NEWSMAX: Report Questions Citizenship for ‘Anchor Babies’

Report Questions Citizenship for ‘Anchor Babies’



The issue of “anchor babies” — children who automatically become citizens upon their birth to illegal aliens in the United States — has become a hot topic as their numbers continue to soar.

But nearly 60 percent of Americans now oppose “birthright citizenship,” according to a Rasmussen poll, and some lawmakers are calling for legislation to end it.

House Minority Leader John Boehner says that a revision of the 14th Amendment — which forms the basis for birthright citizenship — is “worth considering.” And legal scholars including Yale Law School Prof. Peter Schuck and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner question whether the amendment does in fact confer citizenship on the children of illegal aliens.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has released an in-depth report on birthright citizenship that includes these disclosures:

Each year, 300,000 to 400,000 anchor babies are born in the United States and automatically recognized as American citizens.

Only 30 of the world’s 194 nations confer automatic citizenship on children born to illegal aliens, and just two of them are advanced economies — the United States and Canada.

No European country has birthright citizenship.

Over the past few decades, a number of countries have repealed birthright citizenship provisions, including the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Ireland, and New Zealand.

The number of U.S.-born children with illegal alien parents soared from 2.3 million in 2003 to at least 4 million in 2008. Between 2001 and 2009, such births surpassed 542,000 in Texas alone.

The Supreme Court has ruled that children born in the U.S. to permanent resident aliens are citizens, but has never decided if the rule applies to the children of aliens whose presence is illegal or temporary.

Due to birthright citizenship, the undocumented immigrant families of anchor babies can qualify for welfare benefits they would otherwise not be entitled to receive.

Also, a child born into those families has the ability “when he grows up, to legalize his parents, and also to bring into the United States his foreign-born spouse and any foreign-born siblings,” according to CIS Legal Policy Analyst Jon Feere.

“The sponsored spouse can, in turn, sponsor her own foreign-born parents and siblings, and the siblings can, in turn, sponsor their own foreign-born spouses, and so on, generating a virtually never-ending and always-expanding migration chain.”

The child born in the U.S. to illegal aliens thus forms an anchor for the legal immigration of a number of relatives — hence the term “anchor baby.”

The anchor baby phenomenon has led to the growth of “birth tourism” — pregnant women traveling to the United States to give birth on American soil.

Feere points out: “Is automatic birthright citizenship for children of all legal and illegal aliens expressly required by the U.S. Constitution? On its face, the answer is ‘no.’

“The 14th Amendment confers citizenship through naturalization or by birth to persons ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States, but provides no guidance on when an alien is to be regarded as subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

“One might say the practice has become policy without becoming law.”

The 14th Amendment was passed in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War, and its Citizenship Clause was intended to ensure that freed slaves would be recognized as U.S. citizens.

“There is simply no direct evidence that Congress wished to confer citizenship on the children of temporary or illegal visitors, but there is some evidence that they did not,” Feere observes.

Sen. Jacob Howard, a Michigan Republican who debated a resolution that would become the Citizenship Clause, limited citizenship by birth by stating in 1866: “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.”

Feere also notes that an illegal alien is, under law, a citizen of a foreign country and therefore subject to that nation’s jurisdiction, and the authors of the Citizenship Clause intended that “jurisdiction as to the child would be imputed from the status of the parents.”

He maintains, then, that a child born in America to illegal aliens is not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and therefore is not entitled to citizenship.

John Eastman, a professor at the Chapman University School of Law, said in a media conference in August that illegal immigrants are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction in the sense that they cannot be drafted into the American military or tried for treason against the United States.

Their children would share that status, via citizenship in their parents’ nation or nations of birth – and so would not be eligible for a U.S. passport, even if born on American soil, according to Eastman’s statements reported by the Christian Science Monitor.

Furthermore, Eastman said, federal courts have upheld the right of Congress to regulate naturalization policies over and above the basic constitutional guarantee.

Therefore, CIS report author Feere concludes, “Some eminent scholars and jurists have concluded that it is within the power of Congress to define the scope of the Citizenship Clause through legislation and that birthright citizenship for the children of temporary visitors and illegal aliens could likely be abolished by statute without amending the Constitution.”

To that end, last year Nathan Deal, then a Georgia Republican in the House, introduced legislation — which has nearly 100 co-sponsors — that would limit birthright citizenship to persons born in the United States to at least one parent who is either a U.S. citizen, a permanent resident alien, or an alien performing active duty in the armed forces.

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