US-IMMIGRATION: Republicans Seek Restrictions on Citizenship

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 9 1996 (IPS) - Heated political debate over the rights of immigrants threatens to affect the key amendment to the U.S. Constitution that first conferred equal rights to former slaves.

The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868 through the efforts of Abraham Lincoln’s original Republican Party, now itself is being proposed for revision by modern-day Republicans.

The Republican Party meets next week in San Diego, California, to annoint Robert Dole as its candidate for President and a conservative group has won its struggle to include in the party’s platform a promise to scrap the key sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In so doing, the party would end the automatic right of all people born in the United States to U.S. citizenship.

“It’s a sad day,” argues Dan Kesselbrenner, head of the immigration project for the National Lawyers Guild. “This proposal harks back to the day when some people weren’t even considered as people at all.”

The first sentence of the amendment, which was designed expressly to confer equal rights to African Americans, says simply, “All persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

But a Congressional task force, led by Republican Representative Elton Gallegly of California, last year recommended that that sentence be replaced. Instead, Gallegly has proposed that citizenship only apply to people born in the United States “of mothers who are citizens or legal residents of the United States.”

The Republican’s platform, to be unveiled next week, goes along with that recommendation. “We support a constitutional amendment or constitutionally valid legislation declaring that children born in the United States of alien parents who are not long-term residents are not automatically citizens,” it says.

Gallegly argues that such a proposal is necessary given the rate of illegal immigration in the United States, which he claims costs the country billions of dollars each year.

“Two-thirds of all babies born in Los Angeles County-operated hospitals are being born to illegal immigrant mothers,” he contends.

“The present guarantee of automatic birthright citizenship to these offspring of illegal aliens, and the generous entitlements and benefits conferred upon them and their families, encourages illegal immigration and threatens to bankrupt many state and local governments,” Gallegly adds.

The representative argues that, in the developing world, many countries — including Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Japan — do not provide automatic birth citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants.

Birth citizenship, however, has been explicitly defended in U.S. law, Kesselbrenner notes. He cites the debate during the creation of the Fourteenth Amendment itself, when delegates chose to accept the premise that all people born in the United States, regardless of parentage, are citizens.

To delete the 128-year-old definition of citizenship now, he argues, would return the United States to an era in which two separate castes existed: one group of Americans who were fully recognised as “people,” and another that was not.

Kesselbrenner notes that, prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, an African American was defined legally in the Constitution as only three-fifths of a person. Only after the Civil War did the new Republican Party ensure that all people born in the United States would be regarded as citizens and have equal weight under law.

Any attempt to change such a historic precedent, he adds, may inspire a backlash against the Republicans. “It seems to me that they’re going too far,” he says. “This is going to reveal how bankrupt their position is.”

But restrictions on immigrants’ rights have proved politically popular in recent years, most notably with the widespread public support in California for Proposition 187, a 1994 initiative that sought to cut all public assistance and services to the families of illegal immigrants.

Approved by nearly 60 percent of California voters, the proposal was suspended by the Supreme Court, which argued that the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants could not be denied their equal rights under law.

In recent months, however, several new restrictions on immigrants’ benefits have been proposed or passed in Congress. President Bill Clinton says he will sign a welfare bill that denies legal immigrants a wide range of welfare programmes. The Senate is considering a bill to make English the official language of the United States, which was passed earlier by the House of Representatives.

But Gallegly’s proposed revisions may still face an uphill battle. He has tried five times over the past two years to push Congress to change the Fourteenth Amendment, to no avail. Any change in the Constitution would require approval of two-thirds of the members of both houses of Congress and ratification by at least 38 of 50 states.

Ironically, the restrictions on illegal immigrants’ children comes before the Republicans next week at the same time as another proposed reform involving the Fourteenth Amendment. Anti-abortion groups this week won a battle to commit the Republicans to a “human life amendment” to the Constitution to protect unborn fetuses.

“We endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children,” the party platform states. A Dole administration could therefore be in the tricky position of arguing on behalf of equal rights for unborn children – but only so long as their parents are not illegal immigrants or short-term residents.