Boehner: End to Birthright Citizenship 'Worth Considering'

House Minority Leader John Boehner on Sunday said he's open to talks on changing the U.S. Constitution -- or at least the way it's interpreted -- so that U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants are not automatically U.S. citizens.

The top House Republican joined Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in calling for further study of the idea -- something that has been endorsed by prominent Republicans over the past few weeks. Though the call is already running into stiff opposition and faces extremely long odds of ever succeeding, some lawmakers say it would be a way to minimize the incentive for illegal immigration.

"There is a problem. To provide an incentive for illegal immigrants to come here so that their children can be U.S. citizens does, in fact, draw more people to our country," Boehner said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I do think that it's time for us to secure our borders and enforce the law and allow this conversation about the 14th Amendment to continue."

He continued: "In certain parts of our country, clearly our schools, our hospitals are being overrun by illegal immigrants -- a lot of whom came here just so their children could become U.S. citizens."

While a child born in the US does have birthright citizenship, there is absolutely NOTHING in the law that says that you can’t deport the parents if they are illegal.
So if illegal aliens want to leave American citizen children behind while the parents return to Mexico or El Salvador, fine, but the parents still have to go. And if the parents leave the child behind, they should be considered unfit/neglectful and therefore never get the right to enter the US legally.

While a child born in the US does have birthright citizenship,

Where does it say that? No law says that. Not in Wong Kim Ark case as he was legally inside the country as his Chinese parents were there covered by treaty. Even though WKA was wrongly decided, you are trying to conflate the 1898 opinion as making illegal aliens to have birthright US citizenship.

As this article has it straight:

A snippet.

"Dr. John C. Eastman, Dean of Chapman University’s law school in Orange, California, is among the leading scholars in the nation on constitutional law and has testified before Congress on the issue of birthright citizenship. Eastman states plainly that the framers of the 14th Amendment had no intention of allowing another country to wage demographic warfare against the U.S. and reshaping its culture by means of exploiting birthright citizenship.

“We have this common understanding of when you come here to visit, that you are subject to our jurisdiction. You have to obey our traffic laws. If you come here from England, you have to drive on the right side of the road and not on the left side of the road,” he said. “But the framers of the 14th Amendment had in mind two different notions of ‘subject to the jurisdiction.’ There was what they called territorial jurisdiction— you have to follow the laws in the place where you are—but there was also this more complete, or allegiance-owing jurisdiction that held that you not only have to follow the laws, but that you owe allegiance to the sovereign. And that doesn’t come by just visiting here. That comes by taking an oath of support and becoming part of the body politic. And it is that jurisdiction that they are talking about in the 14th Amendment.” "

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2509715/posts

Wong Kim Ark, IIRC, argued the parent had to be here legally. Their argument was from the analogous natural born subject, and it required the person to be in country “in amity” - ie, with permission of the government.

I believe there was another case many years later supporting anchor babies, but I don’t know that for certain, nor do I know the name of the case.

“And then, out of the blue in 1982, Justice Brennan slipped a footnote into his 5-4 opinion in Plyler v. Doe, asserting that “no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.” (Other than the part about one being lawful and the other not.)

Brennan’s authority for this lunatic statement was that it appeared in a 1912 book written by Clement L. Bouve. (Yes, THE Clement L. Bouve — the one you’ve heard so much about over the years.) Bouve was not a senator, not an elected official, certainly not a judge — just some guy who wrote a book.” - Ann Coulter

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=38409

Footnote 10:

“...Justice Gray concluded that

[e]very citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States.

Id. at 693. As one early commentator noted, given the historical emphasis on geographic territoriality, bounded only, if at all, by principles of sovereignty and allegiance, no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment “jurisdiction” can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful. See C. Bouve, Exclusion and Expulsion of Aliens in the United States 425-427 (1912).”

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0457_0202_ZO.html

Insanity by Justice Brennan. I can’t wait to find out what Justice Kagan will come up with during the next 40 years...

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