Comments

1
If a person murders someone, and writes a book about it, he cannot profit from the sales.

This is know as the Son of Sam Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Sam…

We all agree that a person should not benefit from the commission of a crime.

Yet this is what is happening with citizenship.

People are willfully breaking the law and getting a benefit.

It has to end.
2
LOL not gonna happen.
3
A civilized country does not create a permanent illegal underclass just to punish them for the nominal crimes of their parents or grandparents.
5
A civilized country does not create a permanent illegal underclass just to punish them for the nominal crimes of their parents and grandparents.
7
Trump is going to reveal his final form sooner or later. He grows stronger everyday.
8
If we're on the topic of repealing amendments, how about getting rid of the second amendment?
9
The current GOP is a dead political party. What will end up happening is the Democrats are gong to split into the future two parties and what's left of the GOP will simply die off forever
10
I'll trade them the 14th Amendment for the 2nd Amendment.
11
@8 My sentiments exactly.
12
Ahh ha ha. If the party of rapacious business was really serious about ending illegal immigration they could do it in a hot minute. Not by building walls, not by outlawing "anchor babies", but simply by putting any and all employers of illegal laborers in real motherfucking concrete and steel bars jail.

Everything else is hot air believed by fools.
13
@5, sadly it is rapidly becoming the case that a "civilized" country does create a permanent illegal underclass just to cater to the desires of the wealthy for cheap labor.
14
Good job, republicans! Keep up the good work reaching out to minorities! I'm sure policy positions like this will bring them over to your side if you just keep working at it. Really. Keep it up.
15
@12: If we are talking about helping illegal immigrants, jailing the people who give them jobs is not going to help them. You may as well just round them all up and deport them, if you make it impossible for them to work.
16
@9, Tell that to the House of Representatives and the Senate. Also a large number of state governments.
17
Birthright citizenship has helped the people it was intended to help. It is now causing negative effects on families. Getting rid of birthright citizenship could be done carefully as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package that provides a path to citizenship for families already here in the country without documents/illegally and a renewed guest worker program to treat Mexican citizens with the respect that they deserve, allowing them to freely cross the border for economic reasons without requiring them to become economic migrants/refugees.

I'm liberal and will be voting for the Democrat and I will not support ending birthright citizenship unless it is done as part of a comprehensive package that helps us clean up the mess our broken immigration policy has created, however this issue is a legitimate part of the national discussion we need to have about our immigration policies.
18
Piyush Jindal, who was born months after his parents immigrated to the U.S., is on board with ending birthright citizenship.
19
@1:

You have to stop. As it is your comments are literally breaking my Stupid-ometer two or three times a week now, and it's really expensive to have to keep repairing it all the time.

I'll agree to rescinding the 14th Amendment and revoking Birthright Citizenship, but only if we make it retroactive back to its adoption. That alone would probably eliminate 95% of the current GOP slate from qualifying to run for President, which is the only possible beneficial outcome I can envision to such an action.
20
This is so stupid. They are all for the constitution until they are against the constitution. Our nation was founded by immigrants; it has become strong because of immigrants; this is a slap in the face of all the "first generation" born here after their parents immigrated here - legally or illegally.

I like #19's comment. Let's make it retroactive - but all the way back to the founding of the country - and then only people descended from Native Americans can be citizens.
21
@ 15 - I don't think he was talking about helping them at all. He was just saying that there are easier to stop illegal immigration if the GOP really wanted to do it. Of course they don't: who truly benefits from all that cheap labour, after all? Capitalists (i.e. business owners). And who do capitalists vote for?

