GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Friday he would deport the children of undocumented immigrants with their families, despite them already being U.S. citizens.
“There are legally contested questions under the 14th Amendment of whether the child of an illegal immigrant is indeed a child who enjoys birthright citizenship or not,” Ramaswamy said after a town hall in Iowa.
Ramaswamy is not the only GOP candidate to question U.S. citizenship rules. Former President Trump announced in late May that on his first day back in office, he would seek to end birthright citizenship by way of an executive order.
I’m going to be honest, I’m not a fan of birthright citizenship either. I believe a person born in the US should need at least one parent to be a citizen or lawful permanent resident in order to obtain citizenship, and the system as currently set up is routinely abused (See the Chinese tourist industry as an example). But my personal opinion directly conflicts with the Constitution, and guess which one matters?
There’s absolutely no ambiguity here. The Constitution clearly states that any person born on US soil is a US citizen, full stop. There are no disqualifiers listed. Doesn’t matter where your parents came from. Doesn’t matter if they just showed up in the US 5 minutes ago. If they were born on US soil, they are a US citizen. Any change to that requires a Constitutional amendment. And the chances of that happening any time in the foreseeable future are less than zero.
EDIT: I just want to point out that requirements that at least one parent is a citizen and/or has established long term residency in the country is the standard in the UK, Austrailia, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Spain, and several other countries.
Ending birthright chitizenship is the quickest way to a starship troopers style citizen/non-citizen class divide you can concoct, which is ironically the specific situation the 14th amendment was written to avoid, because prior to that none of the enslaved people were citizens so all their descendants wouldn’t be either
Exactly. Combine that with Native Americans and how we still have a problem with treating brown skinned folks like immigrants even when their family has been in a place since before it was America, especially in the portions of the country that once were Mexico. And we’ve also got the fact that we utilize long term labor from immigrants en masse.
There’s also the logical consistency thing. We’re the nation of immigrants. If you’re born here and raised here you’re one of us. I’d be willing to change it from birth to x time in childhood but that’s a lot of work for something I just don’t see as an issue. I think the way we’re making ourselves unappealing to immigrant labor is a much bigger problem in this country.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by this; we already have this now. There are citizens, and there are non-citizens. The law applies to both equally. Nothing would change.
And making sure that descendants of illegal immigrants are also not citizens is kinda the point. Allowing them to become citizens rewards the parents for illegal immigration, and establishes a “back door” path to citizenship through chain migration. The objective would be to disincentivize illegal immigration by removing one of the rewards for doing it.
I suggest we start with your citizenship first. Which of your parents was rightfully citizens? Can you prove it? How? The only acceptable documents are naturalization paperwork or a lineage that goes back to the revolution. Unless you’re suggesting only DAR members be citizens, a great many people (including almost all Black people) will be denied citizenship.
I think the birthright citizenship is the way to go. If you’re born in the US I think that should be the point where we go “Okay, you’re a citizen”. We could have a situation where a group of people are perpetually denied citizenship for some reason that’s advantageous to another group, and that ensures their children can’t becomes citizens either.
We did! It was slavery, slaves and their descendants were not citizens, and if it were not for birthright citizenship from the 14th amendment, would not be citizens today
Yeah :)
That’s exactly what I was implying lol
This debate has been ongoing in Canada for a while now, but personally I’m going to hold off on forming an opinion until someone can actually prove it’s an issue, because in Canada only ~500 births per year are from mothers who don’t live in Canada. It’s not even worth forming an opinion over, it’s just another polarizing distraction. Not sure if it’s as much of a non-issue in the US as well, but honestly it’s not even worth thinking about until someone shares some actual data.
Much, MUCH different in the US.
There were just shy of 800,000 births by undocumented immigrants between 2010 and 2016, or over 110,000 births per year. So several orders of magnitude above Canada.
Technically only a single order of magnitude in terms of total births (3% vs 0.1%). Up to Americans to determine whether 3% of all births is worth worrying about though.
It’s not worrying, only racists are upset about this. A growing, working, tax-paying population is only good for a nation. Almost every single one of those 110k a year will spend 5-7 decades contributing to the American economy and workforce, that’s a plus in my book regardless of how they got here.
What’s interesting is back in the day Republicans supported this. Milton Friedman, Reagan’s infamous economic advisor, advocated for open borders. It’s essentially what we had in the 1800s. Chicago was 80% immigrant or child of immigrant in 1880s.
Hell, Reagan even gave amnesty to millions of illegals.
I think we should have more or less open borders. Block criminals and extremists… but everyone else let them in. Give them a trial period of like 5 to 10 years. If they pay taxes during that time period and don’t commit serious crimes… let them join the country.
We’re gonna need the population to compete with China. There’s plenty of space in this country for many more people. And more people = more demand for goods and services = more jobs = more opportunities = more GDP
I really don’t see many good reasons why not. Sure, the price of labor will go down but illegals are already doing much of the menial labor already anyways.
It goes by factors of 10
So it would be a bit over 3 orders of magnitude above Canada.
With that said, it doesn’t matter anyway because it would require a constitutional amendment to change, which is nigh on impossible in today’s political climate on any topic.
That’s actually not how orders of magnitude work, the definition is a change by a factor of 10, which means that if a number is n orders of magnitude larger than another it’s 10^n times larger. 2 orders of magnitude = 100 times larger, 3 orders of magnitude is 1000 times larger, etc.
The exact order of magnitude of a ratio is log base 10. So log10(3/0.1)=1.4771 orders of magnitude.
3 orders of magnitude greater is 10 × 10 × 10 = 1000x larger… which refers to 100~999% compared to 0.1%.
Or just deny travel visas to pregnant women, add in an investigation for people who aren’t living in the US but have a baby here. If you are really worried about that, there are better ways than wholesale removal. It just doesn’t really seem like a problem.
Right, cause that’s a situation we really want to give CBP power over… pregnancy tests for all women at the border? Pregnant women who can’t travel for business anymore? At that point, just make us 2nd class citizens and get it over with.
Oh don’t worry, they’re working on that already.
I think the issue is maybe not all countries recognize children of their citizens as also being citizens if born in another country? I could be wrong though, all countries might recognize the children, I’m not that well versed in global citizenship rules.
If that were the case though, someone born in the US would technically not be a citizen anywhere if not for birthright.
I feel the same