The most objectionable part here — by far — is not the deportation of the parents, but the deportation of citizens and the lack of due process.
The alternative being proposed is that if ICE is going to deport the parents of US citizen children, the parents should be given the opportunity to seek legal counsel regarding how they're going to ensure care for their children.
This is not true - a citizen by birth can become the president, a naturalized citizen cannot.
Unless of course your lack empathy and de-humanize people by calling them "aliens".
This is why birthright as a legal concept is a diminishment of citizenship for all those who hold it.
Parents pass on the shared history, values, and national culture to their kids. Parents are those who give value to US citizenship.
Not coming out of a belly, that happens to be inside a US hospital.
“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.” -US Constitution, 14th Amendment
Quite literally, US hospitals do have that magic pixie dust because they are on the land of this country.
Will need to be resolved.
Its not a coincidence that Switzerland is the longest-lasting democracy in the world by a factor of 4x, vs USA. Their framers had the foresight to enshrine their communities' common history, values, and culture.... over pixie dust.
If you don’t know US history, why bother to show your ignorance so visibly?
Wax poetic about nativism all you like, it won’t change the truth.
Except our nation’s shared history, values, and national culture is that we’re a nation of immigrants, a melting pot of global cultures, a refuge for those in need, and a place where anyone can come to seek their fortune, so obviously American parents haven’t been passing on those values to their children if we’re still having this debate, and I think the only fair response to that is to deport all the children who don’t meet your standards of citizenship, by which I mean the entire cohort that’s arguing all this is OK.
That way lies a very ugly argument about who is enough on the team. One that almost nobody who thinks themselves American wins, because the real winners of that argument should be the folks stuck into reservations by the alien ancestors of those who see themselves as "true Americans, born of Americans."
For Americans in particular, the best strategy for not having their own legitimacy challenged is definitely not to pull too hard on the legitimacy thread.
In fact, all immigrants who came into this country, actually passed tests (education, work exp, english, etc) before being allowed in. Even in Ellis island at the height of the immigration boom, immigrants who could not support themselves, were sick, etc, were turned around [1]
So yes, we are a nation of immigrants, not a nation of illegal aliens
In the fifties and sixties, those in America who deeply concern themselves with average skin tone saw a darkening country. They believed that fast-tracking immigration for family members would allow Europeans escaping the aftermath of World War II to immigrate rapidly to America, which would bolster the numbers and tilt the national average a bit, if you will, caucasian.
... what they fundamentally failed to grasp is that after the war, America sent her fighting boys (and girls) out to enforce Democracy over Communism at the point of a sword. Sen them to countries where the average citizen was not, generally, bothered by intense direct sunlight. And those boys fell in love. With people who distinctly lacked a certain, shall we say, Innsmouth look that our bigot friends preferred in their fellow citizens. Plus, folks from geographically-adjacent countries who went through the arduous process of naturalization were able to bring their extended families in as well.
The final consequence was a policy that had been supported on one side for mostly economic and "melting pot" reasons that was also supported by bigots for decidedly bigot reasons... Turned out to make the country more diverse, not the less-diverse the bigots had hoped for.
It's a feel-good self-own story.
I think this issue mostly emphasizes the highly unpleasant issues that unrestricted bithright citizenship causes. There's a reason literally no other advanced economy, besides Canada, has maintained such a thing. [1] And Canada is probably the outlier there due to being geographically protected from illegal immigration. Even if somebody e.g. boats over to North America, they're going to be much more likely to head towards the US than Canada.
I say maintained because it's self evident that birthright citizenship would have been a given in the times before big government, if not only because it couldn't not be a given. But basically everywhere desirable started getting rid of it once it started being abused. The entry on Ireland, the last country in Europe to eliminate unrestricted birthright citizenship, is interesting:
---
On 1 January 2005, the law was amended to require that at least one of the parents be an Irish citizen; a British citizen; a resident with a permanent right to reside in Ireland or in Northern Ireland; or a legal resident residing three of the last four years in the country (excluding students and asylum seekers) (see Irish nationality law).[64] The amendment was prompted by the case of Man Chen, a Chinese woman living in mainland United Kingdom who traveled to Belfast (Northern Ireland, part of the UK) to give birth in order to benefit from the previous rule whereby anyone born on any part of the island of Ireland was automatically granted Irish citizenship. The Chinese parents used their daughter's Irish (and thereby European Union) citizenship to obtain permanent residence in the UK as parents of a dependent EU citizen. Ireland was the last country in Europe to abolish unrestricted jus soli. (see Irish nationality law).[107]
---
Under the US Constitution, this is not a distinction. What you're looking for is just "the children's citizenship" without this qualifier that signifies nothing under the law.
