A Nation of Immigrants

Recently there has been a fair amount of discussion over whether the U.S. should continue to grant “birthright citizenship” to the children of illegal immigrants born in the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment has long been held to require the granting of such citizenship, and last month Senator Lindsey Graham proposed a Constitutional Amendment to change that fact.

The issue has led to a few topsy-turvy political conclusions. Here, for example is Mark Krikorian (author of The New Case Against Immigration: Legal and Illegal) arguing that ending birthright citizenship would be a bad idea:

I don’t like illegals having U.S.-citizen kids any more than anyone else, but there’s no evidence suggesting that this “drop and leave” stuff is true — anything’s possible, I suppose, but it’s just an assertion at this point. My own sense is that most illegal alien women who have kids here (accounting for nearly 10 percent of all children born in the U.S. each year) didn’t come for that purpose; they came for jobs or to join relatives, and one thing led to another, birds-and-bees style, and they had kids. There are no doubt some people who dash across the border illegally to have kids, but they just can’t amount to a large share of the problem. Nor does the problem of “birth tourism” require a change in the Constitution — we just need to permit (and require) our consular officers to reject visa applications from pregnant women, inviting them to re-apply once they’ve given birth in their own countries.

And here is open-borders advocate Will Wilkinson arguing that ending birthright citizenship could paradoxically make Americans more open to immigrants: