Two really important articles from the Arizona Republic you need to read to fully understand the downside of the efforts to eliminate birthright citizenship in America:

Birthright limits would harm children, critics say

by Daniel González – Mar. 21, 2011 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

 In many ways, Norma Jimenez is a typical teenager in America.

She tries to never miss an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” she loves spending weekends in front of the TV and she is partial to chicken Caesar salads.

Jimenez, 19, is also a top student. She graduated last year from Carl Hayden High School with a 3.7 GPA and a desire to become a registered nurse.

But because she was brought to the U.S. illegally from Mexico when she was 1, she doesn’t have a Social Security number, meaning she can’t get financial aid for college or legally work in the U.S.

“I’m very frustrated,” Jimenez said. “At the end, you just see yourself as trapped.”

Hundreds of thousands of other children would find themselves in that same sort of economic and social limbo should efforts succeed to restrict birthright citizenship. If the interpretation of the 14th Amendment were changed, in the future, the 300,000 to 400,000 children of illegal immigrants born every year in the United States – as Jimenez’s brother and sister were – would not be citizens of this country.

“I’m frustrated, and I wasn’t born here,” Jimenez said, adding the situation would be worse for children born in the United States.

David Leopold, national president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the move to abolish birthright citizenship would lead to an even larger group of so-called Dream Act kids like Jimenez, the 2 million young adults who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, raised here and consider this country to be their home.

Yet without legal status, which the proposed Dream Act legislation would confer, they live in a shadow economy, often viewed as a burden – the same future that children born in the U.S. would face if birthright citizenship were eliminated.

“You’d create a whole underclass here,” Leopold said. “You’d create an underclass of people who were permanently ineligible to participate in the country, akin to something you have in Europe. . . . It would intensify and increase the undocumented problem we have in the country.”

It appears increasingly unlikely that opponents of birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants will make much progress this year.

Republican lawmakers have introduced bills at both the state and federal levels aimed at ending the longstanding practice of granting automatic citizenship to nearly every child born in the U.S. regardless of their parents’ status.

But in Arizona, the state Senate on Thursday rejected the legislative package. The bills would have defined children as citizens of the U.S. if they had at least one parent who was a legal immigrant or U.S. citizen.

Sponsors of the bills, including Arizona Sen. Ron Gould, R-Lake Havasu City, say one reason illegal immigrants come to the United States is so their U.S-born children can petition for them to become citizens.

Parents may hope their children’s citizenship can help them stay in the U.S., but immigration rules make that unlikely.

Parents who entered the U.S. illegally would have to wait until their citizen-child was 21 before he or she could file immigration papers for them. And even then, the parents would have to return to their home country and wait 10 more years before they could qualify for green cards, Leopold said.

Under immigration laws adopted in 1996, immigrants seeking permanent residency through an immediate relative face a 10-year bar as punishment for entering illegally.

Still, opponents say they will continue to work on changing citizenship rules. State Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, sponsored the House version of the birthright-citizenship bill.

“Anything we can do to discourage new illegal immigrants from coming or current illegals from staying is a benefit to the law and American society,” he said.

Jimenez’s mother, Maria Gloria Hernandez, 42, said she came to the United States to look for work so she could provide a better life for Norma.

A single mother at the time, she crossed the border illegally in 1992, walking through the desert near Agua Prieta. Someone else, using a birth certificate belonging to a U.S. citizen, drove baby Norma through the port of entry.

In Arizona, Hernandez married another undocumented immigrant from Mexico, Jaime Hernandez, 42. They are the parents of Laura, 13, and Jose, 9, Norma’s U.S.-citizen siblings.

Sitting on a sofa in their Phoenix home, the couple said they initially planned to return to Mexico after earning money by working in the United States. But one of the main reasons they have remained is to raise their children.

“I don’t want to take them to a country they don’t know or to a country where they would suffer from hunger,” said Jaime Hernandez, who works as a welder. His wife has worked as a field hand and a house cleaner and has ironed clothes. She now stays home to care for their children.

As U.S. citizens, their two youngest children are enrolled in KidsCare, the state’s public health-care program for children.

The couple said they realize that some people don’t think the children of illegal immigrants should receive public benefits, but they disagree. They said they are raising their children to be productive members of this country.

