Thank you, Kathryn, though I didn’t take Cesar’s comments to be directed at me, mainly because I agree with him on the citizenship issue. But, as I pointed out this morning on Diane Rehm’s show (listen here), the birthright-citizenship issue is one that crosses the usual lines on immigration — I know lots of people who don’t agree with my support for lower levels of immigration who nonetheless are (rightly) outraged by the idea that children born to people who aren’t even supposed to be here are afforded citizenship. It would actually be good to have an informed debate on this, but I’m not sure that’s possible when too many of those arguing to maintain current citizenship rules also oppose pretty much every measure to limit illegal immigration. Also, too many of the high-profile pols arguing for a change in citizenship procedures are not credible — does anyone believe that Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell actually want to limit illegal immigration? Anyone? Anyone? For them it’s just a way of appearing tough on immigration without having to support anything that might actually work and thus anger cheap-labor interests.

The birthright-citizenship issue is a trick, a dead end, a trap to get restrictionists to take their eye off the ball of the measures that would actually curtail illegal immigration. My concern is that, if we went through with this, it would end up just like the immigrant portions of the 1996 welfare-reform law. The law overall turned out to be a great success, but the immigrant provisions did not. Restrictionists had been rightly pointing out (and continue to point out) that admitting a foreign peasantry into a modern society will necessarily create huge burdens for taxpayers. Spencer Abraham and his confederates in preserving the mass-immigration status quo took that argument and said, “We agree with you — so let’s cut them all off welfare!” Restrictionists took the bait, and once the proposed limits on immigration were safely defeated, Congress immediately started carving out welfare exceptions, almost every state picked up the welfare slack, and the immigrant groups with the highest welfare-use rates started showing the highest increases in naturalization to preserve their welfare eligibility. The result? Restrictionists were left with nothing, zilch, bupkes. As George Borjas wrote in NR at the time (I don’t think it’s online), you have to fix problems with immigration through immigration policy, not welfare policy.

I have to say, though, that Cesar’s fear that ending birthright citizenship would result in more abortions is dubious empirically and philosophically. After all, ensuring that taxpayers covered the full cost of prenatal care and delivery for anyone who asked, regardless of income, would likely result in somewhat fewer abortions — are conservatives supposed to be for that? Going farther and paying a taxpayer-funded bounty if women reconsider having an abortion might probably result in even fewer abortions — is that something Cesar would support? This attempt to link abortion policy has a long and intellectually implausible history — I remember hearing Pat Robertson, when he ran for president, say that the real reason we have illegal immigration is that, because of Roe v. Wade, all the babies that would would have been born and entered our workforce never materialized, so our economy was forced to import Mexicans. (I’ve heard this thought repeated many times since.) This is absurd — first of all, abortion policy is right or wrong regardless of its workforce impacts. Secondly, the main result of the expansion of abortion was an increase in conceptions, not a big decrease in births. But regardless, this attempt to link immigration to abortion (some pro-abortion restrictionists do the same thing) is a tenuous and far-fetched thing.