Such constitutional law experts as Bill O'Reilly and anyone else allowed to speak on Fox have mocked Donald Trumps understanding of the 14th Amendment's birth citizenship clause. Ann Coulter, who clerked at a federal appleals court and has actually read the Constitution, agrees with Trump. From her latest column: "On one hand, we have noted legal expert Bill O'Reilly haranguing Donald Trump: "YOU WANT ME TO QUOTE YOU THE AMENDMENT??? IF YOU'RE BORN HERE YOU'RE AN AMERICAN. PERIOD! PERIOD!" (No, Bill -- there's no period. More like: "comma," to parents born “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States “and of the state wherein they reside.”) But on the other hand, we have Justice John Marshall Harlan II, who despite not being a Fox News legal expert, was no slouch. He wrote in the 1967 case, Afroyim v. Rusk, that the sponsors of the 14th Amendment feared that: "Unless citizenship were defined, freedmen might, under the reasoning of the Dred Scott decision, be excluded by the courts from the scope of the amendment. It was agreed that, since the 'courts have stumbled on the subject,' it would be prudent to remove the 'doubt thrown over' it. The clause would essentially overrule Dred Scott and place beyond question the freedmen's right of citizenship because of birth." It is true that in a divided 1898 case, U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court granted citizenship to the children born to legal immigrants, with certain exceptions, such as for diplomats. But that decision was so obviously wrong, even the Yale Law Journal ridiculed it. The majority opinion relied on feudal law regarding citizenship in a monarchy, rather than the Roman law pertaining to a republic -- the illogic of which should be immediately apparent to American history buffs, who will recall an incident in our nation's history known as "the American Revolution." Citizenship in a monarchy was all about geography -- as it is in countries bristling with lords and vassals, which should not be confused with this country. Thus, under the majority's logic in Wong Kim Ark, children born to American parents traveling in England would not be American citizens, but British subjects. As ridiculous as it was to grant citizenship to the children born to legal immigrants under the 14th Amendment (which was about what again? That's right: slaves freed by the Civil War), that's a whole order of business different from allowing illegal aliens to sneak across the border, drop a baby and say, Ha-ha! You didn't catch me! My kid's a citizen -- while Americans curse impotently under their breath. As the Supreme Court said in Elk: "[N]o one can become a citizen of a nation without its consent." The anchor baby scam was invented 30 years ago by a liberal zealot, Justice William Brennan, who slipped a footnote into a 1982 Supreme Court opinion announcing that the kids born to illegals on U.S. soil are citizens. Fox News is treating Brennan's crayon scratchings on the Constitution as part of our precious national inheritance. Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals is America's most-cited federal judge -- and, by the way, no friend to conservatives. In 2003, he wrote a concurrence simply in order to demand that Congress pass a law to stop "awarding citizenship to everyone born in the United States." The purpose of the 14th Amendment, he said, was "to grant citizenship to the recently freed slaves," adding that "Congress would not be flouting the Constitution" if it passed a law "to put an end to the nonsense." In a statement so sane that Posner is NEVER going to be invited on Fox News, he wrote: "We should not be encouraging foreigners to come to the United States solely to enable them to confer U.S. citizenship on their future children. But the way to stop that abuse of hospitality is to remove the incentive by changing the rule on citizenship." Forget the intricate jurisprudential dispute between Fox News blowhards and the most-cited federal judge. How about basic common sense? Citizenship in our nation is not a game of Red Rover with the Border Patrol! The Constitution does not say otherwise. Our history and our Constitution are being perverted for the sole purpose of dumping immigrants on the country to take American jobs. So far, only Donald Trump is defending black history on the issue of the 14th Amendment. Fox News is using black people as a false flag to keep cheap Third World labor flowing. "
So when they straighten out that pesky 14th Amendment so that it reads the way it was "originally intended," perhaps they can revisit the 2nd Amendment and do the same... Now wouldn't that be something? I mean, once you open the door...
I already went through this once when I was a member of a Christian church that believed the Bible was the word of G-d. Now I have to go through it again with the right wing nutcases who think the Constitution was written by some group of Gods we call the "Founding Fathers" and who apparently were infallible except for about 14 amendments which came later.
Keep in mind that the 18th Amendment was nullified by the 21st Amendment. The 14th Amendment was written and intended only for the Reconstruction period to give former slaves citizenship. However with the significant groundswell shaking the U.S. over illegal immigration it is likely that the 14th Amendment will either be turned back by the courts or by a new Amendment being ratified by the necessary number of states. The very idea that merely being born in the U.S. provides a child of an illegal immigrant with citizenship is insane; no other first world country does this.
so that's it? Your future is dependent on what side of the tracks (border) you were born? Ah shit, fifty more feet and I could have been an American. Can you imagine some kid sitting in Jaurez looking across that river and thinking, "If I was just over there I could get a job."
In most first world countries your citizenship is dependent on the citizenship of your parents, not the location of your birth. The United States should obviously follow their example.