The better alternative is to aggressively enforce employment laws against employers. Immigrants come here and stay here to work.
If undocumented workers are finding productive work in an economy with low unemployment then the problem is that the government is not facilitating them gaining legal status.
Employers need to stop taking advantage of undocumented workers at artificially suppressed wages. This has acted like a subsidy keeping these poor business models afloat. This has led us to the situation we are in now, where we've become dependent on undocumented migrants (food production etc), who we are being taking advantage of (lower wages, less rights), and also trying to villanize & deport them (the article above). All simultaneously.
It's possible with careful coordination of industry, legislation, and immagration, we wouldn't be here. But now that we are, we need to either find a way to improve the situation or reverse it.
We should stop letting employers do this, and then we all discover that we still really want to employ immigrants, we should enable that, legally.
It would be a forcing function.
Looking at the most recent DHS yearbook (apples and oranges, but the best I can find so far) at https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook and scaling to match the curve at the ICE stats page, it looks like illegal immigration was way down at the end of Biden's term.
So maybe the influx was already slowed dramatically. I don't think it's possible to stop people from wanting to go to the US, except by making it worse that the places people are leaving. I don't think that's a worthy goal.
This is a classic political tactic to be able to say you want to do something, but never actually have to do it. Politicians use this tactic when they don't actually want to do the thing for some reason. In this case, it's because it's really unpopular with business owners, who like to employ illegal immigrants.
It's perfectly reasonable to say "we need to crack down on employers in conjunction with aggressive border and deportation enforcement". But I'm very skeptical of anyone saying "stopping the flow is step 1". I've heard that story before!
I like how nobody has actually answered this question yet, and have only harped on your birthright comment.
The parents are in the US illegally, ICE deports people who are in the US illegally. Presumably the parents didn’t want to leave their USC kids behind so they brought them.
I guess possible options are
1. Allow illegal parents to designate USC kids a guardian who has legal US immigration status
2. Dont deport illegal immigrants who have USC kids (basically making birthright transitive to parents)
Birthright is somewhat transitive. US citizens can sponsor family members for a green card once they’re 18.
No, the father is not. And when trying to get the mother legal help for her situation was cut off from her. Same when the court tried to get information, ICE ignored it, got her on a plane and then shortly after said “sorry, too late”.
I think the details will matter here, it does seem like ICE skrewed the pooch here in not giving the family recourse to get the kids out of the detainee facility. If the USC kids were involuntarily detained that is a problem (despite it may be legal to do that according to US federal law).
Then, as welfare, lack of law enforcement and border grew, the broken citizenship process became a larger problem that now we have to deal with.
To me, the answer to your question of what is the alternative is as follows: The sole act of breaking laws and cutting the line to come into the country, to then birth babies here for the pusposes of straightjacketing the host's own response seems like should not be allowed, full stop. The premise of becoming a US citizen cannot be grounded in 2 crimes being committed before you are a citizen (1 illegal entry, 1 lying about your asylum petition).
We then have the issue of citizenship. It cannot be that because you come out of a womb that happens to be passing by a US hospital, you are a US citizen. US hospitals do not have magic pixie dust that grant american-ness. The Swiss have the right model that you actually have to come from at least 1 national parent, to foster national unity. The Swiss have the longest-lasting democracy in the world for a reason. Ignoring this seems suicidal. In nature and history, no humans prospered without an organized tribe centered around shared history and values.
Then there are the cases of people that came here, all legally, and found a life worth having by contributing to society. There should be a path for them to be citizens. What that path looks like, I dont know. But that's a conversation worth having soon since they are paying the price for the crimes and abuse committed by the 1st group.
“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.”
> It has been proposed that the US citizenship model was always like the Swiss model - you could only be a citizen if you were born of at least 1 citizen (naturalized or otherwise). For reasons I'm not clear, this has not been strictly enforced for some time.
