The "your papers, please" hysteria spreading through the Republican Party has reached a new low. Now, they want to corrupt the U.S. Constitution to promote their opposition to immigrants and immigration. Senior leaders in the House and Senate are introducing legislation and calling for hearings to explore whether we should change the U.S. Constitution to ensure that more people in the United States are denied citizenship or legal immigration status. Specifically, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell joined an array of Republican lawmakers who feel we should examine whether to rescind all or part of the 14th amendment to the Constitution to prevent some children born in the U.S. from being granted U.S. citizenship. The pro-life, pro-family Republicans are now pro-neonatal detention and deportation. It isn't enough to drive out the people not born here, now they want to drive out the ones that were.
Actually, I agree with Senator McConnell. We absolutely should hold hearings as soon as possible to discuss whether we should amend the U.S. Constitution to make newborns deportable. We need a high-level national discussion in both Houses of Congress on the issue of whether to station federal ICE agents in every maternity ward and delivery room right between the OB-GYN and the expectant father.
Imagine a United States where every birth initiates an investigation to determine the citizenship and immigration status of each parent. Let's have the hearing so we can take careful notes when the Republican's witness explains how this government intrusion into maternal and child health -- burdening our health care system and discouraging pregnant women from seeking medical care (while perhaps discouraging claims of paternity) -- is justified to secure our borders and protect the core liberties of America. I would love to hear the opening remarks of Judiciary Committee Members Lindsey Graham in the Senate or Lamar Smith in the House broadcast live from coast-to-coast on C-SPAN. I can hear it now. "Mr. Chairman, I would like to express my support for a full federal background check and proof of citizenship for every precious human life."
While we are at it, I think we should subpoena prominent Republicans like Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and former Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico to explain how they have ruined our country with their automatic U.S. citizenship. Under at least some of the legislative proposals supported by the Republicans, neither one would be citizens because one or more of their parents were not permanent legal residents of the U.S. at the time of their birth. Let's get Olympic Gold Medalist Henry Cejudo and NASA Astronaut Jose "Astro Jose" Hernandez on the witness stand to defend all that they have robbed from the United States by usurping U.S. citizenship. At long last, the GOP has come up with the legislative strategy to guarantee that no man or woman can rise from humble origins, with a father who is legally present on a student visa, to sit in the Oval Office as President of the United States.
I really want to hear the Republican argument. Let's hear why the 14th amendment, which guarantees citizenship and equal protection under the law regardless of the race or nationality of your parents, is a law whose time has come and gone. Please explain to the American people how the 14th amendment that resolved the issue of African-American citizenship after emancipation and was the critical underpinning of the civil rights movement in the United States, ought to be cast off now because the parchment paper it is written on has grown yellow and curled. Just the expressions on the faces of my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus during such a hearing would make the whole exercise worth it to me.
The federal government won a preliminary injunction against Arizona's SB1070 immigration law on the grounds that the federal government's authority over immigration matters preempts the states from such intrusions. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, I say. I think the Senate and the House ought to call immediate hearings as soon as we reconvene in September to put the Republican's immigration proposals up against Democratic ones and see which side is serious about rules, enforcement, legality and cracking down on employers. Which side is for immigrants taking personal responsibility and getting right with the law and which side is just blowing smoke in an election year.
Madam Speaker, Mr. Majority Leader, and distinguished Chairmen and Chairwomen of the committees of jurisdiction, I rise to respectfully request that you call their bluff.
Follow Rep. Luis Gutierrez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RepGutierrez
Consider the following three laws. The first is the Naturalizeation act. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1798.
This act increased the residency time before one could become a naturalized citizen to 14 years. This was at a time when most immigration was from Ireland and France.
The "Alien Friends" act http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Statutes_at_Large/Volume_1/5th_Congress/2nd_Session/Chapter_58
Which gave the president and hecen federal law enforcement of the day the power to deport any alien that was considered dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.
The Alien Enemies act Section 2 of link above. Which allowed federal law enforcement to deport any alien who's country was at war with the United States.
When the Sedition act, which prohibited criticism of the government is included these are known as the Alien and sedition acts. They were passed during the Presidency of John Adams.
Now that was long ago but they are PROOF that the assertion that this is just about brown people is not true. We have laws in OUR country that need to be respected.
