Section I:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Tancredo can try all he wants, but it’ll take 2/3 of the several States to ratify any such change.

Unlikely, and, in my opinion, unwise.

Ed

Just when you thought they couldn’t stoop lower…

They walk across the border, have a baby here in the United States, and where does that leave the baby?

Why don’t they leave them at the base of the Statue of Liberty, right under Emma Lazarus’ poem?

Now let’s say that twenty years later two of these ‘children of illegals’ meet, fall in love and have a baby of their own, still here in the US. I assume they are also not citizens? What do you propose to do with this ‘grandchild of illegals’ if you happen to aprehend them? Deport them? To where? The country of their grandparents? Why should that country be expected to accept someone who wasn’t born there, and whose parents weren’t born there?

Now play that same game a couple more generations. How many generations do we go before these ‘great-great-great-….grandchildren of illegals’ become American enough to be acceptable to the Republicans?

Whenever you hear something like this proposal, you should evaluate it with three questions in mind: 1. Is it Constitutional? 2. Is it enforceable? and 3. Is it good public policy?

Yes, you can amend the Constitution such that children of illegals no longer are granted citizenship. But you won’t be able to deport all of them, and you won’t stop them from reproducing. What you’ll end up doing, in the long term, is creating this class of resident non-alien non-citizens. And that’s a bad idea for a whole host of public policy reasons.

Isn’t it curious that we lavish institutions set to observe and restrain this natural, rather “osmotic” flow of emigres with resources, yet the means by which newcomers become economically integrated into the communities that surround them are expected to be laissez-faire? Seems like a recipe for unending tragedy to me. Wouldn’t it be better to choose one approach and stick with it so that people can look at it and understand clearly what to expect and how to proceed. Either laissez-faire on all fronts, or on none.

On one hand there is fear, and there will always be fear. On the other hand there is laziness, and that I suspect is the real threat to the frontier spirit. There is a desire to see institutions stay the same, to serve the needs of peoples who have thus far inherited, and to only expand to provide a buffer between the old and the new. Institutions and economies exist and adapt to serve the needs of those who are willing to participate in them. Within new crowds of people, both the capacity to provide service and the less recognized need for new services exist. Both must be cultivated, and only a courageous and virtuous people can be expected to see these things in another as in themselves.

How important is it to be able to accept that other people pride themselves in bringing happiness to those around them? I believe it is everything.

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

And….

“As the St. Louis steamed toward Havana from Hamburg, Germany, with nearly 1,000 Jews fleeing the Nazis aboard, Recha Weiler desperately nursed her dying husband, Moritz.

While other passengers enjoyed the elegance of the civilized cruise after the repressions and humiliations of Germany, Weiler spent most of the voyage in her cabin with Moritz.

But her efforts failed. The university professor died aboard the ship and was buried at sea.

An estimated half of the passengers were to die later, after both the US and Cuba rejected their pleas for refuge and the cruel 40-day journey sent them back to Europe to face the Nazis.

Some 59 years after the St. Louis’s desperate passage back and forth across the Atlantic, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and its Survivors’ Registry are trying to trace the fates of its passengers, including Recha Weiler, the 61-year-old widow originally from Cologne.

The St. Louis left Germany on May 13, 1939. Its passengers, most of them from Germany, had expensive documents – some bogus – for entry into Cuba.

When the ship arrived, however, Havana – and the US – refused to admit them. The St. Louis sat in the harbor for days.

Desperate relatives packed motorboats and approached the anchored liner, shouting messages to loved ones. All awaited the outcome of frantic international negotiations to allow the refugees to disembark.

Ultimately, only 29 passengers were permitted to land in Havana. Then the ship was ordered to leave – maneuvering slowly and tantalizingly near the coast of Florida before turning back to Europe.

On June 17, 1939, the St. Louis docked at Antwerp: 214 passengers remained in Belgium, 224 went to France and 181 to the Netherlands. Another 288 passengers went ashore in Britain on June 21.

But, the end of that journey was, for its passengers, the beginning of the Holocaust.

…

It seems extraordinary that, after being turned away once, the overwhelming majority of the St. Louis survivors still came to the US after the war. Many must have felt the same sense of betrayal that haunted passenger Wilhelm Sydower.

Sydower had boarded the ocean liner intent on finding refuge for his family – a wife and daughter he left behind – and had planned to bring them over when a sanctuary was secured.

Instead, he was returned to Europe and he and his loved ones hid out the war in Belgium, says his daughter, Renee Schifter of Tel Aviv.

After the war, the family returned to Germany. Sydower died within five years, but not before telling his daughter of the journey.

“He told me about the problems they faced to get to a safe shore and how the United States of America, the great nation of immigration, was unable to take in 1,000 people who were in danger of being murdered,” Schifter said.

“He told me that the Americans were not much better than the Germans. They did not kill people with their own hands – however, they did not help them in time.”

Schifter, who now works on behalf of survivors, refused to emigrate to the US.

“Instead I went to Israel, because I never wanted to stay in Germany,” she said. ”

…

and

“The first naturalization law in the United States was the 1795 Naturalization Act which restricted citizenship to “free white persons” who had resided in the country for five years. The next significant change in the law came in 1870, when the law was broadened to allow both Whites and African-Americans, though Asians were still excluded from citizenship. Immigration was otherwise unlimited.

In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act specifically forbade Chinese immigration, overturning the 1868 Burlingame Treaty which had encouraged it. The “temporary” ban was extended repeatedly and made permanent in 1904. It was the culmination of decades of agitation, particularly by Californians, who had passed their own Anti-Coolie Act in 1862. The ban was deeply resented but was not repealed until 1943, and only then to reward a wartime ally. In order to avoid the same humiliation, the Empire of Japan negotiated the Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1907, a protocol that required Japan to prevent her citizens from emigrating to the U.S. in exchange for better treatment of those already living there.

Congress also banned persons because of their health, beliefs, or lack of education. An 1882 law banned entry of “lunatics” and infectious disease carriers, and the 1901 Anarchist Exclusion Act kept people out because of their political beliefs. A literacy requirement was added in Immigration Act of 1917.

On May 19, 1921, the United States Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act establishing national quotas on immigration. The quotas were based on the number of foreign-born residents of each nationality who were living in the United States as of the 1910 census. A more complex quota plan replaced this “emergency” system under the Immigration Act of 1924. One major change was that the reference census used was changed to that of 1890, which greatly reduced the number of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. Immigrants from most of the Western Hemisphere, however, were admitted outside the quota system.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (the McCarran-Walter Act) revised the quotas again, basing them on the 1920 census. For the first time in history racial distinctions were omitted from the U.S. Code. Nevertheless, most of the quota allocation still went to immigrants from Ireland, the United Kingdom and Germany. Its anti-subversive powers are still in force and have been used to bar the entry of countless individuals based upon their political expressions.”

So yes, granting citizenship to those that are born here may in fact reward what is considered at times to be a criminal act for some, though not for others, and not for all.

A better analogy would be the money gotten through embezzlement. Would the criminal who steals monewy from his companies pension plan then be allowed to place the money in a trust for the child to benefit from when he is 21? Once the criminal parent is caught, I doubt any court would say the money is untouchable and belongs legally to the child.

Also, since you’re parents are LEGAL immigrants, it doesn’t seem like any such law would apply to you, correct?

Being devil’s (literally) advocate here. I hate it when people on my side of the aisle make me take up arguments for the Rethugs.

Now of course, you are a smart person, so I assume you’re defense is the 14th Amendment.

So, you enter America illegally, have a child, and become citizens on the baby’s … diaper pins?