I think any clear reading of the 14th amendment shows that you are incorrect.
"and subject to the jurisdiction thereof"
seems critical to make a determination on whether you are correct or not.
Take the act of a random french spy who goes to the UK for the purpose of defecting, without express permission of either government. Does that make him a subject to the UK crown? I think the historical outcome of such situation would be crystal-clear.
The 14th amendment discusses who is a citizen. It does not capture who is a subject to US jurisdictions, or not. That part is open to interpretation , likely because it is based in common law.
Not only is that not in the text of the 14th, it's different from your original proposal two comments ago. If you really want to do this fine-grained reading to try to support your point, you might notice that 1. the subject to the jurisdiction clause is the baby, not the parents, 2. breaking a law does not mean you are not subject to the jurisdiction of the state you reside in.
The only reason they go to jail is because de-facto that is is fair for the victimm in that he/she gets "Restitution" in the form of jail time for the non-citizen, and presumably, the foreign country may even be able to challenge that.
The dejure interpretation may be he should be banished, although that would be unfair to the victim.
SCOTUS response: “LOL”. 6-2 (1 abstention) in favor of him being a citizen. The majority assent lays out pretty clearly that the jurisdiction language was to except diplomats and Native American tribespeople who had different treaties and status.
The Wong Kim Ark ruling is super, super, super clear that it would only be in EXTRAORDINARY circumstances that the 14th wouldn’t apply. For instance, two people in an invasion force sent by King George to take back the colonies have a baby with each other on US soil: probably not a citizen. Even then, if those two were in prison and had the baby: probably a citizen. Baby of two diplomats: not a citizen (called out in the ruling).
The dissent says: The 14th was really about Dredd Scott, and giving former slaves born in US soil full citizenship rights, and therefore “jurisdiction” is obviously only for naturalized citizens: Mr. Ark didn’t seek citizenship and therefore didn’t have it, since he wasn’t a former slave or child of a former slave, the 14th doesn’t apply.
The current attempt to reframe the 14th while including the Ark ruling relies on the very novel idea that anyone in the country without permission is not “subject to the jurisdiction of the US”. ICE’s actions clearly bely that take. It’s not a tenable angle to try and get rid of birthright citizenship, full stop.
However, as you well said, this is the interpretation of the amendment at the time based on that particular case.
The SCOTUS ruling is based the understanding of the 14th amendment for that particular case. Laws are re-interpreted based on originalist or expansionist understanding of the law at the time is was written. It could very well be that this was one of the latter examples, and that there is ample evidence of it that simply didn't make it to Ark. A legal scholar will need to do the work to really understand what was the intent of the 14th as it was written, and present its case to SCOTUS to persevere. The administration could really be attempting to reframe without any legal basis, and if so, the EO won't survive, and we will be able to move on with a full understanding of the 14th.
That Yale article points out European countries have more traditionally relied on "jus sanguinis" -- parentage-based nationality, where UK, US and LatAm countries are mostly "jus soli" with "sanguinis" additions for, say, kids born in foreign countries to nationals.
Anyway - it would be pretty surprising to hear that this is not a reframe. I'll be reading the case with interest.
It means that the parents must be immune from the US government actions. For example, if they are diplomats and literally can't be arrested even if they commit a murder in the plain sight.
I like this a lot. That makes total sense and would take away the incentive to cross the border to give birth.
Just Apu from the Simpsons is only possible due to our immigration. Just the very fucking iconic cartoon character. This is not from legal immigration. Taco Tuesdays, every Irish pub, like, it sounds silly, but what they offer America is ten fold. I do not care about the best and the brightest, give us your tired and poor.
The American right-wing reeks of elitism (soft language for racist/xenophobic) and it is the antithesis of the American spirit and dream. I'm not with it.
This will be one of my final posts on this topic because I believe we are only in month five, and have 3.5 years to go. I pray the midterms are a landslide, and I pray the next Democrat grants Amnesty. See you all on the other side, because to me this issue is no different than the anit-gay marriage bullshit from the 2000s that we wiped the table clean of once and for all. We are a nation of immigrants and we will be so until eternity.
