Comment by jjallen
6 days ago
You can be pro/fine with legal immigration (and moderate/non-partisan) and still not think birthright citizenship is a good idea (like I do).
Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship. It creates perverse incentives.
Reminds me of legal abortion: practically everywhere in the world has it. If you are not in that vast majority you should be taking a very close look at yourself/things.
So yes, let's amend the constitution. It's been a while and we do it on average every ten years or so. I have personally not ever been involved in one.
It's not really a question of what's a good idea. It is in the text of the Constitution, about as plain as it can possibly be. If you want to change it, you have to change the Constitition.
Ironically, the same Court members who most often claim the plain text of the Constitution to support their ideas are the ones who put the most effort into finding a tortured reading of the 14th Amendment.
I thought so too. Then I read the arguments about the passage of the amendment. The people passing clearly stated that, say, the children of ambassadors wouldn't be eligible. It was mainly aimed at clearing up the questions about the various Native Americans who may have considered themselves independent. It wasn't about opening the doors to anyone.
It was about slaves. Native Americans didn't get birthright citizenship until the Native American Citizenship Act of 1924.
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Please re read his comment. He’s saying the constitution should be amended.
I think it was edited to add that?
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SCOTUS has not had anything remotely close to a plain text reading since the 1930s and probably longer. "Shall not be infringed" was changed to "if an infantry rifle was made after 1986 then magically it can be infringed" and (until about a week ago when it was overturned) "if you smoke a left-handed cigarette actually the second amendment doesn't exist." The 1st amendment protects freedom of speech but yet it's legal to ban appeals to "prurient interest" even though no such exemption is mentioned. "Interstate commerce" has been changed to mean basically "commerce" and interstate is now interpreted as if it was put there for funsies since everything can be construed as affecting something else in the universe even though the historical context makes clear that's not how the text was interpreted by the writers.
Every other amendment including the 1st, 2nd, etc even when explicitly spelled out the courts magically pull something out of their ass to "torture it." Yet the 14th amendment birthright citizenship, who's "history and tradition" was to right the wrongs of slavery, somehow has to be read absolutely in black and white.
Personally I am amenable to the plain text interpretation of the 14th, 1st, and 2nd, but lets not pretend that is the game SCOTUS or even most of government and society is playing. The constitution is referenced more as a religious document by all the above to mean whatever it is they say it means.
An aside, but it’s a bit funny to focus on the plain-text reading of “shall not be infringed” and not “a well-regulated militia.”
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Note: There are ~30ish countries that provide citizenship to anyone born within their national borders (many with restrictions, for whatever that may mean). Largely, this covers a spotting of countries across the globe, but is almost universally true within the Americas.
As far as I can see it is almost entirely countries in the Americas plus Pakistan that have real birthright citizenship. Everywhere else has some restriction such as stateless parents, or multiple generations born in the country, or a minimum period of residence or similar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli
Hate to be that guy, but this a pet peeve of mine that pisses me of...
The term "birthright" means "a right that is derived from the circumstances of your birth". Virtually ALL countries grant citizenship by consequence of the circumstances of birth, but what circumstances they consider vary. For some countries, the circumstance is "birth happened in the soil of the country" (jus soli), for others, it's "birth was to parents who are citizens of our country".
I said "virtually", because there is one SINGLE exception. The Vatican. Ok, there's the SMOM, but do they even count?
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And how many of those countries have an illegal immigration problem? I bet that most of them would quickly remove that loophole if people actually started to exploit it.
Root cause it. The USA does not have an illegal immigration problem. It has a "huge, slow immigration bureaucracy" problem that makes the legal path so slow and difficult that people are incentivized to gamble on illegal paths.
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A right enshrined in the Constitution is not a "loophole".
Most countries with a standard of living that even barely better than their neighbors have an immigration problem. There is a whole continent call Europe that is fighting off migrates and last I checked, birthright citizenship is not a thing there.