But the point of such a measure as that suggested by Westside forever is that illegal immigrants would stop coming into the U.S. if no one will hire them there. In the end, that would be a lot cheaper than arresting and deporting them.
22
@17 People it was 'intended to help'? You mean white people?
23
I don't get how a person born and raised in America could somehow not be American. What else could they be?
24
@2: Correct. I was surprised that Miss Lindsey was for this - shameful.
25
@22 no, the citizenship clause of the 14th amendment ensured that slaves freed after the civil war would be citizens.
26
I'm Norwegian on my father's side, and I'm sort of surprised by the admiration for "Scandinavian socialism" from far-left politicians like Bernie Sanders, coupled with utter contempt for the actual mechanics of creating such a society successfully. You can not walk into Norway, give birth, and create a Norwegian citizen. It has nothing to do with being "civilized" - Norway is civilized and socially advanced by anyone's standards. But try to hang out in the country illegally - seriously, try to even get a phone hooked up without the right documentation - and you will have a problem. Immigration has to be controlled (compassionately, of course). A degree of cultural assimilation is also expected. There are reasons for these things, and the result is one of the best countries in the world to live in. Birthright citizenship guarantees the failure of social programs meant to improve the quality of life - if there is always more money going out than going in, if there are always more citizens than jobs to give them, if you have a population that wants the benefits without the responsibilities, no amount of compassion can fix the math.
27
Don't you love how stupid these guys are. Their racism trumps their brains.
28
Sounds like a typical Republican party tactic: choose an unwinnable battle to rally behind. They'll be able to milk a generation or two of rubes for campaign donations by promising to fight for something they can't possibly actually accomplish. Like stopping homosexuality or drug use or teen sex. They would campaign against the tides if they could find a line in the Bible declaring them a sin.

The biggest mistake the Republicans ever made was to "win" the cold war against the godless commies, which had been their dependable cash cow for four decades. They've been in the weeds looking for a comparable boogie man ever since.
29
@17 - I'm not sure I understand your first sentence, but otherwise I concur with the gist of what you're saying. People, listen: the immigration debate is not as simple as bigots vs. non-bigots. There is genuine disagreement by well-meaning people on both sides (and no, I don't mean Trump). It's complicated, and amnesty for everyone is not necessarily the best answer.
30
@29 - Thank you for your very civil comment. Allow me to explain: Birthright citizenship gave citizenship to the freed slaves. It's the part of the 14th amendment that patches the 13th amendment, which freed the slaves. It was necessary at the time and for several generations afterward, and served its purpose. I contend that it is no longer helping people, but hurting them now.

Note, the 14th contains other good stuff such as the equal protection clause, which we need to keep. So I'm not arguing for scrapping the 14th outright.

We need an immigration policy free of perverse incentives and birthright citizenship has become a perverse incentive.
31
Seriosuly, just kill these guys. Enough is enough.
32
It's only perverse, for some.
Not my debate, it's just closing the door after the horse has bolted, isn't it?
America is what it is. The whites have to see that. Slavery , geography.
We've had to put up with the New Zealanders just coming on by any time they want, for years. Same with the Tasmanians. Oh wait, they are part of the country.
33
@32 - I'd say this is very much your debate, as you appear to have very strong feelings on the subject. "It is what it is" is not a rational basis for a policy argument. Millions of people are in this country stuck between a rock and a hard place because of this perverse incentive. We need to help them (I'm not in favor of deporting everybody!) We don't need to close the door. It should be easier for people to immigrate to the US legally.

We are in a situation where we have a bad set of laws and policies and they are eroding respect for the rule of law, for good reasons, and creating an untenable, divisive situation. We need to fix it.

Thanks for the Oceanic perspective, however.
34
@33 I believe LavaGirl is not a US citizen living in Not the US, so it's really not her debate, inasmuch as it will have effectively no impact on her.
35
Always a pleasure.
36
He knows that Fetish, just having a go at me for having an opinion. And it is a perspective from far away, in a country like Fort Knox.
I just don't see where you'd start this rule. Any child born in the US from 2017, from illegal parents, first off the block?
You want a discussion, throwing in words like perverse incentives, is already stating your case pretty clearly. It is not perverse for those doing it.
How would this play.
37
@34, clearly enough, though there's the debate and there's the debate. As for the one that's taking place on this thread, from where I'm sitting, if you're in, you're in...
38
@36, The civics lesson here is that it would take an amendment to the constitution to change the 14th amendment. Precedence would dictate that everyone who became a citizen while the citizenship clause of the 14th amendment was in effect, is still a citizen (a "grandfather clause") A coherent policy response would include a provision to deal with the families stuck in the middle prior to the amendment. A humane policy response would give most of those families the benefit of the doubt, and a clear pathway to legal status or citizenship for the family, subject to a background check. The ongoing policy response would be that if you come to the US illegally and we catch you, we deport you and if you made a baby while you were here, also the baby.