“More than anything, we want our children to be good citizens, good professionals, good workers for the United States,” Jaime said. “We want them to be good at what whatever profession they choose.”

And if their U.S.-born children weren’t citizens, would they still stay in the United States, given the frustration their undocumented daughter Norma has been through?

The couple lowered their heads. They remained silent for several moments.

“We would still stay here,” Jaime finally said. “Even if they didn’t have their papers, this is their country.”

And…..

Birthright citizenship change would have wide effects

by Daniel González and Dan Nowicki – Mar. 20, 2011 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

It might not happen this year, or even the next, but supporters of restricting birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants are not giving up on their drive to force a reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment.

Backers of the idea, which they believe will discourage illegal immigrants from coming to the U.S., hit a major setback Thursday when the Arizona Senate rejected two birthright citizenship bills.

The issue took a backseat, as it has in a handful of other states, to budget chaos and continuing economic anxiety. But supporters say it will remain part of a larger strategy to turn up the heat on undocumented immigrants so they will leave on their own – or not come in the first place.

Whether limiting citizenship would work the way proponents say is a matter of debate, but like other immigration-control tactics, the change would likely have far-reaching implications.

Supporters argue that illegal immigrants would be less likely to come to this country if their children didn’t automatically receive citizenship.

But experts counter that it is unlikely that limiting birthright citizenship would curb illegal immigration. Most illegal immigrants come for jobs, not to have children that might one day, years in the future, help them win legal status in the United States, as critics of birthright citizenship contend. Many European countries, for example, lack birthright citizenship but still attract thousands of illegal immigrants every year.

Even if limits on birthright citizenship did slow the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States, the restrictions still would lead to a larger – not smaller – illegal-immigrant population because they would turn the hundreds of thousands of children born to undocumented parents every year into illegal residents themselves, demographers say.

If lawmakers are able to one day force a reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, which now is recognized as granting citizenship to nearly everyone born in the United States, parents would for the first time in history have to prove their own citizenship before their children could be deemed citizens. Governments would have to verify the citizenship of parents, a process that likely would be costly, politicians say. Even the nation’s military readiness could be affected because without legal status, the children of illegal immigrants would no longer be eligible to enlist in the armed forces.

“If you take all those factors combined, what it does is it’s a real challenge to the nation’s historic identity and historical genius,” said Don Kerwin, vice president of programs at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. “A lot of the criticism of immigrants comes from people who feel the U.S. is an exceptional country. Yet precisely what makes us exceptional – the values embedded in the 14th Amendment and our identity as a nation of immigrants – is challenged by this.”

Legal interpretation

Supporters of the move to restrict birthright citizenship say the longstanding practice of granting automatic citizenship to nearly every child born on U.S. soil regardless of the parents’ status is a powerful lure for illegal immigrants. End it, they believe, and illegal immigrants would be less likely to come to the United States because their children would no longer provide a path to public benefits or legal status for themselves in the future.

Republicans lawmakers leading the charge have zeroed in on a phrase in the 14th Amendment, claiming the passage that says “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” has been misinterpreted. The amendment was ratified in 1868 to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision stating that slaves could not be citizens.

Critics want the Supreme Court to rule that the children of illegal immigrants are not entitled to automatic citizenship because, they argue, undocumented parents are not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S.

Lawmakers in at least seven states – Arizona, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas – have introduced birthright-citizenship bills. But as in Arizona, the South Dakota and Mississippi bills have died, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which is tracking the legislation.

“All you need is one state to pass it to trigger the lawsuit that gets to the Supreme Court,” said state Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, sponsor of the House version of the bill. “So the concept itself may move forward even though there weren’t the votes in the Arizona Senate.”

Legislation also has been introduced in Congress, though it is not expected to pass.

“Arizona, obviously, has been out front on the other aspect of this, SB 1070, and maybe it doesn’t want to be out front on this one,” said John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University School of Law in California, who believes that the 14th Amendment was never meant to bestow birthright citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants and who testified in support of the Arizona legislation.

Nearly 60 percent of Americans oppose changing the Constitution to deny citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, according to a February poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.

But lawmakers say they are pressing ahead to do what they can to battle illegal immigration and the costs associated with it.