People who abuse birthright citizenships are, by definitions, not illegal immigrants. But even if you count all of them as 'unwanted' immigrants - how many % of total immigration to the US is result of those birthright laws?
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Imagine being 18 and suddenly discovering you have to prove the citizenship status of a parent you've never met or else you'll be deported to a country you've never been to and who's language you don't speak
Imagine a country extending citizenship to a whole group of people for no reason other than the location of their birth, and then allowing said people to access the benefits of citizenship, including the ability to receive welfare benefits, vote, and run for office.
That sounds like a great idea. The more citizens of your country the better. Note that US citizens pay taxes no matter where they live. So it's not a free ride by any means.
I don't have to imagine it. I live there. It's the richest and most powerful country on the planet. I hope you get a chance to live here someday!
I live in that country which happens to be the global hegemon.
Seems to work fine. Dozens of countries do this. It's not some weird hypothetical nor is the US some bizarre outlier.
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There is no problem having mechanisms in place for edge cases where the child has been abandoned, parents both dead and so-on.
I appreciate that you can look at the current political climate and imagine that such edge cases would be handled in a compassionate way.
yes because DACA recipients do not live in fear of conservatives trying to remove them from their homes. (this)[https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/during...] was literally 3 weeks ago
i dont agree with the person you are responding to, but theres a difference between not being a citizen and being deported.
This sounds dangerously apartheidy.
A belief held by the majority does not make it better simply for that fact. Not that long ago, the majority view was that slavery was a great thing, so I think you should see that argument falls fairly flat.
Offering birthright citizenship makes the US better than 95% of the other countries. Not worse.
> Offering birthright citizenship makes the US better than 95% of the other countries. Not worse.
No arguments why its better, just stating it as if its fact.
Most countries do not have it because it creates many preverse incentives (such as anchor babies). This especially in countries which are targets of immigration (such as the US).
> Not that long ago, the majority view was that slavery was a great thing
A bit of a tangent, but is that actually the case? The highest estimate I have seen puts slave ownership at 5% of the population while the lowest puts it at 1%.
Obviously just because somebody doesn't own slaves doesn't mean they didn't support the system. There could be economic or legal reasons they couldn't own a slave.
I am just not sure that it was actually a majority view at any point in time in the US.
People are pretty expensive (they're literally worth a lifetime of free labor). 1 slave would've been like 3 complete years income for an average free white southerner to purchase, plus ongoing expenses obviously. So they basically end up in the hands of upper class people who have a steady need for lots of manual labor. Doesn't mean that everyone else around was not benefiting from the economic surplus, or was not supportive of the institution.
The US has always been a country of immigrants; the Constitution recognizes and enshrines this fact. Amending this rule requires a federal supermajority (66% in House and Senate) or a state majority (66% of state legislatures vote in favor of said amendment). Given how difficult it is to find consensus on even the most banal issue, it's unclear whether there would be sufficient support to ever amend.
> Amending this rule requires a federal supermajority (66% in House and Senate) or a state majority (66% of state legislatures vote in favor of said amendment).
This is actually just the first step - to propose an amendment.
To ratify it requires 3/4 of the state legislatures (or state “conventions”) to vote in favor.
https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution
As a non-US citizen, birthright citizenship has always struck me as strangely unique to America - in my mind it comes from a time when it was actively trying to populate the continent (something not a lot of countries have wanted to do, I guess).
Roll forward a few hundred years and the context has changed, so it seems reasonable that the law should too? But I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this is no bueno for SCOTUS, which has an infinite hard-on for Originalism [0] - I certainly can't imagine the conservative justices are ruling based on humanitarian grounds.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism
Most countries in North and South America have unconditional birthright citizenship for persons born in the country.
I take it you are not British? The British Empire had birthright citizenship, and up until 1948 (except for Ireland) citizens of all Commonwealth countries were simply British subjects.
