More discussion of the Alien Criminals

Perri Nelson responded to my suggestion that those children of illegal aliens born in this country be sent back to Mexico along with their illegal parents this way:

The only thing I disagree with in this post is the sending of the children born here to illegal immigrants back to Mexico. Those poor unfortunates are citizens of the United States, and not of Mexico. Sending them to Mexico would make them illegal immigrants in Mexico.

First of all they would not be illegal immigrants to Mexico. Under Mexican law they retain dual citizenship all their lives and possess the right to vote in Mexican elections. This is part of the Mexican government's plan to keep the loyalty of the citizens (and their children) it shoves across the border into the US.

Mexico wants them to retain their identity as Mexicans, send money back to Mexico and vote in American elections with the goal of benefiting Mexico, not the United States.

Secondly the view that children of illegal aliens are automatically citizens of the United States just because their mothers were able to keep their legs squeezed together long enough to keep them from popping out until they had crawled through that hole in the wire is based upon a misinterpretation of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The section reads as follows:

Section 1. 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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The debate surrounding the adoption of the amendment made it clear that the intention of the law was to grant citizenship to those Negros who had been born in the United States in the condition of slavery. It was not, for example, intended to confer citizenship on the children of foreign embassy staff who happened to be born inside the United States (and to this day it is not held to do so). It was also not intended to grant citizenship to the children of female citizens of other nations who happened to go into labor while visiting the United States. It certainly was not meant to grant citizenship to foreign criminals here illegally.

The modern view that any child born in the US other than the child of a diplomat posted here derives from a 19th Century Supreme Court ruling in the Wong Kim Arc case:

The facts and arguments in the Wong Kim Ark case bear only limited resemblance to the present-day issue of illegal and undocumented aliens flooding into the United States across its southern and northern borders.

Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco and lived and worked there until he was twenty-one years old. His parents were like so many Chinese at the end of the 19th century who had come to California to work on the great construction projects: building railroads; erecting levees for the Sacramento River; and draining its vast swampland to create the now famously fertile Sacramento Valley farmlands. After some years during which they lived and worked openly in San Francisco, without violating any laws, they returned to China.

When he was twenty-one years old, Wong Kim Ark visited his parents in China, but upon returning to the Port of San Francisco in 1895, was denied entry on the grounds both that he was not a citizen and that the Federal Chinese Exclusion Acts prevented his entering the United States as an immigrant.

The High Court ruled that the children of Chinese immigrants who were not themselves subject to naturalization due to the Chinese Exclusion Acts were nevertheless citizens if born in this country.

It is obvious that the circumstances of Wong Kim Arc very different from current illegal aliens and their children. The Chinese of Mr. Wong's day were in the United States legally and therefore "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. The government's attempt to apply the provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Acts to Mr. Wong, who was born before those laws were enacted, is a clear case of unconstitutional ex post facto law and should have been overturned.

What is required today is either a Supreme Court ruling clarifying the non-citizen status of the children of illegal aliens or a law passed by Congress and signed by the President. While the Court may, as always, do as it pleases an act of the executive and legislative branches would require a major infusion of political willpower and courage.

Since my suggestion that the government aggressively attempt to send illegals back to Mexico would also require a similar spine stiffening I see no reason not to bundle both ideas together. After all politicians are by nature cowards and getting them to "screw their courage to the sticking place" more than once in a generation might well be impossible.