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.
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.