Afterward it was possible to be, for example, a Canadian citizen, but it was still the case that "Prior to the [the British Nationality Act 1981] coming into force, any person born in the United Kingdom or a colony (with limited exceptions such as children of diplomats and enemy aliens) was entitled to [Citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies] status" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Nationality_Act_1981
Birthright citizenship is not unique to the United States, it’s common to certain kinds of former colonies.
I mean, it tracks with "no taxation without representation". Getting rid of birthright citizenship has the chance to create a separate *multi-generational* class of people that aren't given the same rights in society.
Most of the Americas for just that reason - and because the countries immigrants came from did not want their kids to have citizen ship and the right to come back.
Given the US is one of the most (the most?) successful countries in recent human history, shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the 95% be looking at the US and seeing what to copy?
To be fair a lot of it had also to do with the sheer immense amount of vast, mostly unused ,fertile land available in north America. I sincerely doubt the American experiment would have worked this well if they had rowdy neighbours and infighting due to resource constraints. For almost 200 years the solution to most things in the USA was to get a chunk of either their people or immigrant to move to the neck of the woods to find fortune
But the success hasn't ended since the unused land became taken; in fact, the US became a superpower after the westward expansion era. My point is that looking at conditions today, the US still continues to succeed (by some definition of success) and other countries should try to emulate the aspects of the country that leads to that success. IMO one of the big factors is how well immigrants assimilate in the country, and birthright citizenship is a part of that.
I do agree with you that US success in the 19th century was due to many factors that are not relevant today.
Not getting wrecked in major land wars during the 1800s and 1900s also helped
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> sheer immense amount of vast, mostly unused ,fertile land available in north America
it was not "available", it only became "available" after we killed off nearly all the inhabitants and stole their land
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Define successful?
(You'll probably want to avoid metrics like happiness indices and life expectancy though)
At a minimum, it's been a place that people wanted to come to, more than they wanted to come to anywhere else in the world. That's successful as measured by people.
(Or at least, people wanted to come until the last couple of years...)
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Fair point. Mainly I agree with the sibling comment: the revealed preference of many people around the world, including many people from the richest countries in Europe, is to move the United States and then settle permanently. I think that means a lot.
Obviously you can also say that the US is geopolitically successful because of its global military and diplomatic dominance, but I account zero value to this.
Nobel prizes? Manned moon landings? Reserve currencies? AC units per capita?
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We don't really amend the Constitution every ten years. We got 10 all at once, immediately after the Constitution was written. They were amendments only because there was debate about whether including them would deprive people of even more rights by omission.
Of the remaining ones, two cancel each other out, and several others (including the most recent) are trivial. The Constitution has not been meaningfully amended in half a century, and it seems wildly unlikely that it ever can be.
95% of countries weren't formed by settling on somebody else's land and excluding the original inhabitants from citizenship for several hundred years. The American project is what it is because of millions of migrants who settled there for the perverse incentives of free land via the Homestead Act.
Constitutional amendments are generally made with the purpose of granting rights to the people, not taking them away. The US once made the mistake of making an amendment to take away rights (banning alcohol), but then another amendment restored the right to get drunk.
Birthright citizenship is one of the best things we have going for us. I see no reason why we should treat people differently depending on whether or not they have an imaginary stamp labeling them as special (IE, as citizens). Birthright citizenship ensures the problem of unequal representation is fixed over time. A self-fixing function, if you will.
I think what you mean to say is that as a result of this ruling the voice of Americans can be diluted over time so that your preferred political outcomes can happen. Not everyone in my country believes that the concept of the nation state is stupid and should be done away with. I understand that there are many who do think this, and I have to live amicably among them, but it doesn't mean that I need to pretend that your ideas are good for me and my kin.
Sounds like you want to have unequal representation. Or rather, you want to keep your privilege by preventing other people from gaining equal footing. You are right that this is a pretty central element of American society. However, I think we're at our best when we concede that this sort of thinking is counter-productive in the end. Cooperation is really the core mechanism for societal growth, so any efforts to prevent cooperation (in this case, by creating a subclass) is eventually self-defeating
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It does mean you need to pretend that. Reagan has a famous quote about it.
