Thursday, July 31, 2008
About that 14th Amendment
Maybe it's just me, but after reading Professor Erler's arguments, I think this has been misinterpreted from the very beginning.
You can decide for yourself...
You can decide for yourself...
Vin Suprynowicz explains it all in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
"Long considered uncontroversial, the 14th is now believed to have created that obstacle to deportation of illegal immigrant women and their families known as the 'anchor baby.'
The young mother may not be a citizen or even a legal resident, but the newborn is considered to be both: The newborn thus cannot be expelled, and our sense of common decency makes it difficult to envision expelling the mother but not the child.
But what's that clause about 'subject to the jurisdiction' doing in there, professor Erler asks in his new paper, adapted from a speech delivered in Phoenix back on Feb. 12.
'We have somehow come today to believe that anyone born within the geographical limits of the U.S. is automatically subject to the jurisdiction,' notes professor Erler. 'But this renders the jurisdiction clause utterly superfluous and without force. If this had been the intention of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, presumably they would simply have said that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are thereby citizens.'"
