For so long have I been exploring my random thoughts that I neglected my discussion of the Fourteenth Amendment, that hunk of shrapnel still embedded in us from the War Between The States.
Apart from the violence done to American communities in the name of promoting the “due process clause” and the “equal protection clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment, the federal government has also taken advantage of the “citizenship clause” of that Amendment as a further means to pulverize not only communities’ self control, but their very sense of self. The “citizenship clause” is the very first portion of the Amendment and reads:
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. . . .
Congress’s goal in drafting this language was to create a national standard of citizenship to avoid the possibility that States might deny citizenship to African-Americans. Of particular importance to this plan was the phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which limited citizenship to children whose parents owed allegiance to the United States. Mere birth within the United States was not enough, since this would extend the privileges and immunities of citizenship even to the children of visiting diplomats or other persons having no kinship with our country. Senator Jacob Merritt Howard, who introduced the Amendment for debate, explained as follows:
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.
Another way of phrasing the function of the “citizenship clause” was provided by then-Senator Reverdy Johnson, who observed:
Now, all this amendment provides is, that all persons born in the United States and not subject to some foreign power – for that, no doubt, is the meaning of the committee who have brought the matter before us – shall be considered as citizens of the United States. . . .
The Supreme Court took note of the limited reach of the “citizenship clause” in its contemporaneous Slaughterhouse Cases decision, noting as follows:
The phrase, “subject to its jurisdiction” was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.
Not long thereafter, in 1884 the Supreme Court re-affirmed this holding in Elk v. Wilkins by denying citizenship to a Native-American who, although born within the United States, was not subject to its jurisdiction at that time:*
Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States, members of, and owing immediate allegiance to, one of the Indiana tribes (an alien, though dependent, power) although in a geographical sense born in the United States, are no more ‘born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ within the meaning of the first section of the fourteenth amendment, than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government, or the children born within the United States, of ambassadors or other public ministers of foreign nations.
Despite these unmistakable indications of the meaning of the “citizenship clause,” the federal government has adopted and enforced a policy that children of illegal aliens are citizens of the United States at the moment of birth. This contravenes the Fourteenth Amendment’s aim of withholding citizenship from persons whose parents owe allegiance to a foreign power, and it has also provided them an anchor with which to squat here in violation of the law indefinitely. Although the Supreme Court has avoided scrutinizing this blatantly illegal policy, the Court has tacitly approved of it by forcing us all to subsidize such families and, by extension, illegal immigration itself.**
The dam broke in 1982, when the Court prohibited the State of Texas from denying public schooling to the children of illegal aliens:
Nor is education a fundamental right; a State need not justify by compelling necessity every variation in the manner in which education is provided to its population. . . . But more is involved in these cases than the abstract question whether [the Texas law] discriminates against a suspect class, or whether education is a fundamental right. [The Texas law] imposes a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status. The stigma of illiteracy will mark them for the rest of their lives. By denying these children a basic education, we deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our Nation.
Hence the bizarre result that States, although having no obligation to provide taxpayer-financed education even to full-fledged citizens, must provide such education to non-citizens who are here illegally. So again the Court ignored the Constitution and made a policy choice concerning children’s educational needs, and a muddled one at that: absence of taxpayer-financed education is not absence of education per se, and a child forgoing public schooling will hardly end up “disabled” or “illiterate” (quite the reverse, most likely).
Communities have ever since waged a losing battle to protect their budgets from illegal immigrants and their federal enablers. Whether it’s public education, welfare, medical care, or even incarceration, we have been compelled to expend incredible amounts of money and resources on people who broke the law to enter our midst, leaving us less capable of meeting our needs. A case in point is California, now bleeding roughly $10 billion per year to support this invasion and whose voters in 1994 enacted Proposition 187 to stop the hemorrhaging. California’s act of legitimate self-preservation was nullified by a federal district court, which took its cue from the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision and thereby disregarded the people’s express will to have a say in how to spend their tax money. A similar fate could easily befall Arizona, whose voters recently approved the modest Proposition 200 requiring proof of legal status as a condition of receiving public benefits.
Other burdens of illegal immigration include the depression of wages, the spiraling cost of housing, overpopulation, urban sprawl, and the drain of money that illegal aliens send to their families in their countries of origin. Outweighing even these problems is the erosion of our cultural identity, a process that has overwhelmed some communities and made severe inroads into many more. America was designed to accommodate a patchwork of diverse communities, with our Constitution reserving the majority of political power at the state and local level so that these communities could pursue their unique way of life. What is currently taking shape, however, is a ubiquitous and chaotic stew of customs, mannerisms, and tongues that annihilates a sense of community anywhere. “Assimilation” has become a dirty word, since aliens no longer need to be embraced by the communities where they reside in order to prosper. Aliens now have a federal policy at their backs that coerces communities to support them no matter their legal status or their persistence of alien ways of life. In cities such as Miami and Los Angeles, many Americans find that not only are they compelled to subsidize the alien presence surrounding them, but also that they must learn a second language to survive in it.***
Illegal immigration also represents a potential threat to national security that our political leadership shows little serious intention of curtailing. In spite of September 11th and the “war on terror,” the federal government refuses to tackle one of the few duties that it is indeed charged with, as described in Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion . . . .
But the opposite has occurred, with the federal government maintaining procedural guarantees for those few illegal aliens who have actually been identified and apprehended, which allows them to forever postpone their deportation and which also appeases the legions of lawyers who earn a living processing these invaders. Opinion polls reveal that most Americans consider illegal immigration a problem in need of fixing, and that even legal immigration should be decreased or suspended. Elite opinion rejects this viewpoint and remains indifferent to the dismal state of affairs. Any responsible, or even sane, government attempting to protect its territory would obey the Constitution’s command and stem the near 500,000 undocumented persons who infiltrate our land each year, and whose numbers are now estimated at 10.5 million.
All we hear from the political class and their high-powered business lobbies is that these illegal aliens are vital to the economy; that they take the unpleasant jobs that no one else will; and that anyone who seeks their exclusion or expulsion is a racist xenophobe. These scripted responses betray an utter lack of respect for our laws, implicitly decreeing that if something is considered “necessary” then the law no longer matters. If open borders are truly essential for national survival and prosperity, then we can simply pass a law ordaining it. Of course the American people would never do this, so the political class imposes its own will by circumventing ours (mirroring their modus operandi for destroying the Constitution by ignoring the amendment process).
Many aliens undeniably have a need to come here, but a truth must be shouted from the rooftops if we have any hope of recovering from the disease that wracks the immigration debate specifically and the rule of law generally: needs are not rights. There is no right to enter a country against that country’s will. The true right at issue is that of the American people to select who may come here versus who may not. In 1924, Americans chose to restrict immigration almost completely. In 1965, Americans chose to open the doors to almost everyone from around the world, provided that they follow a specific process for gaining entry. Today Americans are fed up with the massive circumvention of those procedures and all the problems associated with it, but the federal judicial and political authorities have eviscerated our right to implement our wishes. Righteous outrage belongs to us, not to those who demand entry into our company against our will.
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* A little later, the Supreme Court in 1898 issued a ridiculous and unfounded opinion in United States v. Wong Kim Ark holding that the children of legal immigrants were entitled to automatic citizenship. Fifth columnists have seized on the gelatinous language of this opinion while doggedly ignoring that it does not concern children of illegal immigrants or otherwise repeal the citizenship dictates of the Fourteenth Amendment.
**It may be only a matter of time until the Court finalizes its destruction of the citizenship clause and openly holds that the Fourteenth Amendment entitles the children of illegal immigrants to automatic citizenship at birth (a ruling that is most likely to appear if the U.S. Congress ever grows enough of a spine to deny such citizenship by way of legislation, since a federal lawsuit will follow with nauseatingly predictable speed).
*** Some people wonder why I am troubled by the proliferation of Spanish in this country when I speak it fluently. Indeed, I gain quite a bit from my abilities with Spanish, but my beliefs are not driven by my personal interests. There is a such thing as the national interest that does not necessarily match my own. It's a radical concept that, if tried more often, would eliminate many of our collective problems.
