Thread: Pretty Convincing Argument Against Constitutionality Of Birthright Citizenship

University Chair Makes Pretty Convincing Argument Against Constitutionality Of Birthright Citizenship

CONNOR D. WOLF
Contributor
11:06 AM 04/30/2015

American citizenship as a birthright has recently become a prominent issue in the ongoing immigration debate, and congressional leaders sought answers during a hearing Wednesday.

The House Judiciary Committee called upon legal experts to discuss whether the U.S. Constitution actually allows children born in the United States to be citizens, even if their parents are illegal immigrants. Under the Citizenship Clause, which falls under the Fourteenth Amendment, people born within the country or its territories are automatically granted citizenship

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the Citizenship Clause of the Constitution states.

Despite this clear language, many have argued the law has resulted in adverse consequences encouraging immigrants to migrate here illegally so that their children can be considered citizens (dubbed at one time ‘anchor babies’). For Lino A. Graglia, a chair at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, the Constitution is being misinterpreted.

“It should be interpreted to mean what it was intended to mean by those who adopted it,” Graglia declared before the committee. “They could not have meant to grant birthright citizenship to children of illegal aliens because, for one thing, there were no illegal aliens in 1868, because there were no restrictions on immigration.”

“The purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to constitutionalize the 1866 Civil rights Act for which the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment derived.”

Dr. John C. Eastman, the founder of The Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, agreed noting that congress still had the power to determine citizenship under the Constitution.

“Congress remains free to offer citizenship more broadly than that, of course, pursuant to its plenary power over naturalization,” Eastman argued. “Current law merely parrots the ‘birth’ and ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ requirements that are the floor for automatic citizenship already set by the Constitution.”

Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, however, argued birthright citizenship is protected and that later laws and court cases confirm it.

“On May 29, 1866, amid debate in the Senate, Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan introduced an amendment clarifying that birthright citizenship would apply to everyone born within the United States with the exception of the children of foreign diplomats,” Cohen said.

“Howard said that his amendment was ‘simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already.”

“Just thirty years later, the Supreme Court interpreted the Citizenship Clause in a case involving the son of Chinese immigrants,” he continued. “Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco and had spent his entire life in the United States.”

“When he was about 17, he traveled to China for a visit before returning home to San Francisco. When he returned to the United States after a second visit four years later, he was denied entry on the basis that he was allegedly not a citizen,” he went onto say. “Even though Congress had prohibited individuals of Chinese descent from becoming citizens, the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to all who were born in this country.”

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http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/30/un...t-citizenship/

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, however, argued birthright citizenship is protected and that later laws and court cases confirm it.

“Just thirty years later, the Supreme Court interpreted the Citizenship Clause in a case involving the son of Chinese immigrants,” he continued. “Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco and had spent his entire life in the United States.”

Actually that case turned on the court's holding that Wong Kim Ark's parents, who I think had been brought in to build railroads, were in fact legal residents of the United States. Based on the Wong Kim Ark case, it would be absurd to say that the Supreme Court enshrined birthright citizenship.

Actually, when asked, the principal author of the 15th Amendment, George Washington Julian, said that the 14th Amendment did not apply to foreigners, children of diplomats, or people who were in the country temporarily. (The Reconstruction Amendments - 13th, 14th, and 15th - were considered to be part of a unified effort. They were never intended to grant universal birthright citizenship.)
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Americans first in this magnificent country

American jobs for American workers

Fair trade, not free trade

There was never a birthright citizenship for foreigners. This whole practice of granting citizenship to children of illegal aliens and others who are not citizens of the United States and descendants of slaves was always just that .... a practice probably started by some low level clerk who saw a state birth certificate and said "you're a citizen" with no knowledge or approval and then the next one did it and there it went undetected for so many years there were so many of them that they just kept it going. This ridiculous practice can be ended at any time by anyone in any agency in the US government, but the best action is an act by Congress prohibiting it to stop it so every department and agency of federal and state governments stop this stupidity that is costing Americans a bloody fortune in care and benefits for people who shouldn't even be in the country let alone handed citizenship at birth.

