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"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." – seems pretty clear enough to me.

It may be supposed that the 1898 Court case which defined this to have only a specific few exceptions (children of diplomats born here and treatied Native Americans, at the time, as the only groups not subject to American jurisdiction), did not account for "illegal" immigration as a factor. However I'm fairly sure we were already busily trying to restrict Chinese immigrants (the case in question settled the legal citizenship rights of a Chinese non-citizen immigrant's children), which would cut against that logic.

There may be an argument for jus sanguinis over jus soli, but not in a country which rather exceptionally encourages relatively free immigration like ours. Essentially if you want to abolish jus soli, you need to make a better case (or really a case would do for starters) that we should be restricting immigration in the first place. I might sympathize with a desire to make our immigration system more like recruitment of educated or education seeking persons than a source of cheap labour, but that's about as far as I'd be willing to go on that case.

And there are plenty of ways to do that without abolishing birthright citizenship anyway.

Until there is another Constitutional Amendment to change that, they will always be American Citizens if actually born within the boundary's of the U.S.

However, if the parents are deported the families should not be separated so the children should go with the parents – with the legal ability to return alone once they reach adulthood, of course.

Should there be an amendment changing the anchor law, it should not be "grandfathered" to include those already born here to illegal parents, only those from the date of implementation of that law forward.

I understand the amendment as well as anyone else, it is written clearly. The question however is do you agree with it? The debate is not titled "are children born of illegal immigrants US citizens?" It's: "SHOULD children born of illegal immigrants in the US be American Citizens?"

While I appreciate that we are all well versed enough in the Constitution to read through it's amendments where needed, that doesn't complete the whole "debate" idea behind this site.

Fair enough. It doesn't in my view complete the debate to simply say that they should not either (as you did initially).

Give us a reason why jus soli is a bad idea and I'll shoot that down instead of offer the most practical objection: That you'd have to overturn years of legal precedent and a Constitutional amendment.. With the latter being so impractical to do that you'll find it impossible to get what you want here anyway.

It might be an interesting thought experiment, worthy of debate.

But I don't see the point in making a fuss over it for reality as people seem to want to do lately. They're not getting anything by doing it. Why is there a fuss in the first place would seem like a better debate topic than what should be done about it. The why will be necessary anyway in order to shift opinion and in particular elite support for immigration in any direction closer to opposing it in any marginal way (like birthright citizenship).

If there is not some purported practical benefit to making a shift from jus soli to jus sanguinis or some other method of active citizenship, I'm not sure why we're talking about it.

I think you would find that deporting citizens, such as the children of immigrants legal or otherwise, without due process is rather difficult to achieve legally.

Since they (usually) committed no crime after all and stripping someone of their citizenship requires active steps on their part and not a simple public or governmental decree to that effect, it's rather impossible in fact.

You have quite obviously not comprehended nor understood what I wrote. The crime was not committed by the children, therefore the crime was committed by the parents – since you really should not forcibly separate children from their parents unless there is an inherent danger to the children, then the children should be allowed to leave with the parents and allowed to return when they become adults.

Deporting someone that is here legally means that that person actually did commit a crime that warrants deportation.

Assuming anything is wrong.

What you're talking about is denying residency without due process to someone who committed no crime. I don't see how I misunderstood what you were saying such that you had to repeat it. It's still very difficult to get around that whole "due process" thing without a trial or a charge against someone. My objection to that proposal still stands.

I'd drink to that.

Both Jus Soli and Jus Sanguinis are a bit too far on opposite ends of the spectrum for my taste. Jus Sanguinis for example in Greece, gives it's non-blood "citizens" practically no rights at all. If you are a child born of a Greek citizen and say a Dominican citizen you have next to no rights in Greece. You can't own property or vote; it's really quite amazing. On the opposite side, Jus Soli says if you happen to be born here, accidentally or otherwise, you're welcome to all of the above plus more just because of a coincidental occurance (in some peoples cases).