“What we are trying to do is remove the incentive for people to come here illegally,” said state Sen. Ron Gould, R-Lake Havasu City, who sponsored the Senate version of Arizona’s version of the bill.

He said limiting birthright citizenship would save taxpayers money because the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants would no longer be considered citizens and therefore would no longer qualify for public benefits.

“It’s an economic burden on the taxpayers of Arizona,” he said.

Supporters are regrouping and considering other options, such as trying to put the question on a statewide ballot through the initiative process.

Curb or increase?

But limiting citizenship likely would do little to deter illegal immigration, say immigrant advocates, because they come to the United States for jobs, not to have babies.

Carlos Garcia, an organizer with Puente, a Phoenix-based group that advocates for immigrants, said illegal immigrants often remain in the country because they want to provide a better life for their children. He believes birthright-citizenship bills are mainly intended to increase fear among illegal immigrants in hopes of driving them away.

On the contrary, limiting birthright citizenship actually would increase the number of illegal immigrants, demographers say.

Jon Feere, the legal policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C., that favors stricter controls on immigration, said 300,000 to 400,000 children are born each year to the millions of illegal immigrants already living in the United States. Under the birthright-citizenship proposals, those children would contribute to the nation’s undocumented population, he said.

“We would see up to 400,000 illegal-immigrant children added every year,” Feere said.

An August study published by the Migration Policy Institute showed that if the 14th Amendment were limited and births to parents were to continue at that pace, the undocumented population in the United States would rise from 11 million today to 16 million by 2050. For purposes of the study, Jennifer Van Hook, a demographer at Pennsylvania State University, assumed that that nation’s illegal-immigrant population grew only by births – that no immigrants crossed borders illegally or overstayed visas, which they do by the thousands every year.

Her research shows that if birthright citizenship is limited to babies with at least one parent who is a legal resident, the number of undocumented children in the U.S. would double from 2 percent of the total population today to 4 percent in 2050.

In contrast, if birthright citizenship is left as is, Van Hook projects that the share of undocumented children in the U.S. would decrease from 2.1 percent of the population today to less than 1 percent by 2050 because the birthrate would be fueled by children born to U.S.-citizen Latinos.

Even Kavanagh concedes that most illegal immigrants come for jobs and that denying citizenship to babies with undocumented parents would lead to an increase in the number of illegal immigrants in the United States.

But he believes the overall illegal-immigrant population would decrease if limiting birthright citizenship were combined with other enforcement measures.

“Birthright citizenship in and of itself would not solve the problem,” Kavanagh said. “It’s just one solution of many. It would have to be enacted collectively.”

Net savings or loss?

Limiting birthright citizenship could create costs and challenges for the government at various levels while potentially saving money in other areas.

At some level – local, state, federal or even at the hospital – someone would have to determine whether a newborn’s parents were legally in the United States before the infant could be processed for a Social Security number.

Regardless of how the process worked, it would require governments to spend money creating and running an agency to verify the citizenship of parents at a time when the public is calling for less government spending and bureaucracy, said Margaret Stock, a retired Army Reserves lieutenant colonel and immigration attorney specializing in military cases.

She is concerned too that limiting birthright citizenship could hurt the nation’s armed services because immigrants, and the children of immigrants, have a higher propensity to join the military than other citizens, she said.

Denying citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants could save taxpayers some money.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, the children of undocumented immigrants are more likely to live in poverty and lack health insurance than children of U.S. citizens. As citizens, many of those children qualify for public benefits.

By denying them citizenship, those children would not be eligible for most public-assistance programs, so some of the costs to taxpayers would be less, Van Hook said.

In the long run, however, without citizenship, those children would not be able to work legally and would probably earn less money, pay less in taxes and cost the public in other ways such as emergency medical care, she said.

Limiting citizenship also could challenge immigration-enforcement officials, who would be faced with the possibility of trying to deport large numbers of children born in the U.S. as well as their illegal-immigrant parents.

On one hand, deporting people born in the United States would most likely be unpopular with the public, Feere said. On the other, deporting their parents would be easier because their U.S.-born children, no longer citizens, could not be used as an excuse for allowing them to remain in the country.

“It’s a very difficult issue,” Feere said. “It’s unfortunate that the children are in the middle of all this.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement frequently removes illegal immigrants with U.S. citizen children. The parents are given the option of taking their children with them or leaving them with relatives in the U.S. as long as the relatives are legal immigrants or U.S. citizens.

In some cases, undocumented parents facing removal from the U.S. argue in front of an immigration judge that their deportation would cause “extreme and exceptionally unusual hardship” on their U.S. citizen children. But those cases are hard to win, said Gerald Burns, a Chandler immigration lawyer and president of the Arizona chapter of the Arizona Immigration Lawyers Association.

Underclass created?

Some civil-rights advocates are concerned that ending birthright citizenship would create a two-tiered class system in the United States, with an underclass that Van Hook’s research shows could be nearly twice the size of Arizona’s current population in 40 years.

“It’s a modern-day caste system with potentially millions of natural-born Americans being treated as somehow less than entitled to the equal protection of the laws that our nation has really struggled hard to guarantee,” said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

He and other civil-rights advocates have said that denying citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants would set the United States back 143 years, to when the country denied citizenship to descendents of slaves.

But supporters of birthright-citizenship reform dismiss that argument, saying any underclass would be a consequence of the United States’ failure to confront and fix its border and interior-enforcement problems.

“It’s certainly not a function of the birthright-citizenship issue – it’s a function of us not doing anything with illegal immigration,” Eastman said.

A survey by Feere found that 145 countries, including all European countries, do not have birthright citizenship.

Thirty countries have birthright citizenship, including the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as most countries in Central and South America, according to Feere’s survey.

In the past 30 years, several countries have ended birthright citizenship, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Indian, Malta and Ireland, Feere said.

“Increased illegal immigration is the main motivating factor in most countries,” Feere said.

Others say that granting citizenship to all children born in the U.S. regardless of their parents’ status helps immigrants integrate faster here. Germany recently made it easier for children of immigrants to become citizens because of long-standing problems with immigrants not integrating, including higher rates of poverty and crime, said Angela Marie Kelley, vice president for immigration policy and advocacy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C.

“That’s been one of the secret ingredients to our success,” Kelley said. “You take that out of the equation, and it feels like you would be taking us back in time to a very dark and ugly period in our nation’s history when we had a segment of society that we treated differently and that we deemed less than.”

From the New York Times:

Arizona Lawmakers Push New Round of Immigration Restrictions

By MARC LACEY Published: February 23, 2011

PHOENIX — Arizona lawmakers are proposing a sweeping package of immigration restrictions that might make the controversial measures the state approved last year, which the Obama administration went to court to block, look mild.

Illegal immigrants would be barred from driving in the state, enrolling in school or receiving most public benefits. Their children would receive special birth certificates that would make clear that the state does not consider them Arizona citizens.

Some of the bills, like those restricting immigrants’ access to schooling and right to state citizenship, flout current federal law and are being put forward to draw legal challenges in hopes that the Supreme Court might rule in the state’s favor.

More….

And people wonder why Pima County residents want their own state of Baja Arizona….

This from the Arizona Republic:

Birthright citizenship bill unveiled by Arizona lawmakers
Republic Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON – Two Arizona lawmakers joined with legislators from other states Wednesday to unveil legislation designed to force the federal courts to reconsider the current practice of granting U.S. citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

The legislation

Advocates hope the legislation will result in a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court stating that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was not meant to grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants.

Among the supporters of the effort are the architects of Arizona’s toughest-in-the-nation immigration enforcement law, Senate Bill 1070, which makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally.

“The purpose of this legislation is to restore the original intent of the 14th Amendment, which is currently being misapplied and is encouraging illegal aliens to cross and cost American taxpayers $113 billion annually,” said Pennsylvania State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, a Republican and founder of State Legislators for Legal Immigration, referring to the findings of a study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which opposes birthright citizenship.

The state legislators group, which has members from state legislatures in 40 states, held a news conference at the National Press Club to announce the legislation. The event was interrupted several times by immigrant rights’ activists who shouted that the legislation is racist and inhumane and held up a sign saying “Protect the 14th Amendment.”

Metcalfe said lawmakers in about 20 states have expressed interest in introducing the bill in their state legislatures.

Arizona state Rep. John Kavanagh and Arizona state Sen. Ron Gould, both Republicans, said they plan to introduce legislation in the next few weeks that would define what it means to be an Arizona citizen.

That definition would say that an Arizona citizen must be a U.S. citizen, who would be defined as someone who is born in the United States and has at least one parent who owes no allegiance to any foreign sovereignty. Naturalized U.S. citizens also would be considered Arizona citizens.

Kavanagh and Gould both said they expect the Arizona Legislature to pass the bill, most likely in April. If passed, there would be no immediate affect on babies born to illegal immigrants in Arizona or their families, the lawmakers said.

Rather, the bill, if it becomes law, is designed to draw a legal challenge from immigrant rights’ groups over the definition of a U.S. citizen and force the issue into the federal courts for clarification of the 14th Amendment.

“The bottom line: What we want is our day in court,” Kavanagh said.

The draft bill specifically states that citizenship of a particular state shall not give the citizen any special rights, benefits, privileges, or immunities under law. Babies born to illegal immigrants in Arizona or other states that pass the legislation would not be stripped of any of the current rights or benefits they receive, the lawmakers said.

The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1868 and states that “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 amendment’s primary intent was to guarantee citizenship to African-Americans, particularly former slaves. But the question of whether the authors also intended to allow the children of illegal immigrants to become citizens has been a matter of debate since its inception.The dispute focuses on the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Opponents of birthright citizenship argue that illegal immigrants are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

Others counter that the words merely were meant to exclude U.S.-born children of foreign diplomats or occupying enemy armies, the two well-known exceptions to birthright citizenship under English common law. Indians also were left out because the U.S. government considered their tribes to be quasi-sovereign.

See also: Birthright Citizenship Looms as Next Immigration Battle

Also: Here is the Washington Post’s version of the story:

State lawmakers taking aim at amendment granting birthright citizenship

…”This country has a malady, and it is costing her citizens dearly,” added South Carolina State Sen. Danny Verdin (R). He added that the rise in number of what he called “anchor babies” – children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants – had created a problem of epic proportions. “It’s just as bad to be poisoned over time as to have a sudden lethal dose.”

More…

If you wondered what’s next after SB 1070 to stir the pot politically on immigration issues and keep a lot of lawyers busy?

The answer is state efforts to try and deny citizenship to children born in the United States whose mother is here illegally.

A group of state legislators (including some from Arizona) are going to announce the new initiative to (in effect)) repeal the 14th Amendment at a press conference in Washington, DC  Wednesday.

Here’s an article about the issue from Marc Lacey, the New York Times  reporter based in Phoenmx:

Birthright Citizenship Looms as Next Immigration Battle

By Marc Lacey

NOGALES, Ariz. — Of the 50 or so women bused to this border town on a recent morning to be deported back to Mexico, Inez Vasquez stood out. Eight months pregnant, she had tried to waddle north, even carrying scissors with her in case she gave birth in the desert and had to cut the umbilical cord.

More….

 The Arizona Republic reports that state senator Rusell Pearce won’t be at the DC meeting…
Pearce won’t be at citizenship bill unveiling
Jan. 4, 2011 09:52 AM

The main champion of Arizona laws cracking down on illegal immigration won’t be in Washington on Wednesday for the unveiling of proposed legislation to deny automatic citizenship to children of illegal immigrants.

Arizona Senate spokesman Mike Philipsen says incoming Senate President Russell Pearce supports the legislation but has canceled his plans to attend the Washington news conference scheduled by legislators from Arizona and other states on their coordinated proposal.

Philipsen says Pearce is staying home to participate in state budget meetings and to prepare for the regular session starting Monday. Philipsen also cities the time required for the cross-country trip.

Two other Arizona legislators are expected to attend the Washington news conference.

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State Senator Russell Pearce wants to deny birth certificates to children born of parents illegally inside the state even though the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution confers US citizenship on anyone born in the USA.

Tea Party types want to go back to what they claim is the “original intent” of the US Constitution and strip the federal government of most of its powers.

OK…so maybe it is a good idea to boot out of the United States anyone who isn’t an “American”.

So what is an “American”?

Let’s start with accepting some of the fundamental definitions of the American form of government.

If you accept and agree with these provisions, you are an “American” and get to stay. If you do not, and you advocate a change to these fundamental concepts, you are guilty of treason and should be kicked out of the country.

