Something occurred to me recently. It’s accepted as a given that citizens of this country are free to procreate to their heart’s content. In other words, they can add as many new citizens as they like to our country via the reproductive proccess.
To use an extreme example to prove my point: Jim Bob Duggar can churn out 19 kids (new citizens), no problem at all. Doesn’t have to apply for permission with anyone to do this.
But I as a child free individual can’t sponsor even one friend from another country to join this great nation. Even if I’m willing to marry a foreigner, they still have to jump through flaming hoops to become a citizen.
Why the extreme preference towards birth right citizenship over naturalization? This seems unfair to me.
To make things more equitable, I’m offering a modest proposal: Citizens who are certifiably sterile, and haven’t reproduced, should be able to nominate at least one person (possibly more) of their choice for citizenship, and as long as the immigrant doesn’t have a criminal history or a dangerous communicable disease they should be let into the country.
I’d think that even with the flaming hoops, raising a child with zero assets that is utterly dependant for the first 5 years and has no earning ability for the first 15 would still be a larger hurdle than just marrying a foreigner and convincing the government to let them become a citizen.
Your mistake is that you are thinking of citizenship as a gift which individual private citizens can confer.
It is not. Nobody can stop me procreating - at least, not without imposing constraints which a free society considers unconscionable – but it is not I who confers nationality on my children. Nationality is conferred by the state (in the US, by the United States) and I do not control the actions of the state; the community at large does, through democratic and constitutional processes.
If the community confers nationality on my children, then it does so because of their intimate connection to me, a citizen. Similarly if it confers nationality on my spouse, though in that case it does want to test the genuineness and robustness of the connection between us.
There’s no reason, however, why the community should wish to confer nationality on someone whose only connection to a citizen is that the citizen chose them capriciously, or for payment, or for economic advantage, as a person he would like to nominate for citizenship. The relationship here is in no sense analogous to the relationships of parent/child or of spouses. There is no parallel. There is no reason why the community should treat the person you have selected as being as intimately connected with you as a child or spouse, especially if you do not treat them in that way.
What would be an alternative that wouldn’t represent a significant infringement on liberty? If you’re going to restrict reproduction, you’re going to have a very ugly situation. You need look no further than China for proof of that.
If you’re going to say “well, you can have all the kids you want, but they don’t get rights of citizenship until they reach the age of majority” or until some arbitrary requirement is met, you restrict the mobility of family (can’t take a kid who isn’t a citizen of anywhere and therefore can’t get a passport out of the country) and create a very difficult situation should there be involvement with any kind of government services.
It’s not so much a preference as the reality of existence. People are going to have children. Children are people, people must have citizenship somewhere.
Now, should there be better routes to naturalization? Absolutely. Do we wrongly prioritize the needs of business in immigration questions, while ignoring completely the breadth of human relationships, especially in the modern era? Yes, we do. But conflating the fact of birthright citizenship with the limitations on naturalization seems to be presuming that those limitations wouldn’t exist or could be loosened if only birthright citizenship were limited. And that’s leading us down a very ugly path.
as for adults, if you’re married to the person, it’s 3 years from Marriage to naturalization. I don’t think you can rationally ask for less than that - it takes at least a nominal amount of time for someone to become integrated and shed the vestiges of their prior foreign life. And it’s not really hoops - it’s filling out 4 forms in total and paying some money. Which is a heck of a lot easier than dealing with the Terrible Twos and bratty kids.
no, we don’t. sorry, getting your third cousin twice removed into this country isn’t a pressing national need, and it’s not vital to the emotional well-being of the immigrant, either.
But this flies in the face of the “anchor baby” provision. Children of parents who have the most tenuous of connections to the US are citizens depite the intimacy of the connection between them and their foreign-in-all-but-location parents.
Those children are not citizens on the basis of an intimate personal connection with a US citizen, but on the basis of having been born within the territory of the US.
Again, this conferring citizenship on all those born in the US is a choice made by the people of the US. The relevant relationship there is not the relationship with the parents, but the relationship with the wider community in which the child is (likely to be) raised.
You could rationally defend a citizenship law which says that citizenship is not granted purely on the basis of birth within a particular country, or that citizenship so granted is liable to be forfeit if the child isn’t raised in that country.
You can’t adopt an adult for the purposes of immigration, even if that adult is not legally competent and requires a guardian.
It can be a pressing family need. The current familial designations for immigration presume a very American perspective on what makes up immediate family. It’s culturally tone deaf, at the very least.
I think the guiding principle is looking at the alternatives. A child born in the United States has no alternative claim to citizenship. If he’s not an American citizen, he’s stateless.
A person in another country presumedly has some other citizenship already. Placing a higher standard of acquiring American citizenship on him does not create the same burden that it would place on somebody who has no other citizenship.
That would only apply if the child was a foundling, otherwise the child would always have derivative citizenship through her parents. Many (most?) counties don’t automatically grant citizenship to people born in their country.
Yes, but the complaint in the OP was that anyone can crank out a kid, and that kid is a citizen just because his parents were citizens. If the kid born in the US to US citizen parents isn’t granted citizenship, then he’s stateless.