This has Steven Miller’s fingerprints all over it. It’s no coincidence this is being announced on the day that the synagogue shootings will be back in the news, and it’s one week until the midterms.
It’s also that, once your kid is American, deporting the parents is more difficult and it gives them, in practice if not in the law, a simpler way to green-cardness or citizenship.
“Republicans” are hopefully not embracing this idea. So far, it’s Trump and his low education supporters.
But yes, anyone with a brain knows where this will lead, so Republicans should not create a new power that a Democrat can use. Limited government ALWAYS works for Republicans, even if they think it doesn’t in certain cases. It’s only Democrats who benefit from weakening rule of law.
Sure, that’s nice, but between Paul Ryan, Donald Trump, and Lindsey Graham, who is going to be in office in January 2019 and whose political career is over?
That’s really where I was going; it’s not so much the citizenship of the children that is the issue, but the effects on the rest of the family that aren’t necessarily everything we might wish for.
To use an extreme hypothetical, let’s say a pregnant married couple manages to get here (into our airspace, or whatever) from another country while she’s in labor and has the baby a minute after crossing the border.
The difference of a minute would make the difference between that kid being an American vs. from somewhere else. Why? Had the airplane gone a hair slower, the kid wouldn’t be a citizen. It’s the result of a totally random series of events.
Should that give those parents and siblings a leg up on getting permanent residency status versus any other immigrants, legal or otherwise?
What do you think most Americans know about whether they are citizens? You know, by birth? Are there American citizens who assume they aren’t citizens yet because they never went through naturalization?
I agree with all of this. The entire idea is antithetical to our constitutional foundations and sense of ourselves as a country.
Trump, the child of immigrants, is bluffing. He has no idea what he would replace “birthright citizenship” with. He’s just copying one of Mitt Romney’s more bizarre proposals of several years ago.
First, can you substantiate the claim that the parents and siblings do get a leg up on permanent residency status?
Second, consider the effects on the family in the absence of birthright citizenship. You’d have people, born in the US and knowing no other, who aren’t citizens of the country they are residing in. They may or may not have citizenship in another country, and certainly no experience or connection there.
We have examples of groups of stateless people, such as Biharis in Bangladesh, who represent a permanent underclass because their descendants are also stateless non-citizens. Should we not seek to prevent the formation of such a permanent underclass?
I was just trying to point out that birthright citizenship can basically be an accident of birth.
I’m kind of uncomfortable with the idea that citizenship is something you can luck into like that- most European countries, for example, require that you be the child of a citizen to be a citizen.
Citizenship is something valuable- it’s not something we give away to anyone who shows up, except in this one case. That’s why I said “tighten up” the idea of birthright citizenship, not abolish it. Like for example, maybe restrict it to citizens and green card holders or applicants (petitioners?).
