One of the arguments made against changing our citizenship practices is that if we did so, the children born to illegal aliens in the future would be stateless. A spokesman for a high-immigration think tank in D.C. put it this way: “These children, who didn’t break any laws, would have no rights and nowhere to go.”
This is untrue. As Allan Wall, a longtime American resident of Mexico, points out, the Mexican constitution says that any child born of a Mexican citizen, anywhere in the world, is a Mexican citizen. Almost all countries have similar rules, including the United States (though it’s not in our Constitution). And since “jus soli” rules providing for citizenship for all born in a nation’s territory have been abandoned by all the developed countries that had them except for the U.S. and Canada, you’d think there’d be a big problem by now if these fears were true.
This is the kind of weak argument that undermines a defense of our current citizenship rules. We face a profound problem when nearly 10 percent of all births in the country are to illegal-alien mothers. This not only mocks the concept of national self-determination (gate-crashers deciding the future makeup of the nation) but also makes it politically more difficult to deport illegals, because it supposedly involves breaking up families. And it’s true but irrelevant that U.S.-citizen kids can’t sponsor their parents (and brothers and sisters) for green cards until age 21 — as we’ve seen, this administration is considering expanding the grounds of “extreme hardship” for the purposes of deferring deportation to include such parents.
I’m afraid that rhetoric about “restoring Dred Scott” or “manufacturing an argument to create an issue” just marks defenders as out of touch with the public’s deeply felt concerns. Krauthammer has it right: “Let’s not spend all of our time changing the Constitution. Let’s get immigration reform; meaning, control of the border.… Build a fence — it’s a lot easier.” Unfortunately, too many of those defending our citizenship rules are also defending the status quo of feckless enforcement and open borders, and that’s a combination that’s not sustainable.
The only way to preserve our current system of automatic citizenship at birth is through strict, unapologetic, across-the-board immigration enforcement — now.