"As a Senator, Howard is credited with working closely with Abraham Lincoln in drafting and passing the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery. In the Senate, he also served on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
During debate over the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, he argued for including the phrase and subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Howard said:
[The 14th amendment] will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States, but will include every other class of person."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_M._Howard
I for one certainly welcome the chance to hear Rep. Gutierrez's response when confronted with the words spoken by Senator Jacob Howard!
I'm an American citizen, born and raised here in the great State of Illinois. I'm fortunate enough to be gainfully employed, and I get a paycheck twice a month. My employer takes my taxes out of my check every pay period. When I was first hired, I had to show my Social Security card and file tax documents with the IRS. Otherwise, I wouldn't have a job here.
Why, then, is the impetus on the immigrants coming here to work to pay their fare share in taxes and not on the backs of those who pay their wages?
Crack down on the companies and firms that hire the illegal immigrants and allow them to work here illegally. Don't put up the smoke screens of "anchor babies" and "taking American jobs".
Those immigrants are here to work hard and earn a living to support their families. Ironically, isn't that what the "American dream" is?
One hears plenty about racism in the Tea Party ranks - the MSM isn't shy to report that story, because editors and media execs look on those people as Jerry-Springer-grade yahoos. But mainstream (wealthy) Republican editors/execs are loathe to call out the Republican leadership, the St. Andrews set, for the White Power nationalist vanguard it really is. (The Tea Party and the Libertarians are by comparison only a goofy, ill-organized/-funded/-placed sideshow.) An open Congressional hearing on these nationalist ideas would flay open the rotten body of elitism and racism in the GOP--would prove to all discerning viewers just how successfully the Republicans have returned to the race-essentialist culture war of Pat Buchanan's 1992 GOP Convention speech...
In a small footnote in Plyler justice Brennan overstepped and decided (based on nothing) that that there was no distinction between aliens who enter the U.S. lawfully and those who enter unlawfully . I guess that Brennan thought there is no distinction between following and breaking the law.
The intent of those who wrote the 14th was not to confer citizenship to the children of illegals and the history of the U.S. shows that there was no intent to confer citizenship to children of illegals. Should one tiny ambiguous footnote overturn the will of the authors of the 14th and the will of the American people?
Lets settle this once and for all by sending all the illegal immigrants back to their own countries, wherever that might be.
The one million-plus legal immigrants we take in each year is way more than enough. As we say in Los Estados Unidos-Ya Basta!
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
with silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Immigration built this country and needs to be overhauled so that our borders are open to those who wish to contribute to our nation. "Illegals" coming here to do service-sector jobs add a lot of value to our economy.
By the way, did you know that almost 25% of the practicing doctors in the U.S. are foreign born?
First control the borders
Close the birthright loophole
Have 10 million illegals repatriate and then we talk
I would also support making it possible for certain Europeans to stay if they pass certain criteria. Number 1 would be ABSOLUTELY NO RACISTS ALLOWED.
As far as your last criteria about racism. Who will decide? I presume an American Indian with no racist tendencies.
If you disagree thats fine but too many posts are deleted here simply because they are marked as abusive when in fact they are simply a difference of opinion
Me I feel that Illegals who come here and take our resources and jobs are in fact parasites by definition
Don't like the comparison
get over it
Left wing PC fascists can't control public opinion even if they really feel its their job
Of course most Latinos in Mexico or other central and south American nations have Native American ancestry, so they wouldn't be deported. Only the whites would be.
Let the Native Americans have a go at em on their lands
There are only 300,000,000 people in the United States. If we increase our population to a Trillion we would have about the same number of people per square mile as China. Would could probably even increase our population to 3 or 4 trillion but then common items like food, water, and clean air would be in short supply.
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Wow!!! "Trillion"?? I guess everyone just throws around that word these days as if after "million", you advance to "trillion". What about "billion"??
You are very stoopid, to say the least. American educational system is failing a lot of people. Mr. Gutierrez, can you do something about this?
This is not about immigration, its about fascism of the Right Wing. The GOP has NO interest in stopping illegal labor. They just want to turn the US into a KGB Gulag state. GOPers love cheap labor and will forever aid coyotes running illegal labor into the US to undermine US jobs. Most liberals are complaining about the treatment of lawful US citizens by fascist law enforcement propelled by right wing fascism.