To: srmorton
In United States v. Rhodes, Supreme Court Justice Noah Haynes Swayne (December 7, 1804 June 8, 1884) addressed the issue as follows: To be a Natural Born Citizen one has to be born in a State, or Condition of, Allegiance to the USA. A person with Dual Nationality due to having parents of differing Nationality, who both acknowledged the Birth, is not so born. Their Allegiance is, by definition, divided. Subsequent acquisition of Nationality produces the same problem."
229 posted on
02/28/2009 9:05:50 PM PST by
org.whodat
(Auto unions bad: Machinists union good=Hypocrisy)
To: org.whodat
Then, according to you, there should be no advantage to illegal immigrants who are pregnant crossing the border to have their babies and the derogatory term "anchor babies" is meaningless.
Birthright citizenship in the United States of America follows from a hybrid rule of jus soli and jus sanguinis. Under the American system, any person born within the United States (including the overseas territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands) and subject to its jurisdiction is automatically granted U.S. citizenship, as are many (though not all) children born to American citizens overseas. When accorded automatic birthright citizenship based on birth on American soil, a newborn's status is generally unaffected by the legal status or citizenship of that individual's mother or father.
In the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), the Supreme Court ruled that a person who is born in the United States of parents who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of a foreign power whose parents have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States, whose parents are there carrying on business and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity of the foreign power to which they are subject becomes, at the time of his birth, a citizen of the United States, by virtue of the first clause of the 14th amendment of the Constitution. Since the Supreme Court Justice whose opinion you cite died before this ruling, his opinion would seemed to have been nullified by this subsequent case.
The Supreme Court has never explicitly ruled on whether children born in the United States to illegal immigrant parents are entitled to birthright citizenship via the 14th Amendment, although it has generally been assumed that they are. In recent years, Congress has attempted to craft laws that would prevent these so-called anchor babies from automatically being considered to be US citizens, but such attempts have generally died in committee due to the fear that they would be ruled unconstitutional anyway. In the opinion of our lawmakers, therefore, only a constitutional amendment would alter the fact that anyone born in the US or its territories is a US citizen.
290 posted on
03/01/2009 1:48:06 AM PST by
srmorton
(Choose life!)
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson