Derb: My point is not that the consequences of birthright citizenship are unimportant – the fact that nearly one in 10 babies born in America today has an illegal-alien mother is of enormous importance. It is, however, merely a symptom of a broken immigration system; our bathtub is overflowing, and I’m more concerned with turning off the tap than mopping the floor. And, in fact, I guarantee you that if there were to develop sufficient political momentum in Congress behind a change in the citizenship rules, that the open-borders Right would agree to it as a way of co-opting efforts at actually solving our immigration mess, which is exactly what happened in the welfare reform debate of 1996. In other words, we’d end up with a different citizenship arrangement but still-open borders, rather than focusing our political efforts on fixing the core problem.

Regarding Podhoretz’s point, I’d agree that changing the rules allowing chain migration is part of the solution – turning off the tap, as it were. Though his claim that without immigration, we’d have only a quarter of today’s population is incorrect; some demographers looked at this a few years ago and concluded that with zero immigration after 1776, we’d have about half of today’s population – a lot less, of course, but hardly the end of the world.

Oh, and John Pod, about the CAPITAL LETTERS and whatnot – the immigration debate is pretty nasty all around, so get used to it.