I wonder if any of the posters that would like to deny citizenship to people born in the USA to non-residents are non-whites?
I wonder why the color of the poster’s skin has anything to do with the argument that person is making.
I also wonder why you’ve distorted the argument. No one here is advocating a change to deny citizenship to people born here of parents who are here legally, even if those people are brown.
I figure if a pregnant Mexican woman makes through the host desert to give birth a child on American soil then that child should be an American citizen. on U.S . I would amend the law so that only the Mother and Father would be given resident status until the death of the child or its 18th birthday - whatever is the soonest. After that, Mother and Father should go back to their country of origin. I figure if a pregnant Mexican woman makes through the host desert to give birth a child on American soil then that child should be an American citizen. She shouldn’t, however, get to use that loophole to gain permanent resident status for her and entire extended family.
You really wonder that, do you?
I said non-residents if you would mind to read the post.
But answer this. Do you have no problem then with children born to parents visiting on a tourist visa?
I think that arguments against anchor babies are a cover for something else or are motivated by ignorance of the law. A child cannot claim a parent until they are 21 years of age. Cite.
For those who don’t want to read through the code section, let me quote the relevant provision.
When they do so, they have to be able to show that they can support their parent, namely by having an income greater than 125% of the poverty level for a family of their size including the alien that they wish to sponsor. Believe me, the fact that they have a US Immigrant child is not a bar to deporting an illegal alien.
I think that either Rand Paul is an ignorant buffoon who isn’t aware of the law or is rather a cynical candidate for office is who is pandering to a certain element of the electorate who doesn’t like Hispanics and doesn’t want their children to be citizens. Do we really want to go down this road. Do we really want generations living in the barrio with no citizenship, no rights, being part of the underground economy? Is this really the America that you guys want?
Shouldn’t history teach us to infer that that is in fact what certain anti-immigrant types want, while it’s offensive to other anti-immigrant types?
Jus sanguinis citizenship, pro-“guest worker” conservatives:* want much of the populace to be “non-citizen” exploitable labor (as per ancient Athens), never mind the Reconstruction amendments. Aliens can live here with lesser rights.* Presumably the default position among the privileged in the South, where the idea of class is still considered legitimate.
Jus sanguinis citizenship, anti-“guest worker” conservative populists: want to exclude immigrants altogether–no citizenship for them, & no place for non-citizens. Aliens don’t even have the right to come here. In extreme form, this attitude insists that only the “real” Americans have any rights at all. Distressingly common in modern political discourse, even among ostensible progressives.
These two groups argue against each other, but they are unified in their contempt for the Reconstruction amendments & contempt for the idea that the government serves the people who actually live here.
I’m with the Reconstruction Republicans. Everyone who lives here should be treated as a legal resident immediately & retroactively. Naturalization should be quick. Immigration quotas should be cast on the ash heap of history with Stalinism.
It is barbarous to maintain any policy which leads to any forced separation, even temporary, of any child from its parents, regardless of citizenship or residency status (except, of course, in cases of child abuse).
It is antithetical to the very concept of citizenship and the rights thereof to deport any citizen of any age under any circumstances.
And finally, it is frankly bizarre to maintain a policy which attempts to stop would-be immigrants at the border, yet grants a benefit to those who dangerously circumvent the law–encouraging them to trek across the desert, or be smuggled as cargo in some trunk or shipping container. This is a cruel game to play with any person, but it is especially inhuman to do it with pregnant women.
All these may be avoided by simply making the citizenship of newborns a matter of their parents’ citizenship. Regardless of geography, babies born to American citizens are citizens; babies born to non-citizens are not citizens.
At the same time, we should make naturalization easier, and probably stipulate that if a legal immigrant, permanently residing in the U.S., completes the path to citizenship, any minor children of that person who are also permanent residents and living with the new citizen, shall themselves be automatically naturalized at the same time.
