Virgil Goode: Legal Immigrants Weigh Down Obamacare

Sunday, September 13, 2009 8:02 PM

By: Virgil Goode

Like virtually every issue that faces the nation, our healthcare problem is greatly exacerbated by mass immigration—both legal and illegal. A total of 43% of non-citizens lack health insurance, compared to just 12.7% of native born Americans. These uninsured immigrants impose huge strains on our healthcare system that helped create the crisis we currently face.

Plenty of analysts and commentators have exposed how illegal aliens will receive healthcare under Obamacare. They point out that while the bill claims to prohibit illegal aliens from receiving benefits, the Democrats repeatedly blocked Amendments that would screen for the illegals. Steve Camorata of the non-partisan Center for Immigration Studies recently estimated that 6.6 million illegal aliens will be eligible for public healthcare.

This is an outrage for hardworking American Citizens, but I’d like to focus on two other important but largely ignored aspects of our immigration crisis that will cost taxpayers billions of dollars if Obama’s healthcare boondoggle is passed.

The first is birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment of the Constitution states:

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 Amendment was passed for the sole purpose of granting freed slaves and their children citizenship. Senator Jacob Merritt Howard of Michigan who introduced the Amendment stated,

This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States.

But the obvious intent, as well as the “subject to jurisdiction thereofâ€