Will the 14th amendment be canceled?
The United States Census Bureau data released an analysis on the 2008 birth reports according to which eight percent of all babies born in the United States belonged to illegal immigrant parents.
The 14th amendment to the Constitution provides each baby with a United States citizenship at birth if he is born on the territory of America, even though the parents remained undocumented. This is the reason for which some Republican lawmakers want to revise birth right citizenship, so that the children of illegal immigrants would not immediately receive a citizenship. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that 340,000 babies of the 4.3 million born in the United States hospitals in 2008 belonged to illegal immigrant parents, and this makes a total of 4 million citizen currently living in the country and which have illegal immigrant parents. This is the first reliable estimation of annual United States births to illegal immigrants, and ads fire on the already hot debate over the children of illegal immigrants.
There are a lot of critics of the birth right citizenship, which have expressed their worries regarding the fact that the children of the 10.8 million illegal immigrants will receive citizenship and thus will be able to sponsor their parents and relatives for legal residency. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina says that the 14th amendment should be canceled and the Constitution should be changed, so that if a couple of illegal immigrants has a baby, then their child is an illegal immigrant too. The Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, together with some other Republicans like Arizona senators Jon Kyl and John McCain are considering the 14th Amendment issue raised by her, but declare themselves reluctant to changing the constitution. This would require some congressional hearings, because, after all, the Constitution has successfully ruled America for centuries by now and the decision of amending it has to be taken with extensive and thoughtful consideration. Some of the lawmakers say that the 14th Amendment business is nothing but a political stunt, raised three months before the elections. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvannia Democratic Senator whose parents were immigrants to the United States says that citizenship by birth a fundamental right and that using newborn children that can not protect themselves with the purpose of gaining political power is preposterous.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution appeared after the Civil War so that the descendants of slaves received United States citizenship. “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”. George Washington University constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley said that the draft of the 14th Amendment mentioned that it is not referring to foreigners or aliens, but the courts have repeatedly ruled that people who are born in the United States are American citizens. The Supreme Court only dealt once with this matter, in 1898, and ruled that citizenship by birth only applies to United States born children of legal immigrants who have yet to become citizens. The United States is one of the few remaining countries that still grants citizenship to all children born on its grounds.
