Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax

Anti-immigration advocates are bothered because aliens can come over the border pregnant and give birth to a child who is automatically American. They want to change this. What should worry you is that they cannot do this unless they manage to amend the Constitution:

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.

That phrase “all persons born….in the United States….are citizens” protects you. The underlying agenda of the anti-immigration movement is having the power to decide who is a citizen. The Fourteenth Amendment specifically strips Congress, the legislatures, the president, governors, courts, and petty bureaucrats of the ability to exclude you from the American Commons. If they get to change the 14th Amendment, then they can decide that you are not a citizen. If your parent crossed the border illegally, you could be denied your rights and turned into a person without a country. They could carry this back to your grandparents or farther if they wished. Their motives become even more sinister if you realize that rewriting the Fourteenth Amendment could mean reestablishment of segregation by declaring nonwhites to be noncitizens. Or political opponents could be denaturalized: don’t think the Republicans would stoop so low? Given what this Democrat has seen them do these past 12 years, he wouldn’t count on it.