Let’s start with the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If you believe the United States is a Christian” country… out you go. Our Constitution prohibits the establishment of any religion.

If you believe states or the federal government can require the teaching of religious doctrine in taxpayer funded schools like “creationism” or “intelligent design”…out you go.

If you believe that you can restrict the expression of opinions that you don’t agree with…out you go.

A basic structure of our government is called “federalism” which means we actually have a national government with the power to override individual states’ claimed sovereignty.

Examples include deciding who is a citizen of the “United States”. States don’t have that right.

You are not a citizen of the US by being a citizen of Arizona. A state does not have the legal authority to define who is a citizen of the United States. If you believe you can do that….goodbye Russell Pearce…out you go.

Under a federal system of government states cannot impose barriers to interstate commerce. We are not 50 separate little nations here. Arizona cannot  ban the sale of California grown cotton in our state to protect Arizona’s cotton growers. If you disagree with that concept…out you go.

Under a federal system the national government can establish environmental laws that apply to all the states. Individual states cannot establish minimum air or water quality standards lower than the national standard. For example, to reduce the risk of global warming the federal government can set national CO2 emissions standards. If you disagree with that concept and believe Arizona could have drinking water standards lower than federal standards or air quality standards lower than federal standards…out you go.

It seems to me a lot of the people advocating a drastic reduction in federal authority do not believe in United States of America that is enshrined in our Constitution.

They want a really different America.

They basically want to overthrow our present form of government, destroy federalism, and go back to the Articles of Confederacy.

They aren’t “Americans”. They are still fighting for a revolution they have actually lost twice in this country…the first time when the US Constitution was ratified by the states, and the second time when they lost the Civil War.

The people who support the present system of government, who support the separation of church and state, who support a federal system which can override individual state’s on issues like citizenship and immigration…who support a federal system to set national business standards…who support national environmental standards… are  attacked as being  “liberals” and progressives” by the GOP and Tea Pot types. But these “liberals” and “progressives” are actually defending the real America.

The “America” being advocated by the GOP and the Tea Potters is a fantasy.

If you advocate states rights and getting rid of the federal government….you are not the patriot you think you are. You are the one who needs to find another country to live in. You are fighting to destroy the country the Founders created. The “liberals” and “progressives” are  fighting to save our country and national system from your  revolution.

Call us “liberals” or “progressives” or whatever….we’re the real Americans who rely on the nation the Founders created that protects diversity and civil rights and freedom of religion and freedom of speech and freedom of the press and limits the powers of states.

You who espouse the GOP and Tea Party ideals are anti-federalists. You are seeking to overthrow the government created by the Founders.

One of the “issues” being raised by anti-immigrant folks is the claim that illegal aliens come to the US to have babies so they can get citizenship. In response to this they are seeking to change the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution to deny citizenship by birth.

The political environment is being deliberately manipulated to create fear about illegal immigration for the benefit of a specific group of Republican candidates.

In this Arizona Republic story, the “issue”  of people crossing the border to have children is debunked.

Migrants rarely come to U.S. just to give birth, experts say
Research points to reasons other than citizenship, as critics charge

by Bob Christie and Paul J. Weber – Sept. 5, 2010 12:00 AM
Associated Press

SAN JUAN, Texas – When Ruth Garcia’s twins are born in two months, they’ll have all the rights of U.S. citizens. They and their six brothers and sisters will be able to vote, apply for federal student loans and even run for president.

Garcia is an illegal immigrant who crossed into the country about 14 years ago, before her children were born, and the citizenship granted to her children and millions others like them is at the center of a divisive national debate.

Republicans are pushing for congressional hearings to consider changing the nation’s 14th Amendment to deny such children the automatic citizenship the Constitution guarantees. They say women like Garcia are taking advantage of the constitutional amendment and paint a picture of pregnant women rushing across the border to give birth.

While a recent Pew Hispanic Center study shows 8 percent of the 4.3 million babies born in the U.S. in 2008 had at least one illegal parent, a closer examination shows that most children of illegal immigrants are born to parents like Garcia who have made the United States their home for years.

Out of 340,000 babies born to illegal immigrants in the United States in 2008, 85 percent of the parents had been in the country for more than a year, and more than half for at least five years, Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer for Pew, told the Associated Press.

