The 14th Amendment is a wonderful thing. Shame on people who want to ignore it, or define it away.

The 14th Amendment is a glorious thing, an expression in law and the constitution of the founding aspirations of our country, the self evident truth that all people are created equal.

The 14th Amendment begins:

Section 1. 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.

Yesterday I watched Megyn Kelly attempt to pin down Ted Cruz on whether he agreed with Donald Trump in saying that children born in the US, who have one or more parent of foreign nationality, should be deported immediately and be allowed back only conditionally.   He said this was the wrong question.   Megyn persisted, saying it was an easy yes or no question that Donald Trump has put on the table, with a clear position saying "Yes."   Do you agree, she asked again.   

And, again, Ted Cruz refused an answer saying we needed to examine the whole immigration system.

Well, I will answer the question directly:   Of course not.   Children born in the US are citizens of the United States.   Their parents might not be, but they are.  American citizens are "persons", who cannot be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

It is the Constitution, and it is good.   I have witnessed the mess in Israel where there are a vast number of people in the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River who are now in their 2nd and 3rd generation of non-citizenship.   Non citizenship creates stateless people, people with diminished or zero rights, who are locked into an underclass, people who are frustrated, angry, resentful, and easily drawn toward revolution and violence.   They don't have "buy in" because in fact they are not in.

China has its own version of this chaos, with its rules about residency.   Rural people move to the coastal cities, find work, but lack the privileges of local residency in those cities.  Their children cannot attend schools there, they "belong" elsewhere.   This internal population is frustrated, angry, resentful, and is part of the political instability of their country.

But we need not look to foreign countries to see the problem of an un-integrated population.   We had a legal underclass of noncitizen residents, an enslaved population, counting as 3/5 for purposes of representation but lacking citizenship rights.   American fought a civil war to cure this, then notwithstanding this 14th Amendment had another century of legalized segregation, vote suppression, lynching, terror, all-white juries, and oppression.   America has a long ugly history of oppression racial and ethnic minorities, and having residents with diminished rights enabled that in the past and enables it in the present.

Americans forget our own history of our founding.    Colonists in the British colonies resented lacking the rights and powers of their fellow citizens in Britain.   Since we were not accorded the right of representation in Parliament  one of the privileges of citizenship, Britain had no right to tax us, we asserted.   The colonists protested, the rioted, they revolted and took arms against lawful government.   We were born here, we lived here, but lacked equal rights--no way.   

Yet today, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and now other candidates are jumping on the bandwagon to deny equal rights to some native born persons.

How dare they say the Pledge of Allegiance:  I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."   Justice for all.   All persons.