If we combine this approach with the strict enforcement of employment laws (that is, prosecution of American employers who hire illegal immigrants), then we can avoid both the incentives for illegal entry and the presence of an exploited underclass of “illegals,” to the benefit of both would-be immigrants and American workers.
Sorry, but this is a non-sequitur. It may not have been just in the past, but right now is a different matter. Switzerland, for example, doesn’t seem to have too many problems with it.
Regarding Ius Soli and Ius Sanguinis, my experience is that many western European countries (with the big exception of Germany and Switzerland) have been using a version of ius soli with modifications added in time. Until 2000, Germany was using exclusively ius sanguinis, but at that point it modified it somewhat.
Speaking of which, I can add a, well, somewhat “amusing” anecdote to this. I had a good friend in High School in my city of birth in Spain, Albacete. He was the son of Spanish parents who had emigrated to France, he was born in France, his birth was registered there, but when he was 9 his parents went back to Spain and took him along. But his records were still in France, and due to the fact that he had been born there, he was considered automatically to be a citizen of France.
Fast-forward to the time when he had become 18 years of age, and cue a letter from the French Embassy in Madrid, asking “Citoyen Fernández” in no uncertain terms to present himself posthaste in the military quarters of someplace-or-other in France for his compulsory military service in the French army. Apparently they looked at their records, saw this guy who was a French citizen of the relevant age, searched for him, found out he was back in Spain, and put everything in motion to have him come back for military service.
Fortunately, my friend had just had his medical for the Spanish military service, and he had been declared exempt due to a rather debilitating eye defect (this was true). They arranged for an emergency translation of his medical report that was forwarded to the proper authorities in France, so things were solved satisfactorily.
But, imagine if this had not been the case…
E.T.A.: (missed edit window for my previous message 
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On the other hand, in my opinion Switzerland and the U.S. are extremely different in character. Switzerland is -generally speaking- a very inwards-looking kind of place, what you might call “provincial” (I must confess that I don’t really like it very much; the general attitude of the people there rubs me the wrong way somehow… and I have been in Switzerland many times trying hard to like the country). It is to an extent the opposite of the attitude that created the U.S. and gives it its élan. I have the feeling that what works for Switzerland may well not work for the U.S. and vice-versa (not to mention that Switzerland is a pocket country when compared to the U.S., which is immensely more complex and deals with problems orders of magnitude bigger).
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What population in its right mind wants to voluntarily become a minority group? Mexicans in Mexico certainly don’t.
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California is a classic example of why immigration needs changing - it is going bankrupt.
Why should there be a legal benefit that occurs as the direct result of an illegal act? That is bizarre policy. It seems most logical to me that a citizen is someone born to a U.S. citizen or citizens, wherever that birth takes place. Otherwise naturalization is the only other option. Why in the world should the birthplace dictate citizenship, all other factors aside? What magic occurs by virtue of the birth taking place on U.S. soil? What exactly about that act means it should confer citizenship? I don’t get the logic at all. To me, you might just as well say, “Any person born between the hours of noon and 1:00 PM, wherever that birth occurs, regardless of the parents’ citizenship, is a U.S. citizen.” Or “any child who weights greater than 7 lbs at birth.” It would be just as clear a boundary and would be just as arbitrary.
I would accept a policy where anyone born here of parents who are here legally–whatever that legal status is–is a citizen. That’s at least better than the current policy. Which, again, makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Oh, and by the way, I’d like the restriction to only apply to brown people. :rolleyes:
Birthright citizenship is one of the smartest things the US does when it comes to immigration.
The German example has already been brought up, but not in detail, and it’s fully relevant here. The Germans were a blood citizenship nation, and they had to modify that because of the problems it was causing.
