Understanding The 14th Amendment

If you are to understand any issue, you must do your homework.  So as the debate rages on about “anchor babies” and citizenship for illegal immigrants, I thought it might be helpful to share the following pieces of testimony of Edward J. Erler before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims on June 25, 1997.  (Mr. Erler is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and Professor of Political Science at California State University, San Bernardino and the author of The American Polity (Crane Russak, 1993); he has also authored articles on the fourteenth amendment, affirmative action, the death penalty and other topics.)  In it, he puts things into plain English:

Senator Jacob Howard, the author of the citizenship clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, defined who would fall within the “jurisdiction of the United States”:

[E]very 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. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States. This has long been a great desideratum in the jurisprudence and legislation of this country.

What Mr. Erler has layed out is called “original intent” and in a world where the “rule of law” superscedes the “rule of man” it is the basis for interpretation.  Avoiding original intent for perceptions of political gain is what has created the problem of “anchor babies” in the first place:

…it seems to be beyond cavil that the jurisdiction clause of the fourteenth amendment was intended by its framers to have independent force; not all persons born in the geographical limits of the United States are within the jurisdiction of the United States. To be within the jurisdiction of the United States means to be within its political jurisdiction. Those who today advocate birth-right citizenship for children of illegal aliens born within the geographical boundaries of the United States believe that the fourteenth amendment extends to these children what the framers of the fourteenth amendment said did not extend to Native Americans.

In the case of the children born to aliens illegally in the United States, their citizenship would follow the citizenship of their parents or be determined by the laws of the country in which the parents hold citizenship. The fact that illegal aliens have violated laws of the United States precludes any possibility that they can be properly said to be within the jurisdiction of the United States as the aliens surely have demonstrated that they do not believe themselves to be subject to the laws of the United States, or are only partially subject. Contrary to a currently fashionable argument, the denial of birth-right citizenship to children of illegal aliens does not punish the children for the sins of the parents because the children don’t have a right to citizenship in the first place they are being denied nothing that is rightfully theirs. It would, of course, be a different matter for the children born of legal aliens who have been admitted by the laws of the United States. Whether their children would be citizens at birth or upon the attainment of citizenship by the parents would be a matter for Congress to determine.

Jurisdiction is not a geographical concept; it is a matter of political allegiance. Birth-right citizenship has no place in republican government; it is the relic of monarchy and should be recognized as such once again by Congress.

 To read Mr. Erler’s testimony in full (highly recommended), click HERE.