Dear Friends:
As some of you know, I am on medical leave from my job at The Boston Globe and have not been able to write my regular op-ed columns or my Arguable newsletter. For several months I have been contending with a number of worrying, and seemingly unconnected, symptoms — everything from unintended weight loss to increased clumsiness to difficulties with speech. These symptoms are all the more distressing since my doctors so far cannot explain what is causing them, or why they should suddenly have appeared.
All of which means that instead of spending my days trying to write opinion pieces that are interesting and timely and thoughtful, I have instead been devoting my hours to blood draws and CT scans, to being examined by specialists, to getting prescriptions filled and dosages adjusted, and to navigating the maze of "patient portals" that doctors keep telling me even they find maddening.
I also spend a lot of time reflecting on what I ought to be learning from this experience and how I can use those insights to be a better person. One of the great sages of the Talmud, Rabbi Tarfon, said more than 1,900 years ago: "The day is short, and the work is very great." The meaning of those words always seemed straightforward to me. Only now am I struck by their urgency.
Nevertheless, I remain well aware of the world around me. I haven't stopped following the news or instinctively thinking about how I would weigh in — especially on the issues that matter most.
Like immigration.
Though I wish the Supreme Court's ruling in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case, had been unanimous, I always thought it inconceivable that a majority of the justices would let this president — or any president — kill one of the most sublime achievements of the nation that declared its independence 250 years ago this week. From the very beginning of our national history, the rule has been clear: Children born on American soil begin life as equals. That is America at its best.
I wish I had been well enough to write a fresh column making that case this week. Failing that, I thought I'd share with you the first column I ever wrote on the subject. In the 16 years since it appeared, much has changed in American life, most of it for the worse. It is good to know that some things haven't. I find that reassuring, these days, in more ways than one.
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Others on this bandwagon include Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who says "birthright citizenship . . . is a mistake" that should be fixed by changing the 14th Amendment, as well as Senators John McCain and Jon Kyl of Arizona and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, all of whom have called for hearings on the topic.
"There is a problem," said Boehner. "To provide an incentive for illegal immigrants to come here so that their children can be US citizens does, in fact, draw more people to our country." Look at the trouble caused by birthright citizenship, he argued: "In certain parts of our country, clearly, our schools, our hospitals, are being overrun by illegal immigrants, a lot of whom came here just so their children could become US citizens."
The specter of America being "overrun" by undesirable immigrants is a classic bugbear, nearly as old as America itself. And Boehner & Co. are hardly the first members of Congress to fret about the supposed perils from the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to any child born on US soil. During the congressional debates on the amendment in 1866, Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania feared that automatic citizenship at birth would undermine a state's ability to defend itself "if it were overrun" — that word again — by immigrants of "another and a different race."
For example, Cowan demanded, "is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration of the Mongol race? Are they to be immigrated out of house and home by Chinese? . . . If another people of a different race, of different religion, of different manners, of different traditions, different tastes and sympathies are to come there and have the free right to locate there and settle among them, and if they have an opportunity of pouring in such an immigration as in a short time will double or treble the population of California, I ask, are the people of California powerless to protect themselves?"
Change "California" to "Arizona" and "Chinese" to "Hispanic," and you might think you were listening to 21st-century immigration alarmists fulminating about "anchor babies" or the "invasion" of illegal immigrants across the southern border. For good measure, Cowan also denounced the "Gypsies" immigrating into the Pennsylvania of his day — a "pestiferous" people, he called them, "who pay no taxes; who never perform military service; who . . . infest society." Only the players change in the immigration wars; the rhetoric remains the same.
Of course the 14th Amendment isn't going to be amended, as Boehner, Graham, and the others know perfectly well, and it is hard to interpret their embrace of the idea as anything but political posturing. (That too hasn't changed: Following Cowan's philippic during the 1866 debate, Senator John Conness of California, an immigrant from Ireland, observed tartly that it must be "it may be very good capital in an electioneering campaign to declaim against the Chinese.") Yet even as political bluster, threatening an end to birthright citizenship seems pointless.
After all, if the Citizenship Clause no longer protected babies born to illegal immigrants — an estimated 8 percent of all US births — the principal result would be to enlarge the illegal population. Is that what the immigration furies want to see — even more newcomers to the United States who have no legal right to be here?
"Revoking birthright citizenship," writes Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, "would turn hundreds of thousands of infants into 'criminals' — arriving, not across a border, but crying in a hospital." It isn't going to happen. But why would anyone who purports to be concerned about citizenship and the rule of law even suggest something so unjust?
The 14th Amendment says nothing about parents. It does not make citizenship contingent on ancestry, bloodlines, or political favor. The immigration debates may churn, but about this much the Constitution is unequivocal: Anyone born in America is an American. Our nation has been enriched — not "overrun" — because of birthright citizenship. The 19th-century nativists who feared otherwise were wrong. Their intellectual heirs today are, too.
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Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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