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In May, I wrote about efforts by some state legislators and members of Congress to deny US citizenship to children born in the United States to parents lacking proof of legal US residency. Now, a prominent Republican Senator, Lindsey Graham, has rankled members of his own party and even prominent anti-immigration activists by suggesting it's time to change the 14th amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees citizenship to people "born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof."
Graham's idea has drawn criticism from even ardent immigration hawks as former Ambassador Alan Keyes and former television anchor Lou Dobbs, and a Constitutional amendment is probably not politically feasible. However, Graham and a few other like-minded politicians have given credence to an argument that was once the exclusive province of the nep-Confederate movement and other elements of the extreme right wing.
Of "Birthright Tourism" and "Terror Babies"
Late last month, Graham told Fox News:
"We should change our Constitution and say if you come here illegally and you have a child, that child's automatically not a citizen," he said Wednesday. "They come here to drop a child -- it's called 'drop and leave.' ... That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons."
According to an April 14, 2010 ABC news report, the practice Graham described, "birth tourism," "is difficult to track and largely anecdotal." (An analysis of ABC News' report by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters found it full of "contradictions, dubious claims" and "misleading sources.") Nor, according to a former high-ranking FBI agent, is there evidence to support Rep. Louis Gohmert's statement that some of these people are giving birth to "terror babies" who get American passports for their children so that they can return to the US and commit terrorist acts.
A report released last week by the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that in 2008, about 340,000 children were born in the US to parents lacking proof of legal residency. However, Cleveland.com columnist also notes that Mexican immigration to the US has declined since 2008, according to the same report.
That constitutes about 8 percent of the 4.3 million US births during that year. These children, along with the children born to so-called birth tourists, are pejoratively known as "anchor babies," because of the fact that as American citizens, they can petition to have their close relatives enter the US legally once they turn 21.
Parsing the Meaning of the Amendment
As Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy recently explained to NPR, the 14th Amendment was originally adopted to extend citizenship to African Americans. Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, the author of SB 1070, Arizona's controversial immigration control law, and right-wing organizations such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, argue that US-born children of undocumented immigrants do not have citizenship rights because they are not "subject to [US] jurisdiction." According to Kennedy, however, that phrase refers to a few narrow exceptions, such as the children of foreign diplomats. He added that case law supports the idea that children born here are citizens, even when their parents are ineligible for citizenship.
I confess that the focus on the "jurisdiction" phrase makes
