Get rid of birthright citizenship and you make all citizenship merely provisional. Black people in the free states thought they were citizens until the Dred Scott decision arbitrarily stripped them of their citizenship. In the first step of the Holocaust, German Jews were stripped of their citizenship. After World War II, ethnic Germans living in Eastern Europe were booted out of their countries, where in some cases, like Volga Germans, they’d been living for centuries, and repatriated to Germany (half a million died). And if you think It Can’t Happen Here, the Republican Party has now repudiated the 14th Amendment, one of it’s greatest achievements. When this kind of thing happens, worse will always come.
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She can move freely, but she also owes taxes to the United States. If she works in Brazil for ten years and then gets transferred to New York, she needs no visa, but the IRS will insist upon all those back taxes on everything she’s earned outside the United States in her life. Freedom isn’t free.
To demonstrate their commitment to “the law of the land” and our sacred U.S. Constitution, many conservative pundits and politicians strive to eliminate those Amendments that conflict with their ideology, simply ignore other sections that they find inconvenient to honor, and to pick and choose which court rulings they deem worthy to uphold and which federal laws they will encourage their constituents to defy.
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““[r]epealing birthright citizenship would create an underclass of unauthorized immigrants who, through no fault of their own, would be forced to live in the margins of U.S. society, would not have access to health care and basic services, would be vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, and would be at constant risk of deportation.””
Feature, not a bug. Think of the savings on exploiting children in China and India if we could just do it here at home!
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The Know Nothings as an organized party disappeared before the Civil War. Anti-immigration attitudes have an intricate history.
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Your example highlights the imbalance of this discussion in that it assumes that only Central Americans, mainly Mexicans, take advantage of the 14th amendment to give their children citizenship. Wealthy Chinese will arrange a visit to the USA in order to give their children this same ‘gift’, notably to enable them to get into a US university, but the advantages are also financial e.g caching assets in the USA. I don’t know what the numbers are but this issue pops up in the media occasionally when the DNS shuts down a business catering to expectant Chinese mothers.
I see this primarily as a situation that the superwealthy are best able to exploit for their private gain, one also that was ignored in this piece.
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“Trump would better serve the GOP, and this nation, by proposing serious immigration policy solutions.”
Yeah, but if pigs could fly, they’d be pigeons.
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SInce this piece was written by an immigration attorney, who makes money by encouraging more illegals to come here and use his services, I am not shocked at the omission. In addition, the Migration Policy Institute is a blatantly biased “institute” in which all forms of illegals are encouraged.
Conflict of interest on the illegals side is never noted. This wretched piece of propaganda has everything to do with touting the immigration attorney business, and nothing to do with facts or law.
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Part of the problem is defining illegal immigration as a problem of Brown people crossing the Southern border. Our border with Canada is bigger. Illegally immigration is a much bigger issue when you consider that a lot of people enter this country under legal means, then do something that breaks the law- they over-stay their visas, they work, etc.
If we talk about illegal immigration that way, it’s not an issue you can connect to tRump’s favorite targets- Mexico and Mexicans.
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How many illegals does tRump have working for him? Since he’s so concerned about Brown people slipping across the Southern Border, maybe he should set an example by finding all of the illegals that work for him, fire them and personally fly them back to Mexico.
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Absolutely correct. Some estimate that 4,000,000 of the 11,000,000 + illegals are visa overstays. And the recent immigration reform bill had nothing to say about visa overstays. Unlike all other civilized countries in the world, we do not keep track of visa overstays. In any other country (like those in the EU, Japan, etc), if you overstay your visa, you will be detained, fined, and deported. In this country, you get to keep your high paying job. Visa overstays often have very desirable jobs, jobs that Americans can and should be performing.
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There’s no evidence that this is a widespread phenomenon—for instance, less than 2 percent of Arizona babies were born to nonresident mothers in 2010.
2% is actually quite a lot.
That’s why the Senate passed immigration reform but it will never pass the House. House Republicans want to go back and relitigate the 14th amendment. Many of them want to refight the civil war.
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I keep wondering why people call these the concepts of “conservatives.” They are nothing of the sort.
I keep wondering about the many people who keep repeating this. Conservatives have never been any different, whether you’re talking about William Buckley or the Democratic party in the old south.
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Trump is a teabagging dick, and he is completely wrong about the 14th Amendment. But that’s not to say that there isn’t an issue to be addressed with illegal immigration. There most certainly is. If a nation can’t control it’s borders, then it ceases to be a nation. But the correct way to address this over-all problem, is to hit the businesses which knowingly employ the illegals in the first place. They are coming here for the jobs and the higher wages, at great risk to life and limb. But if a large portion of the jobs dried up due to stricter enforcement, the total number of illegals would drop correspondingly. For example, ten years ago during the recession there were reports of large numbers of illegals heading home to wait it out, rather than stay here and face working conditions that basically mirrored conditions back home. That same low job status can be man-made even when the economy is booming, simply by hitting the law breaking employers with unsustainable fines and fees for employing the illegals in the first place. If the illegal jobs dry up, so will the illegal bodies filling them.
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Thank you for presenting a reasoned, factual rebuttal of Trump’s ridiculous claims. It’s a pity that so many in this country don’t bother to think things through, but are satisfied that if someone says somethin on television, it must be true. Of course, the wingnut response (from the likes of Michelle Malkin, herself a child of immigrants!) is that the “reconquista” is a long-range project. Guess we’ll have to wait another 31 years to find out…
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Yeah, after reading this I thought, “targets minorities, is based on fundamentally changing the Constitutional, and serves as a tool to lower Democratic voter registration… sounds like Republican policy to me!”
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Why do TV pundits always seem to refer to Trump as “intelligent”? Just listen to him for a few minutes and it is obvious that his intelligence is barely comparable to an average grade schooler. So far, the only things he has said that even resemble intelligent comments are those about how the billionaires own all politicians. That is a fact hard to dispute. But, his other “ideas” resemble those of 5th graders far more than those of any even mildly intelligent adult.
Trump’s biggest “skill” is being lucky. He has been bankrupt more than once, but managed to luck into his current status as a billionaire. After listening to him for even a few minutes it is obvious that he couldn’t possibly amass such a fortune through intelligence.
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I feel stupider every time I read something about Trump. He is A Idiot and he’s gong to take the rest of us down with him.
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I’m sorry to hear that France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, etc. have ceased to be nations. I suppose they should now be referred to as ???, but not nations.
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