Arguably Congress can legislatively clarify the meaning of the 14th Amendment to exclude from automatic citizenship the children born in the United States to illegal immigrants.
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After I posted the article titled Illegal Citizenship, reader Jerry Quatrano emailed a link to an essay from the Fall 1996 issue of the Stanford Law and Policy Review.
Unfortunately the article is in pdf format, so I can’t reproduce it in this text-based posting.
The Review article recaps the background presented in my earlier posting. The important point is:
“As we will show, the language of the Fourteenth Amendment does not dictate bestowing citizenship on children born to illegal aliens in the United States. Moreover, the Supreme Court has never expressly affirmed this policy… Given that this issue of citizenship has not been directly addressed by the Court or by the Constitution, the question becomes: Does Congress have the power to legislatively narrow its interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to postulate that the children of illegal aliens do not acquire U.S. nationality, or would such change require a constitutional amendment.”
When this article appeared in 1996, two unsuccessful attempts had been made to enact legislation to define the issue to exclude such children from automatic citizenship. At that time, the one-world-under-the-UN paradigm of liberal-socialism was at its zenith.
So far as I know, the assertion remains true that the Supreme Court never has directly ruled on this specific issue. Earlier cases were concerned with children born here to aliens who were legally entitled to be here working, or to American Indians.
If the Stanford Law and Policy Review article is correct, the only impediment is Congress’s continuing lack of political will. The political climate, post 9/11, is however much changed and the problem of illegal immigration has become a greater source of public anger, particularly given its connection to potential infiltration of Islamic terrorists.
The question remains: Is the Constitution to be regarded as subordinate to the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights, as a suicide pact interpreted by Senator Kerry’s foreign policy “sensitivity”? Or shall we reassert the consensus of 1776 and 1787 that the United States must be a unified nation governed by its heritage of English constitutionalism and Judeo-Christian morality?
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