Originally Posted by Judy

[T]he best action is an act by Congress prohibiting it to stop it....

The main problem at the moment is that we are being "led" by a narcissistic hustler who wants to punish Americans for electing him as president. And his wife is the woman who accused a little old lady of racism when she asked for help with a box which was too high for the lady to reach. So there's nobody in the hustler household who can provide a sanity check.
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Americans first in this magnificent country

American jobs for American workers

Fair trade, not free trade

They unload a barrage of personal attacks on a law professor testifying that birthright citizenship is unconstitutional.

By Ian Smith — May 6, 2015

So this is how the liberal elite control the narrative. In coordination with the Southern Poverty Law Center, Democrats from the House Judiciary Committee last week launched a barrage of personal attacks on an 85-year-old law professor testifying that birthright citizenship is unconstitutional.

Lino Graglia, the Dalton Cross Professor of Law at the University of Texas, was one of four witnesses at the hearing, which included SPLC president Richard Cohen. Graglia was made the subject of nearly all the questions from committee Democrats, who fixed on supposedly racist comments he’d made decades ago.

After the hearing, NBC and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reliably followed up with hit pieces on Graglia and, like the committee Democrats, avoided the core issue before the panel: Whether illegal aliens born in this country should be given automatic citizenship. Rather than address one of the central reasons that illegal aliens are coming here in waves, the House Democrats opted to play what another witness at the hearing, John Eastman, called, “a game of gotcha.”

Two bills have been introduced, one in the House and one in the Senate, that would end the practice of awarding illegal alien children with automatic citizenship. The post–Civil War legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment shows that its framers were seeking to guarantee the right of citizenship only to newly freed slaves and to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott, but today around 400,000 children born to people who are in the country illegally are given citizenship every year. This would include about 40,000 who are born to “birth tourists” coming mostly from China.

Polls show that the public overwhelming supports killing this perverse incentive for illegal immigration.

Polls show that the public overwhelming supports killing this perverse incentive for illegal immigration. Senator Harry Reid called the policy “insane” when in 1993 he introduced a bill to overturn it. As witness John Eastman noted in his testimony, birthright citizenship is “one of the three magnets” for illegal aliens to break into the country, the others being higher wages and welfare. Instead of engaging with this significant problem, however, House Democrats Zoe Lofgren (Calif.), Luis Gutierrez (Ill.), and Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas) focussed their questioning on a single issue: supposedly racist comments that Graglia had made years ago.

An expert on birthright-citizenship jurisprudence, Graglia put it best when in his testimony he described our current system as one “that makes unauthorized entry into the country a criminal offense and simultaneously provides the greatest possible inducement for illegal entry: a grant of American citizenship.” Unable or unwilling to argue with Graglia’s characterization, Lofgren (starting at 01:47:00 in the video below), the hearing’s top Democrat, decided to discuss certain criticisms that the professor had apparently once made about Brown v. Board the professor had apparently once made. Like everyone else in the room, Graglia initially sat still in a confused silence. Although momentarily stunned, he politely answered that he did in fact agree with the decision, but Lofgren’s cheap jab was only the beginning.

Lofgren’s next whopper was even worse, but more remarkable was what occurred at SPLC’s side of the witness table. Lofgren produced a copy of an old New York Times article describing Graglia as having used the word “pickaninny” during one of his classes in 1986 (eliciting much eye-rolling in the hearing room); when she began quoting from the piece, an assistant with SPLC handed handed Cohen a copy of the article for his reference, complete with highlights and arrows to Graglia’s comments. It appeared that the SPLC had heavy input in the Democrats’ smear campaign, which was starting to play out at the hearing.

Jackson Lee’s line of questioning no doubt sent Barbara Jordan, the late true immigration reformer and her fellow Texas Democrat, rolling in her grave.

Posing as a civil-rights organization, SPLC has amassed a quarter of a billion dollars in unspent charitable donations, mostly by frightening elderly Jewish couples into believing that the second Holocaust is around the corner. The American Institute of Philanthropy and the Better Business Bureau, which rate non-profits, have given the SPLC failing marks. In its newsletters, SPLC refers to immigration-enforcement advocates — the Center for Immigration Studies (which also had a witness at the hearing), NumbersUSA, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform — as the “nativist lobby’s three faces of intolerance.”

