http://american-rattlesnake.org/2011/02 ... -straight/

What it means in the US, what other nations make of it, why it has no place in the country today. With a full complement of attentive listeners at the Penn Club’s elegant Tarnopol Room in midtown Manhattan, this month’s presentation by the Center for Immigration Studies offered analyses, figures and insights of legal policy analyst Jon David Feere, juris doctor.

The icy temperatures of a particularly cold winter’s eve did not prevent a full room of interested listeners. The stats rolled out, startling in their cumulative power. Feere indicated offhand, during the post-talk Question-and-Answer, that decades ago, the porous borders of our southern states let in some illegal aliens, but not at the rate and volume that have marked our current flood to such an extent that states bearing the brunt of this influx are either bankrupt or verging on insolvency.

While the figures are somewhat hazarded, an annual 300,000 to 400,000 children are born to illegals in the US, with the US then recognizing these territorial intruders in the legal thicket known as ‘birthright citizenship’ that hails from a misconstruction of the 14th amendment.

Temporary visitors, diplomat families and tourists–as well as, one supposes, extraterrestrials here for the bonfires of July Fourth or body probes–have all been the glad recipients of US largesse—when the application of the US 14thamendment was clearly intended for freed slaves and their progeny, or the Native Americans who of course predated the founding of the country in 1776.

Feere outlines in turn every country that permits a new citizen merely by the accident of a mother’s bearing a child while on US soil. Every other country has rather straightforward conditions for such a privilege, but no nation is so besieged by throngs seeking the conferred benefits and value of belonging as does the United States.

Those countries that once did offer automatic citizenship (Australia, Ireland, India, New Zealand, the UK, Malta and the Dominican Republic) have years ago rescinded those policies. Of advanced countries, says Feere, only the US and Canada grant automatic citizenship to offspring of illegal immigrants. It is worth noting that Canada, with a population of some 30 million, is far less overrun than is the US, with a current population of some 308 million, ten times the people, and ten times the worries, and seeming expenses, as our friends to the north...