I think my comfort level would come from a moderated Jus Soli which has long been adopted by several countries i.e. UK, France, and Australia.

The practical benefit is to initiate new citizens with a sense of accomplishment in their naturalization. There is a process involved which takes time and effort; those factors alone give the participant thought as to whether they truly want to make the effort to become a citizen on say, their 18th birthday.

The overturning of legal precedent and the 14th amendment are both big things I agree, but the constitution is made to be changed; that's the amazing part of it, a 235 year old document that still has social relevance. Prohibition was mandated by the United States by the 18th amendment and was overturned in '33. Amendments are made to be changed when necessary.

My big argument against the Birthright of Citizenship amendment is the small percentage of people who "sneak" in specifically to have their child on American soil, claim citizenship for that child and stay here just as illegally as someone who "jumped" our border.

Prohibition, unlike birthright citizenship, was never a very popular idea (and not to mention involved money collected by the government, making its support and enforcement among GOVERNMENT low to begin with). Overturning it was therefore not terribly challenging. I agree you could always try to amend the Constitution, my argument would be that you need to make a very compelling argument that you need to in order to find enough support among state legislatures or popular support within states. That we have been unable to muster popular support for a variety of ideas with, I think anyway, somewhat better standing for defending our liberties against government power speaks rather poorly of the idea of overturning objects of law already enshrined in the Constitution.

And in this case you would be using that overturning object of law in order to expand power of government (as with the 18th), which I find a rather less than appealing concept. And I'm highly skeptical of using sweeping legal architecture to deal with a (very) small percentage of people. This is how we ended up with crack cocaine sentencing disparities or the Arizona immigration law or a whole host of national security programmes.

I might agree that a modified system would be an improvement (though not for the reasons that most would), but given the historical and modern patterns of immigration, I see little need to use it. Most immigrants do most of the required work on their own, and all that is required is to give them a reasonable path that they might accomplish it. They do not need an additional sense of "accomplishment", given that the process of naturalisation is already arduous to the point of discouraging legal immigration, particularly in technical fields that we might call "recruitment" economically.

The main practical suggestion for abolishing jus soli or perhaps amending it as you suggest is that it would actually encourage more immigration (by making the conceptual immigrant less threatening to the median voter). Which I'm pretty sure is not what the people who want this gone think would happen or should happen. I'd like to see how that would go over with the xenophobes.

I would still object on the principle that we should not be meddling (much) with border controls in the first place or the reasons which motivate and induce people to cross our borders to live and work and seek their pursuits here, provided those reasons are not belligerent or fraudulent (which is rare in both cases). And I'm not sure how we could say this power would be applied once granted, it is likely as not to be abused (or ignored by powerful elites). The status quo here is clearly unacceptable to most, but in my view we have already done enough to restrict and coax a sense of accomplishment out of immigration status and should be dialing it back rather than ratcheting up the power of government controls.

I wonder how many Cubans we'd save from drowning each year if we ended birth-right citizenship…

Considering we already use pepper spray and water cannons to keep Cubans from coming here, I don't see that the amount would be that high.

How much better would Mexico do in the Olympics if everyone from there who could run, jump or swim wasn't having their kids here instead?

The Native Americans had a pretty lax view of land ownership and borders too. (I'm just going for cheesy one liners this time, not a real debate, you guys can have that up in your discussion. I'm just having fun this time.)

Considering I have a pretty strong view of land ownership and property rights (but not borders), I suspect the one-liners will have to suffice.

Alright fine, I'll debate this seriously. Can we at least agree that the reasoning for the initial passage of the part of the 14th amendment that causes birth citizenship is no longer an issue? (making sure that the south didn't deny blacks citizenship.)

That reasoning is no longer an issue, sure.

But the reasoning was extended through case law and legal precedent to deal with immigration and the legal jurisdiction of the United States and all who reside in it. Which means it is still pressing in relation to this issue.

