Washington State GOP platform opposes automatic citizenship for anchor babies

SPOKANE — The state Republican Party adopted a platform Saturday that includes a provision aimed at opposing automatic citizenship for babies born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants. The state party approved a similar platform plank at its 2006 convention that proved controversial. The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution recognizes citizenship for all persons born in the United States.

[State GOP: No automatic citizenship for kids born in U.S. to illegal immigrants, By Andrew Garber, Seattle Times, June 1, 2008]

It's good to see that some Republicans in this country are questioning birthright citizenship, which is one of the avenues that immigrants employ to come to this country. The 1965 Immigration Act changed U.S. immigration policy to operate on the principle of family reunification. Therefore, most immigrants today are admitted because they have a relative here who is an American citizen. Because recently admitted immigrants can also sponsor family members, the chain migration of relatives has caused the number of legal immigrants to the U.S. to skyrocket (roughly 1.3 million admitted every year, and rising).

The Seattle Times reporter writes that "[t]he 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution recognizes citizenship for all persons born in the United States." Elsewhere in the article, displaying his ignorance for all to see, Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna says: "We have more than 200 years of history in which children born in the U.S. are deemed U.S. citizens. ... What matters is where the children are born."

Well, Mr. McKenna is wrong: for example, the children of foreign diplomats are not granted automatic citizenship if they are born in the United States. And the 14th amendment says no such thing about automatic citizenship. The first sentence of the Amendment states:

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.

Ratified in 1868, the intent of the 14th amendment was to grant American citizenship and, by extension, civil rights, to recently freed slaves (prior to the civil war, slaves were not considered citizens, even though they were subject to U.S. law). The phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was added to prevent granting citizenship to American Indians, who, though they lived within U.S. territory, were members of sovereign tribes not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

As Howard Sutherland argues in his article Weigh Anchor! Enforce the Citizenship Clause [VDare, August 31, 2001], all we have to do to end birthright citizenship is to enforce the amendment as written. In fact, despite the liberal interpretation by the Warren Court and others, no Supreme Court has held explicitly that the 14th Amendment automatically grants American citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

In his article, Sutherland writes:

In the case of illegal aliens, the illegality of their presence in the United States is not in dispute. They remain entirely subject to the jurisdiction of their home countries, the only nations to which they owe direct and immediate allegiance. To reason that, through breaking the laws of the United States by entering and remaining illegally, an illegal alien has somehow transferred his allegiance from his home country to the United States is absurd.

There had been legislation proposed in 2001 that would have denied citizenship to babies of illegal alien mothers born on U.S. soil, but the bill, H.R. 190, never went anywhere. Despite Sutherland's argument, I think that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is too vague and open to creative interpretation today, with the added trouble of between 12-14 million illegals currently living in the country (not to mention the presence of pressure groups like MEChA, La Raza and others). One could argue that as undocumented workers doing the jobs Americans won't do, they are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. With the Washington State Republican Party adopting a platform that specifically rejects birthright citizenship, perhaps others will follow and introduce legislation in Congress that forces an interpretation of the 14th Amendment as written and intended, and absolutely forbids the granting of citizenship to children of non-citizen parents. This would do wonders to end the horror of chain migration, and would also reduce the burden on the American taxpayer, who funds the benefits, such as free health care, for anchor babies and their mothers.