Thread: Nash: Let's amend the 14th Amendment

Nash: Let's amend the 14th Amendment

published Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Let’s amend the 14th Amendment

In response to the Tuesday letter to the editor headlined “Immigrants deserve great college education:” The 14th Amendment to the Constitution needs to be changed so as to bar children born of illegal immigrants from being automatically naturalized as citizens in our country. Their parents have come only to have them in the United States, in order to take advantage of a glaring loophole in the law.

Section 1 of the 14th Amendment currently defines a citizen as, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States ... .” As it stands now, all an illegal immigrant needs to do is jump the border fence and have children here, automatically making them citizens of our nation, and therefore binding the government to appease them as the law currently demands.

Amending this clause would prevent undocumented children and their parents from partaking of the benefits that legal citizens enjoy. The phrase should be changed to read, “All persons born of a United States citizen, not of aliens who have unlawfully trespassed against territory, or whom have been naturalized in the United States.”

The aforementioned change would also keep undocumented children from becoming an unnecessary drain on our nation’s educational system, as they would be just as illegal as their parents. The change would also make it easier for the U.S. government to enforce existing immigration laws currently on the books. With the change, instead of just the parents being sent home, all of the family would be sent home.

It is unfair for our own children, born here of legal U.S. citizens, to take a back seat in school to children born to alien parents. They deserve better.

It is also very selfish of undocumented college students to make demands of a system their parents cheated by coming here. I don’t begrudge a child’s right to obtain an education, but when they are used as a tool in deception by people who seek to take advantage of a flaw in our Constitution, the thought makes me cringe.

I think this behavior by illegal immigrants is purely self-serving, seeing as how it all amounts to these persons dumping all of their burdens on another sovereign government against its will and its written law.

It might not seem fair, but it’s simple common sense: If you aren’t a citizen here, neither are your children.

Andrew Nash

Nash: Let's amend the 14th Amendment | Online Athens

Yes! Common sense alert!!!