Note that immigration in the US is a huge, convoluted issue, and ending birthright citizenship still doesn't address the legal status of the so-called "Dreamers" Also note that as a liberal, I side with giving those people the benefit of the doubt as well.
39
@26- You need to show your math, not just keep claiming "the math demonstrates."

Birthright citizens are a tiny portion of the US population and our welfare system is horribly designed. Claiming citizenship for people born in the country causes the welfare system to inevitably fail is an extraordinary claim, one I find laughable. So show me these numbers.
40
I don't think I would go as far as eliminating birthright citizenship but I think Pneumatic is right about the need to fix legal immigration. Huge waves of Irish, Italians, etc. were able to come here legally in the past and start the process of assimilating future generations.
Does anyone know of a good book that explains how things got so broken between then and now?
41
@38: "The ongoing policy response would be that if you come to the US illegally and we catch you, we deport you and if you made a baby while you were here, also the baby."

We already do this. It's not like we park the baby by the side of the road, or stick her in an orphanage when mom gets deported. The main problem with eliminating birthright citizenship is this (repeating what I said @23): if a person born and raised in America is not American, than what are they?

I was born and raised in the U.S., but my parents were legal immigrants. I'm as American as anyone whose family has been in the States for additional generations, and I take great offense at the rednecks that insist I'm not "from here." I've lived exactly as long in this country as you have, motherfucker!

But suppose unbeknownst to me, my parents came here illegally. Does that change my American-ness, despite being a native of this land? I should hope not.

My wife is also the child of legal immigrants. Suppose it turned out her parents were also illegals, and thus she's also not American under the proposed regime. Would our kids also not be Americans? Which country would they be from, then? [And note that my wife's family and mine are not from the same country or even the same continent.] And so on down the line... would we have entire generations that lived in America but are somehow not Americans? See any glaring issues with creating a permanent legal underclass?
42
@41 I believe that a coherent and humane immigration policy would account for this as well, which is why I allude to the Dream Act. Personally, I would say that some consideration should be given to undocumented families with children who have lived here for a long time.

I also think it should be easier to immigrate legally to the United States.

However, I _also_ think that if proof of citizenship or legal residency, rather than just a birth certificate, were required to put a child into school, a lot less babies would be born to illegal immigrants, and a lot less children would remain in the US long enough for "where they grew up" to be very bearing on the case in any emotional aspect.
43
It is not necessary to repeal or amend the 14th amendment in order to end "birthright" citizenship, and no sensible supporter of ending it advocates repealing the 14th amendment. The 14th amendment was passed just after the end of the Civil War to ensure that the children of slaves and freedmen would be American citizens. It had nothing to do with children of illegal immigrants.

And Republicans are not the only ones who support ending birthright citizenship. I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter, and I think birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants is like saying that if someone squats in your house, and has a baby, you have to finance the raising of that child. We are one of only two western nations that have birthright citizenship.
44
Okay, let's agree to end the 14th amendment as long we as go back as many generations as it takes to kick out all of the GOP politicians out of North America. If we keep rolling it back, watching people magically disappear, at some point the only people will be here won't be white people. Humans are migratory. White people are immigrants. Hispanic people have been in the U.S. longer than the Trumps.
45
@40: (talking to myself in a comment thread) This looks like a good not-too-ideological read you should give it a try!

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-30…
46
@12 is absolutely correct. The GOP makes a lot of noise about hating immigrants, but still wants their workers cheap.
The immigrants from Central America and China are just the latest in wave after wave of lighter-skinned people working their way up by stepping over the African-Americans, this time because employers would rather pay a brown-skinned laborer below-minimum wages and no social security than to hire an American of African descent who quite reasonably wants legal protections and legal wages, and social security.
If someone who owns a roofing company actually wants to pay fair wages to his or her employees, he can't, because too many competitors employ undocumented immigrants too afraid of being deported to complain about 12-hour days or being injured on the job. As soon as we see some of the unscrupulous roofing company employers jailed for hiring undocumented immigrants, the rest of the owners will have to start paying better to get workers, which would lower the unemployment rate of people whose families have lived here since being forcibly brought here as slaves. Of course, it means the cost of fixing your roof or having your lawn manicured will go up through market forces, but isn't raising the minimum wage something that most SLOGgers want to see happen?
@40, those jobs are now in China or Indonesia for even lower wages.
47
@42: Once again: "if a person born and raised in America is not American, than what are they?" Let's get to specifics here:

1. If my parents were illegals and thus I'm not an American, than to which country do I belong? My parents' country, even though I've never lived there? No country?