The Germans have a population of immigrant Gastarbeiter, many of them Turks, who they invited into the country to provide some cheap labor for their factories. Apparently, in the pleasant little fairytale that the Germans substituted for actual thinking, they believed that these guest-workers would live and work for three years, then leave. Of course, the labor demand of the country didn’t disappear after just three years. A large chunk of the workers stayed, put down roots, raised families. And their children, many of them with practically no Turkish and all, many of them who had never even been to Turkey, were never citizens. So you had an entire new underclass of German-speaking non-citizens, gangs of disaffected youth who literally had no country. They weren’t German citizens and they weren’t proper Turks.
This was not a fun experience for them.
Moving toward birthright citizenship became necessary in Germany as soon as they became an immigrant country. It just took them a long while to figure that out. The Germans have had problems coming to terms–I heard some pretty appallingly racist things from otherwise “progressive” people when I lived across the pond–but there’s no going back now to a complete bloodright system. That would not work. For the US to move in the other direction would be simply absurd. For all our problems, the US does about ten thousand times better at integrating our immigrants, both legal and otherwise, and that is in no small part due to the fact that the kiddies are full-fledged citizens from the moment the little turd-machines are born.
Our children don’t have the identity crisis that the Germans force upon their young Turks, even today, by forcing them to make a choice. There’s no question that the children are Americans from the get-go. And that means, really means, that they act like Americans.
The alternative can be nightmarish. If you start off, day one, from the position that they don’t really belong, then many of them will never belong. You’ll be left with a population of people who are legally foreign but effectively stateless, who have lived their whole lives in the country but never identify with it because the country never identified with them. That’s simply an appalling situation. And it’s not just bad for them. It’s bad for everybody.
And from an economic perspective, I have to say that of all the places where libertarians could draw the line, immigration is one of the strangest. For markets to work efficiently, they require the free flow of capital and labor. If you compromise on that, then there’s no reason not to compromise on any other barrier to international trade: import tariffs, capital controls, you name it. Whatever excuses you can provide about reducing the number of immigrants, I can come up with a protectionist analogy about reducing imports. I realize that not all libertarians are uncompromisingly dogmatic, but I still find this particular exception very odd.
There’s a conflict between Libertarians True to Libertarian Principles & Libertarians, Darlings of the Teapartiers. The Teaparty gathering I observed (in a public, taxpayer built park) was blindingly white. Sentiment against immigration (illegal & otherwise) was featured on many signs & shouted in speeches. These are the folks who were just fine with a deficit–until we got a (sort of) black president.
Hellestal, how is your “nightmarish” circumstance different in any way from someone who snuck into Germany, uninvited, and gave birth? What if the children were born elsewhere and brought into the country illegally later as infants, where they’re raised as “cultural Germans.” Those children are identically disaffected and alienated, correct? Should we confer citizenship on them too, since presumably the same rationale would apply–i.e., their circumstance is “nightmarish”?
This is the key sticking point for me. I have no problem granting citizenship to anyone who is born here of a parent who is here legally. And I don’t care what color their skin is.
Please tell me what crime did the child commit, or do you believe that children should be punished for the crimes of their parents?
In an ideal world, yes, those young children should have opportunity to attain citizenship, too.
But in the real world you need a rule. Governments need practical solutions to deal with the larger problems, not every little tragedy. Birthright is a good, easy-to-understand rule. By itself, with no further modification, it prevents the development of an entire underclass of un-citizens, so that particular problem is one we don’t have to worry about. Of course, you’ll still have a few sad cases who slip through the cracks between the cultures, but thankfully they’ll be the exception and not the norm. You won’t breed an entire new generation of effectively stateless youngsters, because there won’t be enough of them.
Still, the few exceptions will be in a bad situation, so if you can come up with a convincing set of legal criteria to help these children, too, get their citizenship, I will be sure to support your proposal.
How about this: Anyone in this country is deemed a citizen. That solves your issue for everyone, no underclass of un-citizens, and the rule is certainly easy to understand. Any issues with that approach?
BTW, “every little tragedy” is an odd way of describing all the illegals here who weren’t born here. There’s lots and lots of them, right?
What crime did an impoverished infant from, say, Guatemala commit? Because he isn’t a citizen either.