Democrats act as if the right to run across the border when you’re 8 1/2 months pregnant, give birth in a U.S. hospital and then immediately start collecting welfare was exactly what our forebears had in mind — a sacred constitutional right, as old as the 14th Amendment itself.
The louder liberals talk about some ancient constitutional right, the more you can be sure it was invented quite recently.
In fact, this alleged right derives only from a footnote slyly slipped into a Supreme Court opinion by Justice Brennan in 1982. You might say it snuck in when no one was looking, and now we have to give it residence.
The 14th Amendment was added after the Civil War in order to delegitimize the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which held that black slaves were not citizens of the United States. Thus, the precise purpose of the amendment was to stop sleazy Southern states from denying citizenship rights to newly freed slaves — many of whom had roots in this country longer than a lot of white people.
The amendment guaranteed that freed slaves would have all the privileges of citizenship by providing: “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 drafters of the 14th amendment had no intention of conferring citizenship on the children of immigrants who happened to be born in the U.S. (For my younger readers, back in those days, people cleaned their own houses and raised their own kids.)
Inasmuch as America was not yet a massive welfare state, attracting malingerers, frauds and cheats, it would be amazing if the drafters even considered the amendment’s effect on the children of aliens.
But they did.
The very author of the citizenship clause, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, expressly said: “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.”
In the 1884 case Elk v. Wilkins, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not even confer citizenship on Indians — because they were subject to tribal jurisdiction, not U.S. jurisdiction.
For a hundred years, that was how it stood, with only one case adding the caveat that children born to legal permanent residents of the U.S., gainfully employed, and who were not working for a foreign government would also be deemed citizens under the 14th Amendment. (United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 1898.)
And then, writing for the 5-4 majority in the 1982 case, Plyler v. Doe, Justice Brennan snuck in a footnote, asserting that “no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.” (Other than the part about one being lawful and the other not.)
This point of view had nothing to do with the case and, therefore, constituted mere dicta, of no legal importance.
Brennan’s only authority for his lunatic allegation was that it appeared in a 1912 book written by Clement L. Bouve. (Yes, the Clement L. Bouve.) Bouve was not a senator, not an elected official, certainly not a judge — just some guy who wrote a book.
So on one hand we have the history, the purpose, and the author’s intent behind the 14th Amendment, which clearly establishes that the 14th Amendment was about freed slaves and had nothing to do with illegal immigrants.
On the other hand, we have the random musing of some guy named Clement — who, I’m guessing, was too cheap to hire an American housekeeper.
In addition to not being in our country legally, other “plausible distinction(s)” between legal and illegal aliens include the facts that legal immigrants have been checked for subversive ties, contagious diseases, and have some qualification to be here other than “lives within walking distance.”
But most important, Americans have a right to decide, as the people of other nations do, who gets to become our fellow citizen. Combine Justice Brennan’s footnote with America’s ludicrously generous welfare policies, and you end up with a bankrupt country.
Consider the story of one family of illegal immigrants described in the Spring 2005 Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons:
“Cristobal Silverio came illegally from Oxtotilan, Mexico, in 1997 and brought his wife Felipa, plus three children aged 19, 12 and 8. Felipa … gave birth to a new daughter, her anchor baby, named Flor. Flor was premature, spent three months in the neonatal incubator, and cost San Joaquin Hospital more than $300,000. Meanwhile, (Felipa’s 19-year-old daughter) Lourdes plus her illegal alien husband produced their own anchor baby, Esmeralda. Grandma Felipa created a second anchor baby, Cristian. … The two Silverio anchor babies generate $1,000 per month in public welfare funding. Flor gets $600 per month for asthma. Healthy Cristian gets $400. Cristobal and Felipa last year earned $18,000 picking fruit. Flor and Cristian were paid $12,000 for being anchor babies.”
In the Silverios’ munificent new hometown of Stockton, Calif., 70 percent of the 2,300 babies born in 2003 were anchor babies. As of this month, Stockton is $23 million in debt.
It’s bad enough to be governed by 5-4 decisions written by left-wing judicial activists. In the case of “anchor babies,” America is being governed by a single left-wing justice’s digression in a footnote.
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