We all know that.
But the authors of the 14th Amendment knew what they were doing when they wrote the amendment making people -- all people -- who were born in the United States citizens of the United States and the state where they resided.
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| Reason.com |
Trump's team argued at the Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment had a narrow purpose, to extend citizenship to the children of former slaves, but not to people who are unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States.
America has always had tension among different immigrant groups. There were New England Congregational descendants of Puritans, Pennsylvania Quakers, and Maryland Catholics. The righteous people of Boston had hanged Mary Dyer for the crime of being a Quaker.
A familiar part of American history is the prejudice against the Irish.
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| "The Irish way of doing things," Thomas Nast, Harpers Magazine, 1871 |
The Ku Klux Klan is famous now for anti-Black sentiment but its original animus was opposition to Catholic immigration. The political party with the famous name, the "Know Nothing Party," officially the American Party, was a nativist party opposed to immigration generally, but especially by Catholics.
In 1868, amid a Republican majority big enough to override vetoes from President Andrew Johnson, Congress passed civil rights legislation. Congress proposed the 14th Amendment, with language that declared citizenship for people born here.
In Senate debate on the issue, Edgar Cowan, a Republican from Pennsylvania complained that the amendment went too far. It would offer citizenship to children of Chinese immigrants. He asked his colleagues, "Is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration of the Mongol race? Are they to be immigrated out of house and home by Chinese." He also opposed "Gypsies" who he said were present in Pennsylvania. "These people live in the country and are born in the country. They infest society. If the mere fact of being born in the country confers that right [ of citizenship], then they will have it, and I think it will be mischievous."
A senator from California, also a Republican, said, "I beg my honorable friend from Pennsylvania to give himself no further trouble on account of the Chinese in California or on the Pacific coast. We are entirely ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and equal protection before the law with others."
Both sides understood what it meant: Being born in America bestowed citizenship.
Chinese immigration -- and birthright citizenship for children of Chinese extraction -- was the "hard" case at that time, the one that best tested the scope of the 14th Amendment. Chinese immigration was unpopular in California. Sixteen years later, in 1882, agitation out of California got Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act. But birthright citizenship extended even to the Chinese. There wasn't a carve out or exception, even though it would have had popular support.
There is an element of quaintness to the changing targets of anti-immigrant focus over the generations. Quakers. Irish, Catholics, Chinese. In World War I it was Germans. In World War II it was the Japanese. People hated Quakers??? People on the outs cycle into becoming part of the new majority.
The constant is that someone is on the outs. President Trump is riding this recurring American unease about immigration. He takes a broad brush, first focusing on Mexicans ("They don't send their best,") and now people from Latin America generally (except Cubans, a Trump-friendly constituency in south Florida). He wants to exclude Muslims, Haitians and people from "shithole countries," and Blacks (but not Whites) from South Africa. He wants to stop people from unpopular, undesirable ethnicities from joining the melting pot. He wants a carve out for the 14th Amendment.
If he creates one, it will be new. Both opponents and supporters of it understood what the law said: People born here, even if from unpopular ethnicities, are citizens.
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10 comments:
Unlike the Second Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment is worded very clearly. If people want it changed, it can be done the same way we did prohibition – not at the whim of some ignoranus the people were stupid enough to make president.
The original intent and current application of the 14th Amendment is beyond my capacity. I will note one commonality among this list of sometimes-resented immigrant groups over the years--the vast bulk of them entered the country legally. The extent to which that distinction is to be effaced for most practical purposes? That remains to be determined.
There's a wonderful poster the shows a photograph of some Native American warriors and says, HOMELAND SECURITY: FIGHTING TERRORISM SINCE 1492. Sometimes I wish they had done a better job.
The notion of legal vs illegal immigration is is utterly irrelevant. You can prattle on about it, but the reality is humans are fleeing oppression, those that can, risking their lives. Racist demagogues have always sought to exploit prejudices, ignoring reality, to insure their grip on the minds and pocketbooks of the dim. BTW, we ALL have birthright citizenship, if you haven't noticed. If we allow it to be rescinded for some, what's next?
When you look at earth from the voyager or from the moon, those boundaries don’t seem to count. We are all sharing this planet and we all have a common ancestor dating to around 150,000 years ago.
Your first sentence also binds Mexico via a vis poorer neighboring Guatemalans, right? China too must respect those fleeing “oppression”? Borders, schmorders……
The Clovis could have used one too. And peaceful tribes subjected to rapine and plunder by the Comanches….
According to Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court, the general rule until 1924 was that American Indians were not U.S. citizens, even though they were born here. There are surely some Indian people still alive who were born into this crazy legal scheme of things. The rationale was that they were citizens of sovereign tribes, so they weren't United States citizens. The Constitution refers to "Indians not taxed" as being apart from the American body politic. How convenient, for taking Indian land and resources. Anyhow, it's simplistic to say that an argument can't be made against birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants, aka illegal aliens. Where there's a will, there is a way.
The way is an amendment to the Constitution. Good luck.
The "way" was to believe that Native Americans weren't covered by the 14th Amendment. If we who are comfortable with our own birthright citizenship keep telling ourselves that illegal aliens aren't covered, we can convince ourselves that their children born in this country aren't covered either. Who in their right mind would believe that the victims of the Wounded Knee Massacre weren't "subjected" to the jurisdiction of the United States; or that the government's uncompensated taking of "surplus" land to open the Klamath River Reservation to white homesteaders and timber companies wasn't an exercise of the United States' jurisdiction over the Yurok people who depended on that reservation? Well, everybody who ran this country believed that. Let's not kid ourselves that such things could never happen again. By "such things," I'm thinking of the denial of birthright citizenship to people who lack power to do anything but accept that they are not citizens and they have no rights. MAGA!
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