News articles on the 14th Amendment birthright citizenship and anchor babies

This section includes selected news articles on the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

  • "Birthright Citizenship" (A.K.A. Jus Soli) And The Cheating Of America, Steve Sailer, VDare.com August 23, 2010
    The Pew Hispanic Center issued a report on August 11, 2010, Unauthorized Immigrants and Their U.S.-Born Children, stating that illegal aliens' progeny comprised eight percent of all births in the U.S. in 2008. The way to put that into perspective is to think of it as a percentage of the entire population of 310 million. Thus, illegals in the US are having the same number of children as a group of 25 million Americans...
    And if the illegals were to get amnesty, their birthrate would go through the roof again-as it did after the 1986 amnesty, when the total fertility rate for foreign-born Latinas in California shot up from 3.2 in 1987 to an amazing 4.4 in 1991...
    The cost of building hundreds of public schools for this Amnesty Baby Boom (and, now, their kids) has been a key, if unmentioned, factor in the breaking of California's budget...
    These are not, however, the sort of thing you are supposed to think about. Because when you do think about how you are being cheated, you don't like it.
  • Murphy: Flawed immigration policy is sinking our ship, Belmont Citizen-Herald, August 15, 2010
    ...we need to stop 'birthright citizenship'; the idea that when an illegal immigrant births a child here, the baby automatically becomes a citizen, which means the parents are allowed to remain in this country to care for the child until adulthood. No surprise then that an entire industry of 'pregnancy tourism' has evolved where non-citizen women about to give birth come to the U.S. for a 'visit' and then, oops, go into labor...
    Every other wealthy nation in the world enforces tough immigration laws and forbids 'birthright citizenship' because they understand that if a company gives away its products for free, people will not value what they produce. We ask American soldiers to lay down their lives for the values that make this country great. How can we possibly indulge a 'no cost' immigration policy for anyone?
  • Time for a real debate on citizenship, Part Two, Powerline Blog, August 15, 2010
    As a matter of principle, it is difficult for me to understand why illegal immigrants should profit from their illegal conduct by gaining the enormous benefits associated with the grant of citizenship to their offspring. And, as a pragmatic matter, continuing to confer citizenship on the massive number of children born to illegal immigrants could profoundly alter the nature of our citizenry.
  • Birthright Citizenship, John Derbyshire, National Review Online, August 10, 2010
    When you tell people about the birthright citizenship business they are surprised, and often very angry. Americans are proud of their country and treasure its citizenship. When they hear that foreigners can get that citizenship for their kids by a ruse, they are outraged...
    Instead of impossible hopes for a Constitutional amendment, just change the law to stop chain migration. That's the ability of citizens to sponsor foreign relatives for settlement. Without chain migration, the baby's citizenship is only worth anything to the baby. With chain migration, it has value to the baby's entire extended family. Chain migration for anything other than spouse and children is anyway a terrible idea...
    Best of all, of course, would be not to let illegals settle here in the first place. For that, we don't even need new laws: illegal immigration is already illegal. Just enforce the people's laws.
  • Gregory Kane: Look to original intent of the 14th Amendment, Washington Examiner (August 12, 2010)
    Black Americans, probably more so than any other racial or ethnic group, have what might be called a "blood investment" in the 14th Amendment... And that's precisely why I don't want to see it cynically abused and misused. Are children of illegal immigrants born here "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, or the country of their parents?
  • Illegal aliens give birth to 8% of babies born in U.S. each year, The Examiner, August 12, 2010
    Pew research reveals that nearly four-in-five (79 percent) of the 5.1 million children under the age of 18 born to illegal aliens were born in the United States and qualified as citizens...
  • Is Mexico annexing the U.S. through their so-called 'anchor babies?'", The Examiner, August 12, 2010
    The Pew Hispanic Center just announced the results of a recent study which found that of the 4.3 million babies born in the U.S., during 2008, about 340,000 were born to illegal aliens. The study found that children born to illegal aliens account for 7 percent of the total population of people under the age of 18, or 5.1 million children. 79 percent of those children were born in the United States, automatically making them U.S. citizens...through the exploitation of the 14th Amendment, illegal aliens are now building colonies in every state of the union.
    ...Recently, the ethnocentric Latino group known as La Raza [The Race] proudly reported on their website that 85 percent of the Latino population under 18 were born inside the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 80 percent of our Latino population is age 44 or younger, which means that the vast majority of Latinos in the U.S. are still of child-bearing age...
  • Phil Gingrey: 'Anchor Babies', Phil Gingrey, Marietta Daily Journal (August 12, 2010)
    Simply put, the United States cannot be a nation that rewards crime, or that fails to act decisively to deter those who break our laws by entering our country illegally. It is not fair to the many who are waiting patiently to come the right way, and it certainly is not fair to the hardworking taxpayers who ultimately bear the financial burden associated with illegal immigration.
