The policy of granting automatic citizenship to children born in this country is an anachronism and doesn’t mesh with today’s realities
In his July 15 column “Immigration debacle,” Tim Rutten uses Americans’ natural reluctance to deport illegal alien parents of U.S.-born children as a weapon to attack efforts at immigration enforcement. Nothing new there. In his dissent to the majority ruling in United States vs. Wong Kim Ark — the 1898 Supreme Court decision affirming that birth in the United States automatically confers citizenship — Chief Justice Melville Fuller foresaw how this “birthright” would hinder enforcement of immigration law. He insists that American citizens are required to subsidize the households of those who break our immigration laws. And unfortunately, he is likely correct as a matter of constitutional law; the citizen children of illegal aliens are entitled to the transfer payments due any citizen child, even though the money actually goes to those who have knowingly broken our laws. Fuller, writing at a time when the welfare state was nonexistent, doubtless never imagined such a development.
Harold
Nice post, thanks