And immigration experts say it’s extraordinarily rare for immigrants to come to the U.S. just so they can have babies and get citizenship. In most cases, they come for economic reasons and better hospitals, and they end up staying and raising families.

Garcia’s husband has been deported, and she earns a living selling tamales to other immigrants who live in fear of being deported from the slapdash, impoverished colonias that dot the Texas-Mexico border.

“I think that children aren’t at fault for having been born here,” Garcia said. “My children always have lived here. They’ve never gone to another country.”

Under current immigration law, Garcia and others like her don’t get U.S. citizenship even though their children are Americans.

With an estimated 11.1 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, the issue strikes a chord with many voters – people like retired Air Force nurse and pediatric nurse practitioner Susan Struck, 66, of Double Adobe, Ariz.

“People come over … and they have babies with U.S. birth certificates, then they go back over the border with that Social Security number, with that birth certificate,” and have access to public services, she said at a recent event near the border organized by conservative “tea party” activists.

Several prominent Republican leaders share Struck’s beliefs on the issue. Sen. Lindsey Graham, S.C., has been a vocal advocate for changing the Constitution, and he helped the issue gain momentum heading into the midterm elections.

“Women have traveled from across the world for the purpose of adding a U.S. passport-holder to their family, as far away as China, Turkey and as close as Mexico,” said Jon Feere, legal analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for strict immigration laws.

Still, changing the Constitution is highly unlikely, legal scholars say. Measures have been introduced in each two-year congressional session since 2005, but none has made it out of committee. Constitutional changes require approval by two-thirds majorities in both chambers of Congress, an impossibility now because Democrats have the majority in both houses and most oppose such a measure.

Even if Republicans gain power in November and legislation is passed, an amendment would still need to be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

To be sure, some pregnant Mexican women do come to the United States. In border cities such as Nogales, Ariz., women have been coming to the U.S. for decades to give birth, though the primary reason is better medical care, Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada said. Billboards advertising birthing services in Arizona line streets across the border in Nogales, Sonora.

Tucson Medical Center offers packages designed to provide inclusive care to new mothers. The program draws some residents of Sonora who can afford its upfront costs and already have U.S. visas, spokesman Michael Letson said.

Princeton University demographer Douglas Massey said in 30 years studying Mexican immigration, he’s never interviewed a migrant who said they came to the United States just to get citizenship for their children.

“Mexicans do not come to have babies in the United States,” said Massey, who blames the tightening of the border in the 1990s for cutting off normal migration of men who used to come to work for a year or two and then go home. “They end up having babies in the United States because men can no longer circulate freely back and forth from homes in Mexico to jobs in the United States, and husbands and wives quite understandably want to be together.”

More common, he and other experts say, are families stuck with one child who is legal and others who aren’t – like Beatriz Gomez, a 35-year-old illegal immigrant who came to Phoenix 11 years ago on a now-expired tourist visa from Arriaga in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

Her 12-year-old daughter was born in Mexico and is here illegally, but her two youngest children, ages 5 and 8, were born in the U.S. and are citizens.

“It’s sad,” Gomez said of her oldest daughter, who was only 1 when the family came to the United States and won’t qualify for benefits such as in-state college tuition rates or federal student loans. “She studies hard, and she won’t be able to go to a university like the other two.”

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More fuel to the fire to change the 14th amendment and eliminate birthright citizenship was added with the story about how many children are born to undocumented alien parents.

In today’s Arizona Republic:

Number of children born in U.S. to illegal immigrants rising

by Alan Gomez on Aug. 12, 2010, under Arizona Republic News

The total number of children living in the United States who were born to illegal immigrants on U.S. soil jumped to 4 million in 2009, up from 2.7 million in 2003, a report released Wednesday estimates.

Those children, who are automatically granted U.S. citizenship, represent 5.4 percent of all children under age 18 in the U.S. That compares with 3.7 percent six years earlier, according to data from the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center. That percentage will continue rising because an estimated 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the U.S. in 2008 alone, or about 8 percent, came from illegal-immigrant parents, the report says.