And considering it took another amendment and a very messy LBJ-era law to deal with the South's second class citizenship approach…I'm not so sure anybody took the 14th at face value on that point anyway.

Of course. If it's not broken then don't fix it, which means it's on me to show that we should get rid of birth citizenship, not you to say that we should keep it.

Another question, are we in agreement that the welfare state resources available to illegal immigrants are not sufficient to promote immigration to the US, but that those afforded to their children (who are then citizens) are?

There are few welfare state resources available to illegal immigrants. Or legal ones. So the first part yes, I agree that does not promote immigration.

The second part, no.
1) I don't think those children are going to have much use for concerning themselves with rational incentives like health care or food stamps that they may have access to (while their parents will generally not)
2) I don't think this incentive is anywhere near as powerful as merely living here is relative to the alternatives of making a go of it in Mexico or Haiti or Vietnam or Cuba or Ghana. I think anti-immigration elements have vastly oversold the supposed insufferable laziness of immigrants (repeatedly throughout our history) and hence the likelihood of such people to live at the teat of social safety networks instead of by their own exertions, and hence that they will have children solely to exploit our system (and that they will know how to exploit that system with any degree of sophistication).

So no, I don't agree that's an incentive at all.

I might agree that if they can exploit it, that might be fraud. But I don't agree that it is exploitative (in all cases) or somehow providing a backwards incentive.

"In Parkland Memorial Hospital Dallas, the second busiest maternity ward in the United States, 70% of the women giving birth were illegal aliens. That added up to 11,200 babies for which Medicaid kicked in 34.5 million dollars to deliver these babies, the feds another 9.5 million and Dallas taxpayers tossed in 31.3 million." Reiniers, John. Hernando Today, "Anchor Babies." January 25, 2008.

Also look at the data here regarding immigrant children welfare broken down by race: http://www.firstfocus.net/sites/default/files/Chi…

I don't see how that proves that there is an INCENTIVE for illegal immigrants to come here based on generous health care provisioning or general social safety nets. The incentive point is the one you are claiming as a problem.

What it establishes is
1) That illegal immigrants have children.
2) That they either cannot afford to pay for it out of pocket or that they do not have employer/private health insurance.

Given that almost nobody in this country bothers paying for health care out of pocket (only something like 11% of all American's medical expenses are out of pocket payment, rest is deferred wages or, mostly, government tab), I'm not that worried about the second as a problem.

And the first still does not disprove the logic that it would be better to have a family here than wherever someone emigrated from as a greater incentive than "I'm going to siphon off billions of dollars". Medicare/aid is already a bankrupting and unsustainable system with or without a few billions spent on migrant workers' families. The much larger problem is the wealth transfer from young to old and in particular from poor to rich that it engages in at a tune of many billions of dollars per year. This, by contrast, is a nuisance.

It may very well be worth closing some sort of loophole, but that may come at the cost of medical ethics and humanitarian aims.

As for the study you highlighted, you might want to read it…. They largely indicate that the immigrant or (illegal) migrant is not interacting with the machinery of the state when they could be. "underrepresented" does not seem to imply that this is a severe problem.

Further digging has indicated that far from being the incentive, the most common record of a birth in Parkland over the studied timeframe was a woman's SECOND child. Patient records and this little feature would often indicate she already had established residency for a period of years (yes, sometimes illegally) rather than using the birthing and birthright citizenship as the sole source of "legal" residency.

so let me get this straight. i'm 18 yrs of age. i never been to mexico. all my life i lived here. so just cuz my ancestors weren't born here,(correction, this was mexico before) i have to be sent to mexico where i've never been? this, just this is an identity crisis. i'm neither mexican nor american. the whole born in the soil citzenship cancels this identity crises, and i am an american. but if this is canceled, where the fuck do u want me to identify myself?

as much as i dislike it i think anyone born in the U.S is a natural born citizen