Common notion, but based in ignorance. I've found that the left wing is more idealistic, but in the sense that they have chosen not to learn from history and rely on immediate emotional values. The right wing sees second order effects and acts on them.
Thus, you get the left calling the right heartless/immoral/racist, and the right calling the left idiots.
This is just an ad hominem, to prove it, I shall call you ignorant too.
Next:
The right wing sees second order effects and acts on them.
I need white people on the right to testify honestly that a Mexican took their job or out-bid them on a rental or real estate. So I would need millions of them to say "Hey I went for this job at Costco, but some cheaper Venezuelan got it". Or, "Hey I wanted an apartment, but since there are so many Mexicans, they all just gobbled it up". So, what I need is testimonies of this.
The reason we don't get such testimonies is because the truth is nastier. The truth is, "hmm, its a little too brown and dirty and all crime-like in my neighborhood now days". This they will never testify to.
You've clearly only paid attention to ragebait. Because "integrated members of our society" is exactly what the right wing is interested in. But this is not what happened in recent years. The entire reason for the deportations is because they are not becoming "integrated members of our society" - it instead became "all crime-like" in places it wasn't before, and the correlation with the alien imports is just too obvious. It happened too fast and too much, and now the correction is just as hard.
"They are simply sick" and you're...... proving my point.
It’s hard to take this one at good faith. The right wing is very publicly melting down the CDC for glue while the second order effects of a preventable measles epidemic spreads through the country. Is there a more targeted claim you want to make?
I suspect that you merely dislike the authoritarian things the government is currently doing; I dislike that the government is authoritarian. We are not the same.
Slavery, segregation, women’s suffrage, child labor protections, labor rights, Social Security, interracial marriage, homosexuality, civil rights legislation, same-sex marriage, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, prohibition, environmental protections, public education expansion, healthcare reform, voting rights expansion, immigration rights, disability rights, reproductive rights, minimum wage laws, workers’ compensation laws.
> considered unspeakably cruel
You're not disagreeing on any pragmatic basis, just the emotional one. Like I said.
They could have said things like 'reproductive rights leads to X goods for the populace' or 'prohibition was a net positive in Y ways' or 'minimum wage laws are shown to improve GDP by Z amt on average' - but they didn't. They used an emotional argument. Like I said they would.
And 'wrong side of history' (bandwagon fallacy) and references to 'cruelty' (appeal to emotions) is really, really bad epistemology.
The Republican party traded logic for populism long ago.
No, citizenship based solely on a person's birth within the territory is a common feature found in countries in the Americas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli
It's always been like that. Otherwise, think of the first generation of citizens for each of these countries as they gained independence. They were citizens because they were born on that soil.
As to why this isn't the case for countries outside of the Americas, that's a more interesting question, IMO. Were people citizens in some informal sense before laws were written on the concept of a birthright to citizenship? Who knows...
It doesn't have to be as ugly as what is described in the article.
My citizenship is solely that way too, even though generations of my ancestors were also citizens.
Unless you personally naturalized then your citizenship is solely by birthright. The vast majority of US citizens are this way. Insisting that this is somehow worth less in terms of legal protections is just frankly wrong.
Imagine you said this for other circumstances. "Well, a parent going to prison is always going to be hard for the family - better imprison the whole family!"
There is a moral answer, the practical answer, and two popular answers, none of which are particularly satisfying.
The moral answer is open borders. Both capital, which is generally freer than people are, and people should be able to vote with their feet. However, this is unsustainable unless all or a large bloc of countries allow it in reciprocity, or at least countries with an EU-like agreement. It would make a lot of sense for all of North America to have an EU-like agreement, economically, militarily, and legally.
The practical answer: amnesty for parents of children who are born here, conditional on criminality aversion. Like a form of probation.
The right-wing propaganda answer: immigrants somehow took jobs they are unwilling to do and therefore, while we might crack a few eggs making the omelette, all immigrants must go. Authoritarians love this view.
The left-wing propaganda: all immigrants are noble victims of evil capitalist systems, and therefore any control over borders is inherently racist and fascist. This is clearly also unsustainable, and authoritarians love for their opponents to have this view.
