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To: Founding Father
While I agree with your desire to not have citizenship be granted in so arbitrary a manner as it is now, unfortunately, the 14th amendment does not put any such restrictions on citizenship. The framers of the 14th amendment may have WANTED to bar the children of non-citizens to automatically become citizens upon birth here, that may have been their intent, but they didn't write it into the amendment itself. All it says is, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the States wherein they reside". There doesn't seem to be any ambiguity; if you are born here you are a citizen. If the writers of the amendment were so strongly for barring foreigner's children from becoming automatic citizens, they should have made that explicit. They didn't. What is needed is an amendment that actually clarifies this point.
17 posted on 04/24/2005 9:18:25 AM PDT by CarolinaGuitarman (Theft is taking something you don't own and you didn't pay for without permission.)
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To: CarolinaGuitarman

I don't normally like to weigh in on such matters without thinking them through first, but let's not write this one off too quickly. The key language, it seems to me, is the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." As the materials in the original post indicate, everyone in the United States, whether here legally or illegally, is in some sense "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." That is, there is a purely territorial element to governmental jurisdiction. If that is the sense in which the Fourteenth Amendment uses the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," the phrase is utterly pointless. If it means anything else, the most plausible meaning may well be something like "subject to full jurisdiction." On the other hand, it also seems unlikely that only children of citizens are automatically citizens, because it would have been very easy to use the word "citizens" in that context.

The Fourteenth Amendment was a botch-job of major proportions, and this may be one more example of that principle. Bottom line: don't make hasty assumptions in either direction on this point.


19 posted on 04/24/2005 9:36:33 AM PDT by tenuredprof
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To: CarolinaGuitarman
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the States wherein they reside".

Alternative interpretation:

A child born in the US whose parents are illegal aliens is immediately subject to our jurisdiction. Illegal aliens are non-entities, therefore the child is a legal orphan. The parents have the option of claiming the child without citizenship or giving it up for adoption. Either way the parents go back home.

Cruel world, ain't it?

25 posted on 04/24/2005 9:47:35 AM PDT by ZOOKER (proudly killing threads since 1998)
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