalculably valuable benisons are Medicare and food stamps. Feere states that nationwide, 40% of alien-headed households get ‘some type of welfare.’ State to state rates vary, with a high of 49% eliciting such monies in NY State. By contrast, only 19% of native-born households access a major welfare plan.

The thorny issue hails from the wording of the first sentence of the 14^th amendment (the so-called Citizenship Clause):

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the united states and the State wherein they reside.”

In other words, a birth must have occurred on US soil. And the person born must be subject to the jurisdiction of the US. They must have allegiance to this country. They must foreswear alien allegiance.

Thereby hangs a tale of dozens of years of legal problems, most though not all coming to a boil in the past few decades.

In answer to the question of rewriting or abrogating the 14^th amendment, however, Feere asserts that we need not change the US Constitution. We need, instead, to narrow the definitional understanding of the amendment, and tighten up on who may be admitted as citizens. Some have suggested that noncitizen pregnant women visiting or temporarily resident from other countries not be allowed in during their third trimester, but this is difficult to oversee and manage. (It did not escape notice that these issues are germane to the very man who currently resides in the White House, whose background and provenance seem as murky as any brackish wadi after a flash flood. But leaving that aside…)

Returning to the subject of granting citizenship, Feere says that it does seem that the framers of this controversial citizenship clause “had no intention of establishing a universal rule of automatic birthright citizenship.”

The fight is joined. Amnesty, such as the “last, ever” one in 1986, is “out of the question,” according to Feere, though it continues to be a blisteringly hot topic among Democrats and especially, the chief executive, who has been trying to thwart resistance to amnesty at every possible opportunity. That he has met with strong opposition despite senatorial pressure from his former colleagues, and that he has been dealt a resounding nay by the recent midterm elections–in which a vast wave of new Republican congressional representatives came to the fore, and a similar wave of Democratic incumbents was defeated–argues that he is not in the majority on this topic, and the will of the majority ought to be the dominant consideration.

The presentation, Q and A, and post-session knots of people discussing the finer points of these issues, went far beyond the allotted time. Clearly, the last word on this issue, even in the able and comprehensive words of Jon Feere, JD, has not yet been uttered. The fight has not yet been decisively won.

marion d s dreyfus            .    .    .                   20©11

Tags: 14th Amendment, 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act, Alan Simpson, Barack Obama, birth tourism, birthright citizenship, Center for Immigration Studies, China, CIS, ICRA, India, Jon David Feere, Jon Feere, jus soli, New Zealand, Nigeria, People's Republic of China, PRC, Ronald Reagan, Simpson-Mazzoli

This entry was posted on February 11, 2011 at 1:13 AM and is filed under Analysis, News, News and Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.