FEATURED QUESTION: U.S. Constitution

(This FEATURED QUESTION stuck here for few days. Please scroll down for other postings)

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 as one of the Reconstruction Amendments, is the Constitutional basis of "anchor babies," particularly Section 1, which reads as follows:

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.

Recently, in light of this from an Arizona lawmaker, Texas Fred commented as follows about the amendment:

The original intent of the 14th Amendment was to offer protection to the recently freed slaves and their children. It was NOT written with the express intent of giving citizenship to the offspring of illegal aliens.

In his essay, Texas Fred cites the following about the original intent of the 14th Amendment (Senator Jacob Howard, 1866):

“Every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. 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, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States. This has long been a great desideratum in the jurisprudence and legislation of this country.”

According to the source cited for the above quotation from Senator Howard:

The United States did not limit immigration in 1868 when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. Thus there were, by definition, no illegal immigrants and the issue of citizenship for children of those here in violation of the law was nonexistent. Granting of automatic citizenship to children of illegal alien mothers is a recent and totally inadvertent and unforeseen result of the amendment and the Reconstructionist period in which it was ratified.

Furthermore,

Current estimates indicate there may be between 300,000 and 700,000 anchor babies born each year in the U.S., thus causing illegal alien mothers to add more to the U.S. population each year than immigration from all sources in an average year before 1965. (See consequences.)

Also,

Births to illegal alien mothers are adding more to the U.S. population each year than did immigration from all sources in an average year prior to 1965.

Read more at The 14th Amendment.

See "The 1965 Immigration Act: Anatomy of a Disaster." The 1965 Immigration Act accomplished the following:

...[U]nder the 1965 immigration Act, [anchor babies] act as an anchor that pulls the illegal alien mother and eventually a host of other relatives into permanent U.S. residency.

Video on the topic:




FEATURED QUESTION: Should immigration reform include the repeal of the 1965 Immigration Act, or is it too late for any such step?