Texas talks tough on illegal immigrants

The Lone Star State has long welcomed Latino immigrants, no matter how they got across the state's 1,200-mile border with Mexico.

Back when California voted to cut public services to illegal immigrants, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush was preaching that immigrants were equal players in the state's economy.
But the atmosphere has changed markedly in Texas, home to about 10% of the nation's illegal immigrants.

Now, a growing chorus of Republicans and some Democrats is pushing some of the harshest immigration-related measures in the United States — laws that would not only deny public services to illegal immigrants but strip their American-born children of benefits as well.

The proposal to deny services to American citizens, which is thought to be the first in the country, is part of a push to challenge the citizenship given automatically to children born in this country to illegal immigrants.
Prior rulings have affirmed that nearly all such children were entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. But some legal scholars have questioned whether the amendment, which redefined national citizenship to include the children of slaves after the Civil War, should cover babies born to foreign parents.

The Pew Hispanic Center estimated last year that more than 3 million U.S. citizens were born to illegal immigrant parents.â€