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WASHINGTON — Take boiling frustration over a dysfunctional immigration system, sprinkle in fears about the sputtering economy and add a healthy dose of election year politics.
What you get is the growing buzz over whether the United States should continue to grant automatic citizenship to anyone born on American soil — a right rooted in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Prominent Republicans, including House Minority Leader John Boehner and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, have floated the idea of eliminating birthright citizenship.
Obama administration officials and other Democrats have said looking to change the 14th Amendment is wrong, that what's needed instead is a comprehensive overhaul of the nation's immigration system.
Three Midlands House Republicans — Adrian Smith and Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska and Steve King of Iowa — are among those who say they favor ending birthright citizenship.
“It's a big magnet — it attracts illegals,” King said. “If we're going to shut off the jobs magnet, we need to shut off the citizenship magnet, too. ... We're a welfare state today, and the drafters and ratifiers of the 14th Amendment didn't contemplate a welfare state that would be a magnet for people to come here to cash in to this giant ATM called America.”
Without taking a position on birthright citizenship, John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said the talk of no longer recognizing it “seems like a kind of logical extension with the concern about immigration.”
Hibbing pointed to Nebraska's 2006 Republican primary for governor. One hot issue in that race was whether to permit in-state college tuition rates for some illegal immigrants.
Tom Osborne supported the proposal for in-state tuition; Dave Heineman didn't. The iconic former Husker football coach lost to Heineman.
“That was a wake-up call for a lot of us about the power of these kinds of issues,” Hibbing said.
Republicans are hoping to harness that power as they seek to make significant gains in the coming midterm elections, said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.
“Why are they doing it?” Sabato said. “They're doing it for political advantage during an election season.”
The issue is particularly potent right now because people are angry about the economy and high unemployment and want to lash out at someone, he said.
The Pew Center, a nonpartisan Washington research group, recently found that 344,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 — or 8 percent — had at least one parent who was an illegal immigrant.
Those children are all citizens, thanks to the 14th Amendment.
Ratified in 1868, it says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The amendment was part of an effort to protect the rights of freed slaves and their children.
Some modern-day politicians argue that it should have no role in dictating current immigration policy and that it is being used as an end-run around normal procedures for obtaining citizenship.
Others say immigration was part of the debate surrounding passage of the 14th Amendment. At the time, some unsuccessfully argued that the amendment should exclude Chinese immigrants, said Darcy Tromanhauser of the Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest.
“It's not as if this is an accidental part of the amendment,” she said. “The amendment as a whole, in all of its parts, is core to who we are as Americans, and I don't think that there is public support for tinkering with that.”
Talking about the 14th Amendment is “a major distraction” from dealing with the real problems of a broken immigration system that hurts families and communities, she said.
Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., has taken conservative positions on immigration issues, stressing the need for get-tough border control policies before addressing the status of millions of people in the United States illegally.
But Nelson has not embraced the recent talk of ending birthright citizenship.
“If there's a serious effort to change the Constitution, then we ought to look at it, but my sense is that it's being drummed up by talk show hosts and others,” Nelson told reporters recently.
Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., said he's interested in hearing from legal experts on the issue, but he does not “take lightly the idea of changing the Constitution.”
Indeed, the push to amend the Constitution faces a monumental hurdle — one that legal and political experts interviewed by The World-Herald described as nearly impossible. The level of national consensus required would be hard to get on any issue, not to mention something as controversial as immigration.
That's partly why, King said, Congress should first pass a law clarifying that “Born in the USA” does not automatically mean citizenship. He said such a law would quickly be challenged in court and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could provide some direction.
Smith, who represents Nebraska's sprawling 3rd Congressional District, has co-sponsored legislation to end automatic birthright citizenship without a constitutional amendment.
Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., said he wants to study the birthright issue more closely but called it “worthy of discussion.”
Among the reasons cited for eliminating birthright citizenship is the practice of so-called “birth tourism,” in which pregnant women visit the United States to have their babies here.
“The 14th Amendment I don't think was designed to accommodate that modern reality, and it happens more and more,” Fortenberry said. “You see a real abuse of this from tourists coming from China, for instance. What does this say to people who are trying to legally immigrate to our country?
“It's simply not fair.”
The Lincoln lawmaker said a U.S. Embassy worker in Western Europe told him that people show up every morning claiming citizenship for children born during a visit to the U.S., despite efforts to ensure that people coming to the United States on tourist visas have no plans to abuse immigration laws.
Still, it's unclear how big a problem such “birth tourism” represents. Figures just released by the National Center for Health Statistics indicate that there were 7,775 births to nonresidents of the United States in 2007 — less than 0.2 percent of total births.
The Pew survey based on 2008 numbers indicated that 80 percent of mothers in the U.S. illegally had been here for more than a year before giving birth, and more than half had been here five years or more.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors more restrictive immigration policies, said it's valid to examine automatic birthright citizenship, a policy rare among today's developed countries.
Even within his organization, Krikorian said, there is disagreement over whether birthplace citizenship is a major incentive for illegal immigrants to come here, but he said there is a principle at stake that applies both to illegal immigrants having children and the practice of birth tourism.
“It boils down to the same problem,” he said, “the American people not consenting to who will be future citizens of the United States — in other words, foreigners determining America's future rather than Americans.”
Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, opposes changing the 14th Amendment, which he says makes clear “whether you're a descendant of someone who came over on the Mayflower or you're the child of an undocumented person, you're a citizen of this country.”
Harkin said that approach takes the politics out of who should be granted citizenship, and he criticized Republicans for questioning the practice.
“Shame on those who have now decided that the best way to reach, to gain votes in this election, is to be more mean-spirited than the next person,” he said.
Hibbing said the changing demographics of the country mean that the GOP could be hurting itself nationally down the road, but he was skeptical that the same could be said for Nebraska's politicians.
“I just don't think it's a dangerous position for them to take,” Hibbing said. “I think it plays well to constituents.”
Contact the writer:
202-662-7270, joe.morton@owh.com