I mean, it's a free country, nobody can make you accept an idea you don't want to. But the nativist ideas you've adopted are not considered by most Americans to be acceptable. If you go around telling people that immigrants aren't real Americans, you will not be accepted even in many conservative circles. Even much of the Trump movement views nativists as useful dupes; the Vice President and Secretary of State, for example, clearly would not welcome your theories that their kin are diluting "the voice of Americans".
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> Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship. It creates perverse incentives.
I typically find that the people using this logic don't seem to apply it to laws like universal healthcare, parental leave, or paid-time off. The lack of those benefits creates perverse incentives to already living citizens, not hypothetical future citizens. Why not focus on them?
The United States is different from 95% of countries. We're the place you are supposed to flee to when those other countries oppress you. That's just not the history of a place like Italy or Japan.
My great great grandparents left Quebec in search of a place where they could earn enough money to make it. They immigrated to America. They lived in communities of other Quebec emigrants and spoke French their whole lives. They never pursued American citizenship. Without birthright citizenship, would my great grandma have been American? OK then what about my grandpa? What about me? I'm not sure if any of my immigrant ancestors formally pursued American citizenship.
> Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship.
Closer to 82% actually, depending on how you count countries. Almost every country in the Western hemisphere has it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli
> Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship
The map of which countries have jus soli is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli
>Jus soli is the predominant rule in the Americas; explanations for this geographical phenomenon include the establishment of lenient laws by past European colonial powers to entice immigrants from the Old World and displace native populations in the New World, along with the emergence of successful wars of independence movements that widened the definition and granting of citizenship, as a prerequisite to the abolishment of slavery since the 19th century.[5]
>There are 35 countries that provide citizenship unconditionally to anyone born within their national borders.
>
>It creates perverse incentives.
It also helped vault America into being the wealthiest country in the world.
> It creates perverse incentives
Perhaps advantageous, America has been the product of these incentives and still sits atop the world on most hegemon metrics. It amazes me how many people complain about the post-WW2 world order America built and benefits from more than any other country.
> Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship.
most of the countries in the Americas do
> let's amend the constitution
go ahead and give it a try. I'd start with getting rid of the 2nd Amendment, then we can talk about the 14th.
The US is unlike most other countries in that it is built on the recent genocide of the native population, with ~most of the current population being immigrants in the last 400 years.
Under what moral rules do genocidaires get citizenship but not, say, refugees?
Do you have US citizenship? How did you acquire it?
If you inherited it from your parents, how did they acquire it?
Usually strong opponents to birthright citizenship are just a few generations removed from someone who got theirs via birthright.
I, for one, believe in American exceptionalism. This country is different in many ways and its success is due to that difference. I don't think that the US should actively aim to "revert to the mean".
Why do you think it's not a good idea?
Why should I give a shit what 95% of other countries do? 99% of other countries are worse in every way that matters
There's about 193 countries in the world, your number would mean there's less than two countries that are better in every way that matters.
I can name ten countries off the top of my head that are better in every way that matters to me.
The USA ranks near the bottom of developed countries in every metric but the metrics related to money.
US is 23rd in happiness globally which is far from the bottom. For example UK, France, and Italy all rank lower.
So your claim is wrong.
This has nothing to do with whether it is a good idea. The question is whether the 14th amendment plainly says that this is the law of the land in the US, which it plainly does.
That three Justices chose to attempt to gaslight us about this is a disgrace. I'll never trust their judgement again.
Its a terrible idea to give citizenship to the chidlren of birth tourist. It makes no sense that someone defrauds the US government to get their child citizenship then you do nothing about it.
Is it "defrauding" if someone's just following the rules, though? And, at that, is it worth building your citizenship rules around something incredibly rare? (Estimates seem to think it's something like 15k babies a year.)