2. What about my kids-- to what country do they belong? My grandkids?

Don't just give the NIMBY answer. Say who should claim people born and raised in the United States, if not the United States.
48
@47: This is all really good food for thought. I will answer your two questions and I will preface my responses by saying once again that:
I think it should be easier for people to immigrate legally to the United States.

1. If you were born in the US to illegal parents, then you belong to your parents, who should be thinking about promptly returning to their homeland or establishing US residency. Once again, I will state that I don't think the US owes your parents an environment where they will be able to raise a child who is not a citizen or legal resident of this country.

2. A coherent and humane immigration policy would provide a mechanism for your parents to be legal residents of this country, a pathway to citizenship for them and their children, and a consideration for your circumstances which may occur outside of the process of legal immigration. I will restate that I think if you 'grew up' in the US, you obviously didn't crawl here in diapers, it's not your fault, and you should be given the benefit of the doubt.

Let me restate: I think your hypothetical illegal parents should not fear to apply for green cards due to the high likelihood that they will receive such green cards even if they came here illegally, and that if they can't be bothered to do that, then it should not be possible for them to hypothetically raise you in the United States.

It should be easier for people to legally immigrate to the United States. We should not be treating poor people as criminals. That is why I have stated previously that I would not support ending birthright citizenship without a lot of other measures being taken to ensure that people who are stuck between a rock and a hard place are not crushed between them.
49
The 14th Amendment is also where we get corporate personhood, and that could use a revisit too. How bout it, Donald?
50
And so turns the wheel of Karma. The USA was born of three great sins. 1. Genocide 2. Slavery 3. Hypocrisy

It is so often (and flippantly) injected in such debates that NO ONE is an American unless they are native to the Americas. Most Mexicans and Central Americans are just that. As are Native People. The rest of you are invaders. Illegal in every moral sense. Those who have been in this hemisphere for ten thousand years never invited you to come here. Only our inferior numbers allowed, and still allow you to remain here. This debate about who should and should not be here is ripe with White Privilege. Remember that America is browning and you cannot do a damn thing about it. One day I hope to hear the non-white supermajority debate what we are going to do with whites whose only claim on the Americas is rooted in the murderous greed of their forefathers. Maybe we will allow you to remain here as a permanent underclass to pick our tomatoes. Or maybe we will show you the door. Maybe we will decide that if genocide was good for the goose, it's just as good for the gander.

Consider this perspective as you condescendingly argue among yourselves about who should be allowed to be citizens of this Land. If I were you, I'd be ashamed to even have such a conversation.
51
Kwodell - that will be an interesting debate, but I predict that consensus will be difficult to achieve.
52
Not gonna happen.
53
If you are born in America, you are American. We are the only country with a mission statement, and IMHO it is that belief in America as a principle and not a heriditary claim that makes us great.

For those wanting to close the door behind us (my great-grandfather was a WOP), should we just send the Statue of Liberty back to France? Are we really that callus, that insecure in our own abilities, that we fear a changing future so much that we would try to close the door to the strivers of the world, wanting to make a better life? Preventing their families from assimilating, from adding to the American quilt? What the hell people?
54
In 2008, the illegal actions of most of the country's leading banks, including CitiBank, Bank of America, and others, crashed the economy and extorted your tax dollars so they wouldn't crash it further.

Not a single one has ever seen a trial, let alone been convicted.

Now, please explain to me how "illegal" immigrants are ruining our country, and that this law is somehow causing a decline in America. We have a knife at our throat, and it's not held by some poor schmucks from another country.
55
I don't ever want to hear ONE more Republican talk about how much s/he values the Constitution; it's pretty fucking clear this party doesn't.
56
"Once again, I will state that I don't think the US owes your parents an environment where they will be able to raise a child who is not a citizen or legal resident of this country."

The text of the 14th Amendment is not in any way ambiguous. Any person born in the US is a citizen of the US.

I'm with Dan. Watching the modern Republican Party commit electoral suicide by repudiating the Republican Party which passed the 14th Amendment will be very delicious.

"The 14th Amendment is also where we get corporate personhood, and that could use a revisit too."

Bingo! The irony, it burns...

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