A strong no on this being "the moral answer". If people are permitted to vote with their feet maybe people are also permitted to build pickets around communities. That sounds more "moral" to me than entirely ignoring the wishes of the chosen destination's "people". IFF the destination is happy to welcome people who think their community better than their own and want to move over, then fine, that is a much better candidate for "the moral answer".
Voters have rejected this sort of cosmopolitanism at the ballot box, repeatedly. To suggest that governments should open borders over the wishes of their citizens seems to simply be an object-level misunderstanding over the goals of statecraft.
The purpose of a Republic is to be a stable entity that ensures the welfare of its citizens. It is not to have a single-minded obsession with global welfare at the expense of its own sustainability or the desires of its citizens.
I'm less confident that this was performed in either location due to direct democracy, and more because it made political sense and was expedient at the time that these locale enacted the governance structure.
In other words, it's not a one-and-done-forever type discussion, and things (clearly) evolve over time.
But "well Trump won so just have ICE kill them all" (this is what my aunt, a republican lobbyist, wants) is not a thing.
I don't see how it's unrealistic.
Think it should depend on custody. US courts don't just always favor the custody of the citizen parent.
A fair trial in court for a start.
No, there are lots of immigration statuses between "illegal" and "citizen". DAPA, which was the Obama administration's policy, gave parents of US citizens a status where they could get temporary renewable work permits and exemption for deportation. This was not citizenship, or even a status that could allow someone to eventually become a citizen.
The net result, of course, is identical to if they had all stayed home.
I think there has to be a reasonable solution that gives legal status to the guy who's been here for 20 years and is making a positive contribution to society, but doesn't allow someone to show up and exploit loopholes to stay forever.
I think a reasonable compromise would look something like this:
* Make it much easier for people to get temporary visas for the kinds of jobs where we need migrant workers.
* Provide a pathway to citizenship for people who have been in this country for a very long time and are contributing to society.
* Make it very difficult for people to come to the US without a visa - e.g. make people apply for asylum outside of the US. Stop issuing temporary protected status to huge blocks of migrants.
Unfortunately, political polarization has basically made it impossible for Congress to solve real problems.
The simpler, logically consistent solution would be that the child’s citizenship is only granted if the parents are citizens. (Or at least if parents are not illegal immigrants). Then when you deport the parents, you can legally deport the child too. It still is not a pleasant situation, there is no ideal solution here, except he should have never been let in at all, but once he is, these seem the only choices
Citizenship by blood creates its own problems. I am eligible for Polish citizenship if I choose to pursue it based on where my ancestors lived. I have never been to Poland, don't speak the language, and don't really know that much about the culture or feel any loyalty or even much affinity to Poland. On the other hand, let's say that someone is born in Poland to immigrant parents. Culturally they are entirely Polish - they lived their whole life there, speak the language, were educated by the Polish school system and consider themselves entirely Polish - they've never lived anywhere else. Yet they would not have the same ability to become a citizen that I have. If I got Polish citizenship, I'd just take whatever benefits I could from it and contribute nothing to Poland. How is it logical that I could be a Polish citizen and this person couldn't be?
Is there an acceptable way for POC to get citizenship anymore, if it's not by inheritance and it's not by being born in the US?
How about real actual fucking due process? Maybe they can NOT cut off communication when the citizen father tried to provide her with a phone number for legal counsel. Anything else is ghoulish. Keep defending it if you really don’t give a shit about your level of humanity.
Is father a US citizen?
Based on https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21... assuming that's the right case it doesn't seem like he is
Yeah, it sounds like a completely unworkable situation.
If only there was some way to make it easier for people to stay in the United States with much relaxed concern about their citizenship status or documentation.
... Oh wait, we could just do that. Because it's our laws, which means it's rules for a game we made up for ourselves. The universe does not care about the lines drawn on a map. People do. If the lines drawn on a map and the separation of human beings across those lines is becoming painful... Maybe we stop hurting ourselves?
We could care less. We did care less in the past. It seemed to work pretty well.
Like in this case, what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent that you think could be agreeable to most people? The parents were in the country illegally, and the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright. Any sort of "pleasant" outcome would effectively require turning birthright citizenship into defacto citizenship for the parents as well, at least if they can stay illegally for long enough. That's not only completely unrealistic, but also a complete slap in the face to the millions of people who try to migrate legally and are refused entry.