  • 14th Amendment: Is birthright citizenship really in the Constitution?, Christian Science Monitor, August 11, 2010
    'The courts apparently have never ruled on the specific [issue] of whether the native-born child of illegal aliens as opposed to the child of lawfully present aliens may be a US citizen,' concludes a 2005 Congressional Research Service report on birthright citizenship....
  • 14th Amendment is a fraud that should be repealed, WorldNetDaily.com (August 10, 2010)
  • Birthright Citizenship: WSJ deploys Linda Chavez, VDARE.com blog (August 11, 2010)
  • Across Texas, 60,000 babies of noncitizens get U.S. birthright, Dallas Morning News (August 8, 2010)
    ...the debate could resonate in Texas, where not only 1.5 million illegal immigrants are estimated to reside but at least 60,000 babies are added to their households annually...
    The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868 as a way to block state laws that prevented former slaves from becoming citizens. It also effectively overruled the Dred Scott decision of 1857 in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared that slaves were mere property and could not become citizens.
  • How Mexican Law Undercuts "Anchor Baby" Interpretation of U.S. 14th Amendment, VDARE.com (August 2, 2010)
    ... Now if original intent means anything, it means that the 14th Amendment was definitely not drafted to provide citizenship to the children of illegal aliens... It was passed in 1868, and its purpose was to guarantee citizenship for recently freed black slaves-not illegal aliens...
    According to Mexican law, every child born in the United States to a Mexican mother or Mexican father is a citizen of Mexico....
    So not only is automatic birthright citizenship not authorized by the U.S. 14th Amendment, but the Mexican constitution shows us that anchor babies are not "under the jurisdiction" of the United States.
  • 8% of U.S. newborns have undocumented immigrant parents, New York Times (August 12, 2010)
    About 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 - or 8 percent - had at least one parent who was an undocumented immigrant, according to a study published Wednesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington... In all in 2008, 4 million children who were American citizens had at least one parent who was in the country illegally... More than 80 percent of mothers in the country illegally had been here for more than a year, the figures show, and more than half had been in the country for five years or more...
  • Treason Lobby Does Damage Control On Birthright Citizenship, VDARE.com (July 5, 2010)
    ...A June 3 Rasmussen poll found that 58% of US voters opposed giving birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens while only 33% supported it....
  • Birthright Citizenship Act adds 25 more Cosponsors, NumbersUSA.com, June 3, 2010
    Rep. Nathan Deal's (R-Ga.) bill to end Birthright Citizenship added 25 new cosponsors after the Memorial Day recess. The bill currently has 71 cosponsors in addition to Deal
  • California: Mexico's maternity ward, East Bay Republican Examiner (May 10, 2010)
    The financial burden of providing social services in the state of California as a result of illegal immigration from Mexico is absolutely staggering. It's enormous. Yet no republican or democrat state official is willing to go on record and put their job on the line to spearhead a drastic reform of the states' 'anchor baby' policies...
  • A Citizenship Birthright? Maybe Not. by George Will, Townhall.com (March 28, 2010)
    ...that there is no constitutional impediment to Congress ending the granting of birthright citizenship to persons whose presence here is "not only without the government's consent but in violation of its law."
  • Illegal Immigrant Births - At Your Expense - Taxpayers Foot Bill For Roughly 300,000 Children Born Into Citizenship When Their Parents Are Illegal, CBS (April 7, 2008)
    Take healthcare for example -- an estimated $1.1 billion per year for undocumented men, women and children, according to the Rand Corporation... ...of the McAllen Texas Medical Center near the Texas-Mexico border. Forty percent of the children born there, nearly 2,400 last year, were the babies of illegal immigrants.
  • Nearly All Wealthy & Emerging Nations Have Eliminated Birthright Citizenship -- We Should, Too, by Roy Beck, Business Week (July 24, 2009)
    All told, federal law (not the Constitution) gives citizenship to an estimated minimum 400,000 babies each year who don't have even one parent who is a U.S. citizen or permanent legal immigrant. This is a huge impediment to efforts to stabilize U.S. population to allow for environmental sustainability... Birthright citizenship is an antiquated practice that has been abandoned by nearly all wealthy nations and emerging nations (recently India and Indonesia) and by the majority of poor nations...
  • Should U.S. deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants? Two views D.A. King: YES, D.A. King, Atlanta Journal Constitution (June 17, 2009)
    The 14th Amendment to the Constitution was never meant to reward illegal aliens with the jackpot grand prize of becoming a parent of a new American citizen who would then serve as immunity and insulation from punishment for violating U.S. immigration laws, or as an "anchor baby" to gain access to welfare benefits... It was passed before the nation had laws regulating immigration. There were no illegal aliens for the mid-19th-century lawmakers to imagine or define... We are progressively making the terms "American citizen" and "sovereignty" meaningless.
    Read more on anchor babies on the Dustin Inman Society website.
  • Immigration debate gnaws at meaning of citizenship, Orange County Registar, (November 18, 2007)