SPLC has also attacked National Review as well as other perfectly mainstream individuals and groups who question the progressive line — Ben Carson, for example, and the American Family Association and the Family Research Council. Even their alter ego, the Anti-Defamation League, criticizes their tactics.

Next up at the hearing was Representative Gutierrez (01:58:00), who began by quoting Graglia from a BBC interview years ago on the issue of racial preferences in universities. Gutierrez quotes Graglia as saying, “I can’t imagine a less beneficial or deleterious experience than to be raised by a single parent, usually a female, uneducated and without a lot of money.” According to Gutierrez, the interview then “turned personal when the reporter told [Graglia] that since he was black and was raised in a single-parent family, [Graglia was] saying he’s ‘less likely to be as smart as a white person of the same age.’” (The reporter, by the way, was jovial and the exchange was anything but tense or adversarial — listen for yourself here.)

Gutierrez then quoted Graglia’s response to the black interviewer: “Listening to you and to know what you are, and what you’ve done, I suspect you’re you’re rather more smart, my guess would be that you’re above usual smartness for whites, to say nothing of blacks.” Finally getting to his question, Gutierrez said, “Mr. Graglia, do you believe African Americans can’t compete?” The professor became incensed and rightly protested, saying, “I don’t understand what this line of questioning, like Representative Lofgren’s, has to do with this discussion.” But before he could finish his sentence, Gutierrez was already trying to cut him off accusing, him of refusing to answer the question.

When Representative Jackson Lee (02:10:40) began her turn by thanking the SPLC, noting she and the organization had “spent a lot of good time together” in the past. Then she fired off three questions in succession. To her credit, they at least had some relation to topic of birthright citizenship:

Do you think a student who overstays his visa is an enemy of the United States?

When a mother who was previously deported reenters the country unlawfully to join her children, is she part of an invading army?

Do you think all people entering unlawfully are invading our country?

Jackson Lee’s line of questioning no doubt sent Barbara Jordan, the late true immigration reformer and her fellow Texas Democrat, rolling in her grave.

Responding to Jackson Lee, Graglia, exasperated, said that he “didn’t understand the basis of these questions.” He should have known, of course, that there was none. The Democrats’ portion of the hearing was an interrogation, not an engagement with an important matter of public policy. It was designed to flummox and defame experts on the “wrong side of the debate” and to steer them away from the topic at hand.

Such is the state of the immigration debate in today’s Congress.

— Ian Smith works for the Immigration Reform Law Institute and is an attorney in Washington, D.C.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...bate-ian-smith

Originally Posted by Jean

Polls show that the public overwhelming supports killing this perverse incentive for illegal immigration. Senator Harry Reid called the policy “insane” when in 1993 he introduced a bill to overturn it.

When trying to understand a legal statement, such as the 14th Amendment, we look first at the language itself. The language of the amendment includes, "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." Amendments to the constitution are written without wasting words. If the authors had intended to grant citizenship to, for example, tourists, they would not have qualified their statement with "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof."

Foreigners are of course subject to our laws, but they have not sworn allegiance to the United States. So if foreigners break a law, we can imprison and then deport them. But imprisoning them does not transform into citizens, it simply makes them criminal aliens whom we are deporting.

This is not rocket science, but the issue is clouded by welfare pimps, such as the SPLC, whose scare tactics against elderly jews have, as stated above, been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League.
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Americans first in this magnificent country

American jobs for American workers

Fair trade, not free trade

Well, just remember that all these lobbying actions are the result of our "charity" tax frauds using as designed the income tax to destroy our country. Without the income tax, the SPLC and the Century Foundation and National Council of La Raza and thousands of others using tax exempt tax deductible donations to fund their activities, wouldn't be in business because they wouldn't have any money.

People also need to remember that our US Supreme Court is comprised of 6 Catholics and 3 Jews, so if anyone is holding their breath on a good decision from that outfit needs to and I quote Doc Rivers "just breathe" and come up with a new game plan.