The study comes as some legislators, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., are calling for a revision of the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

The percentage of native-born people in the U.S. has fallen for four straight decades, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2008, 12.5 percent of the population was born outside the U.S., nearing the all-time highs of nearly 15 percent in the late 1800s.

“The share of the population that is White non-Hispanic is going to drop,” said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer of the Pew Hispanic Center. “The percentage that consists of immigrants and their children is going to increase.”

Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which wants lower levels of legal and illegal immigration, said automatic citizenship for children born in the U.S. is one of the main magnets for illegal immigration.

Dane said many illegal immigrants are searching for jobs. He said many others come here to have a baby who is entitled to a wide array of government benefits and can eventually help the parents become citizens as well. He calls the practice a “corruption of the rule of law.”

Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, which supports a process for some illegal immigrants to become citizens, said eliminating birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants would be a colossal mistake.

“It puts the United States of America on the brink of legalizing apartheid,” he said.

Noorani said some people have always fought for a change to the 14th Amendment’s birthright clause, but he is shocked to see prominent members of Congress suddenly embrace it. He thinks the upcoming November elections are the reason.

“This is a pathetic attempt to gin up a (voting) base,” he said. “This is political fear-mongering.”

A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press indicated that 56 percent of Americans do not want to bar the children of illegal immigrants born in the U.S. from becoming citizens.

Of people who identified themselves as conservative Republicans, 55 percent support a ban on birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants, while 67 percent of self-described liberal Democrats oppose such a ban. The poll of 1,802 adults was conducted in June and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The childbirth study was based on data from the census, and the center analyzed demographic characteristics of the illegal-immigrant population.

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The New York Times blasted the xenophobia about illegal immgrants  being used to gain votes:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL August 6, 2010
Xenophobia: Fear-Mongering for American Votes

Leading Republicans have gotten chilly toward the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to people born in the United States. Senators Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Jeff Sessions and Jon Kyl have been suggesting that the country should take a look at it, re-examine it, think it over, hold hearings. They seem worried that maybe we got something wrong nearly 150 years ago, after fighting the Civil War, freeing enslaved Africans and declaring that they and their descendants were not property or partial persons, but free and full Americans.

As statements of core values go, the 14th Amendment is a keeper. It decreed, belatedly, that citizenship is not a question of race, color, beliefs, wealth, political status or bloodline. It cannot fall prey to political whims or debates over who is worthy to be an American. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” it says, “are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

People like Mr. Sessions, who pride themselves on getting the Constitution just right (on, say, guns), are finding this language too confusing. “I’m not sure exactly what the drafters of the amendment had in mind,” said Mr. Sessions, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, “but I doubt it was that somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home with that child, and that child is forever an American citizen.”

It’s true that air travel was not a big focus in 1868, but this is not about a horde of pregnant jet-setting Brazilians, if, indeed, such a thing even exists. The targets are Mexicans, and the other mostly Spanish-speaking people who are the subjects of a spurious campaign against “anchor babies” — children of illegal immigrants supposedly brought forth to invade and occupy.

Usually alarms about scary foreign infants are made by one-note zealots like Tom Tancredo of Colorado. But it’s a bipartisan temptation. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who berated Republicans this week about abandoning their principles over birthright citizenship, did so himself in a 1993 bill for which he later apologized.

Thankfully, the Constitution is sturdy. The birthright-deniers will not easily rewrite it or legislate around it. More than a century of jurisprudence stands against their claim that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” (an exception for diplomats’ children and members of sovereign Indian tribes) also alienates undocumented children.

The proponents of changing the 14th Amendment also would have to acknowledge the big-government colossus that new rules would require, burdening all parents to prove their children’s status. New battalions of attorneys would gain full employment to fight over thousands of newborns rendered stateless each year, an instant, permanent underclass. Then there’s the obsolescence of all those civics texts, old movies, patriotic picture books and red-white-and-blue songs.

The United States has never had a neat, painless way to add newcomers. But our most shameful moments have involved the exclusion of groups, often those that do our hardest labor: Indians, African-Americans, Chinese, Irish, Italians, Catholics, Jews, Poles, Japanese-Americans, Hispanics. America has stood proudest when it dared to stretch the definition of who “we” are.

As a result, this is still the most welcoming country for immigrants. A few politicians chumming for votes in an off-year election cannot be allowed to destroy that.

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