TheEpochTimes.com

Among President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for immigration is a move to end a longstanding practice of granting something known as “birthright citizenship” to children whose parents are illegally present in the United States.

How exactly Trump will change policies within agencies is unclear, but experts indicate he has options.

Regardless, revoking birthright citizenship could impact waves of new illegal immigrants and change the incentives for so-called birth tourism, wherein an expectant mother arrives in the United States just before giving birth.

BorderHawk.blog

One of our country’s most insane policies is that of automatic birthright citizenship for babies born to illegal aliens on U.S. soil.

People in the Third World certainly know about this policy and take advantage of it.

The policy’s defenders assert that it’s in the Constitution and it would be a great injustice to change.

A surprising recent action taken by the U.S. government sheds some light on the issue.

The U.S. State Department, under the Biden administration, rejected the citizenship of Siavash Sobhani, a doctor in Virginia who was born in the United States in 1961.

Sobhani was considered an American citizen all his life and was simply renewing his passport.

But in June, the State Department informed Sobhani that he wasn’t a citizen, had never been a citizen, and shouldn’t have been recognized as such way back in 1961.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
NationalReview.com

Shortly after the Constitution went into effect, the first Congress enacted a naturalization law. Lawmakers superseded this statute just five years later. Both provisions derived from the Constitution’s grant to the legislature (in Article I, Section 8) of the power “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” That grant, along with these naturalization statutes of 1790 and 1795, edifies us about the Framers’ conception of citizenship, and of the status of aliens and their children.

Status questions about the children of aliens have moved to the fore in recent months. Central Americans, enticed by laws that perversely incentivize illegal immigration, have sought entry en masse at our southern border. This week, with an oncoming “caravan” of migrants galvanizing President Trump’s base on the eve of the midterm elections, these questions have stoked a heated debate — with all the shopworn smears of racism and bad faith that are now staples of American public discourse.

In campaign mode, the president floated the idea of issuing an executive order that would purport to deny “birthright citizenship,” i.e., to end the policy of granting American citizenship to children born in the United States to alien parents who are not legally present here. I highlight “purport” and “policy” because the president’s opponents counter that these newborn children of illegal aliens are granted citizenship by the Constitution, specifically, by the 14th Amendment. Therefore, the argument goes, this grant of citizenship is not a mere policy but a command of the highest law of the land; it may not be reversed by an executive order, or even by a law of Congress, the branch empowered to set the terms of citizenship.

That is a lot of weight to put on an amendment that had nothing to do with regulating aliens — an amendment ratified in 1868, a time when there was no federal-law concept of illegal aliens.
 

State Responsibility

Rarely noticed in our era of the Beltway Behemoth is how sparse the Constitution is on the matter of central-government power over aliens. The naturalization clause is the beginning and the end of it. Congress was given the power to prescribe what aliens needed to do to become Americans. But there is not a word in the Constitution about law enforcement, nothing about which aliens would be allowed into the country, or on what conditions they would be permitted to stay.

By Craig Bannister
CNSNews.com

Iconic Democrat Harry Reid, a Nevada senator in 1993, declared that “no sane country” would grant citizenship to illegal aliens and their children born in the U.S.

In a speech on the Senate floor on September 20, 1993, Sen. Reid said America can neither reward illegal entry into the U.S., nor afford to pay for the services taxpayers would have to fund if it did:

"If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant?

“No sane country would do that, right? Guess again.

“If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and guarantee a full access to all public and social services this society provides. And that’s a lot of services.”

The incentive for illegal aliens to have babies in the U.S. is both obvious and costly to taxpayers, Sen. Reid said:

“Is it any wonder that two-thirds of the babies born - at taxpayer expense - in county-run hospitals in Los Angeles are born to illegal alien mother?”

Bowing to union pressure, Sen. Reid recanted his remarks in 1999, Fox News reports:

"Reid reversed his position in 1999 and apologized for his stance, shortly after the union group AFL-CIO, which holds significant political sway nationally and in Nevada, changed its position to support birthright citizenship. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that Reid has since called his speech "way up high" on his "list of mistakes," and in 2006 he referred to it as a "low point" of his legislative career."

By Stephen Dinan
TheWashingtonTimes.com

Some pregnant foreign women pay as much as $100,000 to be ferried into the U.S. on a visitor’s visa, arriving in time to give birth on American soil, instantly earning their new baby citizenship.

The Trump administration on Thursday announced a new policy designed to put an end to that kind of “birth tourism.”

Under new rules taking effect Friday, State Department consular officials will now be able to refuse to grant short-term tourism or business visas to women they believe are attempting to travel solely for the purpose of having their womb be on U.S. soil at the time they deliver.

The department called birth tourism ‘a threat to the security of the United States,” and the White House said the very integrity of U.S. citizenship is at stake.

“The birth tourism industry threatens to overburden valuable hospital resources and is rife with criminal activity,” said presidential press secretary Stephanie Grisham. “Closing this glaring immigration loophole will combat these endemic abuses and ultimately protect the United States from the national security risks created by this practice.”

Only women believed to be traveling specifically to give birth on tourist visas would be denied.

Women seeking visas for other purposes but who are still likely to give birth would still be able to come, said Carl C. Risch, assistant secretary at the State Department, in the government’s filing in the Federal Register. Women coming to the U.S. for specialized medical care for their pregnancies would be able to argue the merits of their cases, he said.