Anchor Babies and Interpreting the 14th Amendment
It is well known that a person born in the United States is an automatic citizen regardless of the mother's citizenship status. However, the United States is unusual in its offer of citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. Only a few European countries still grant automatic citizenship at birth. The United Kingdom and Australia repealed their U.S. style policy in the 1980s after witnessing abuses similar to those plaguing the U.S. today. Why does the United States continue to allow a practice subject to widespread fraud? The answer lies in how American jurisprudence has interpreted the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution as part of the post Civil War reforms aimed at addressing injustices to African Americans. It states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States" and was crafted so that state governments could never deny citizenship to anyone born in the United States. However, when the amendment was crafted, the United States had no immigration policy, and thus the authors saw no need to state explicitly, what they believed was understood. The phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was intended to exclude from automatic citizenship American-born persons whose allegiance to the United States was not complete. In the case of illegal aliens who are temporarily or unlawfully in the United States, because their native country has a claim of allegiance to the child, the completeness of the allegiance to the United States is impaired and logically precludes automatic citizenship.
"Every Person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. 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 accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.
Senator Jacob Howard, Co-author of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, 1866.
The Price We Pay
· The Urban Institute estimates that the cost of educating an estimated 800,000 illegal alien school children in the nation's seven states with the highest concentration of illegals was $3.1 billion in 1993 (extrapolated to $4.6 billion in 1996 by FAIR), but this estimate does not at all take into account the additional costs of bilingual education or other special educational needs.
· It is estimated that the number of children born to illegal aliens each year is 165,000. This figure is based on the crude birth rate of the total foreign-born population (33 birth per 1000) and the size of the illegal alien population (five million).
· In 1994, California paid for 74,987 deliveries to illegal alien mothers, at a total cost of $215.2 million (an average of $2,842 per delivery). Illegal alien mothers accounted for 36 percent of all Medi-Cal funded births in California that year.
What This All Means and What Can Be Done
Higher Taxes: The federal government has control over immigration law for the United States. By not addressing this abuse, the funds that state and local governments must provide to anchor babies amounts to a virtual tax on U.S. citizens to subsidize illegal aliens.
Disrespect for the rule of law: By not closing this loophole, the federal government in effect rewards law-breakers and punishes those who have chosen to follow the rules and immigrate legally. Allowing illegal aliens to give birth to American citizens, in effect, makes citizenship a license for welfare. [Peter Brimelow. National Review, April 7, 1997.]
The present guarantee under American law of automatic birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens can operate...as one more incentive to illegal migration and violation by nonimmigrant aliens already here[.] When this attraction is combined with the powerful lure of the expanded entitlements conferred upon citizen children and their families by the modern welfare state, the total incentive effect of birthright citizenship may well become significant.
Profs. Peter Schuck and Rogers Smith, "Consensual Citizenship," Chronicles, July 1992.
Congressional action warranted: The 14th Amendment stipulates that Congress has the power to enforce its provisions by enactment of legislation and the power to enforce a law is necessarily accompanied by the authority to interpret that law. Therefore, an act of Congress stating its interpretation of the 14th Amendment, as not to include the offspring of illegal aliens, would fall within Congress's prerogative.
[FAIR supports legislation introduced into the current Congress to change the automatic conferral of citizenship to children of illegal aliens. See the Legislative Update page for H.R.7 by Rep Brian Bilbray (R-CA) and H.R.346 by Rep Bob Stump (R-AZ). An excellent description of the issue written by Rep. Bilbray was published by the San Diego Union-Tribune on August 17, 1997. Bilbray Op-Ed]
FAIR, 8/97.
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