Not all of Wall Street thinks like the WSJ or Bush...
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The Born Identity
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, August 21, 2007 4:20 PM PT

Rights: Elvira Arellano, poster child for illegal alien parents of U.S. citizens, has been deported back to Mexico. True immigration reform would end the ultimate incentive to illegal immigration — birthright citizenship.
The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed after the Civil War to ensure the full rights of citizenship to freed slaves and their descendants. Of late, it has been abused and misinterpreted to grant citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, including those who have the good fortune to have their mother slip past the U.S. Border Patrol.

When Arellano took refuge in a Chicago church to avoid her second deportation for crimes committed on American soil, she had with her son Saul, 8 years old and an American citizen. But should he be?

Such children, called "anchor babies," are used by illegal aliens and their activist supporters to fight the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. We're told it's morally wrong to tear families apart. But such families were and can be united in their countries of origin. Prisoners are separated from their families. Do we stop enforcing the laws they broke, too?

HR 1940 was introduced in April by Rep. Nathan Deal, R-Ga., to restore and clarify the original intent of the 14th Amendment. It would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the U.S. of parents who are not U.S. citizens or permanent resident aliens.

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, John C. Eastman, Chapman University School of Law dean and a fellow at the Claremont Institute, argued that the prevailing interpretation gives too much weight to place of birth than originally intended and should be changed.

Eastman argued: "Birth, together with being a person subject to the complete and exclusive jurisdiction of the United States (i.e. not owing allegiance to another sovereign) was the constitutional mandate." Indeed, the 14th Amendment reads, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and (italics added) subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

But, Eastman's argument goes, illegal aliens from Mexico are still foreign nationals and are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, except for purposes of deportation. Therefore, their children born on American soil should not automatically be U.S. citizens.

In a debate on the 14th Amendment during the Reconstruction, Sen. Jacob Merritt Howard of Michigan added the jurisdiction language specifically to avoid accident of birth being the sole criteria for citizenship. If citizenship was determined just by place of birth, why did it take an act of Congress in 1922 to give American Indians birthright citizenship if they already had it?

The current interpretation of birthright citizenship may in fact have been a huge and costly mistake. Anchor babies? Anchors away.