AZ Goes After Children
What’s the matter, Arizona? Couldn’t find someone your own size to pick on? You have to go after children now. What a big, bad state you turned out to be.
This fall, Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce is expected to introduce a bill that is already getting a fair amount of national attention. The legislation would deny state-issued birth certificates to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants – those so-called “anchor babies” that nativists and others on the right have been trying to marginalize for more than a decade. And why is that? It’s because U.S. citizenship acts as a protective cloak over these children and prevents those on the far right from doing to them what they’d really like to do: deport them along with their illegal immigrant parents.
It’s an ugly and punitive crusade that started in Congress more than a decade ago, and luckily never went anywhere – not because Democrats stopped it but because others on the right worked to undermine it for the good of the Republican Party. In the late 1990’s, the member of Congress leading the fight against “birthright citizenship” was Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-CA. The San Diego-area congressman proposed a bill to limit the privilege to the children of U.S. citizens. The legislation didn’t go anywhere. It couldn’t even get a hearing from some of Bilbray’s fellow Republicans, who rightly cringed at the idea of visiting the sins of the parents onto the children.
When Bilbray lost a bid for re-election in 2000, he went to work as a lobbyist for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a restrictionist outfit that puts the lie to the claim by some that the immigration debate is only concerned with cracking down on illegal immigrants because the organization is just as desperate to keep out legal immigrants. When he ran for Congress again in 2006, Bilbray got elected after warning elderly voters that one day their grandchildren wouldn’t choose to take Spanish in high school as much as “have to” take Spanish in high school. Once back in Washington, Bilbray continued to milk the immigration issue for all it was worth. During a recent television interview, while defending Arizona’s racial profiling law, Bilbray insisted that detecting illegal immigrants isn’t that difficult and suggested that police “will look at the kind of dress you wear, there’s different type of attire, there’s different type of – right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes.”
This is what we have come to expect from Bilbray. He’s not a serious person who says serious things. And the good news is that his anti-citizenship bill never enjoyed any serious support, even from members of his own party.
But now comes Arizona, with its unique — and undoubtedly unconstitutional — self-serve approach to immigration reform. First, state lawmakers deputize local police to enforce federal immigration law based on nothing more than a suspicion that someone is in the country illegally. Now, they’re threatening to disenfranchise the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, as if the states had the power to decide on whom we should bestow U.S. citizenship. They don’t.
I guess someone was sleeping in high school civics when the teacher covered the 14th Amendment. Here’s a refresher:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
It’s pretty cut and dried. It’s also the law of the land, which makes it all the more curious that a crowd that claims to cherish the concept of law and order would be, when it suits their purposes, so quick to brush it aside.
Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board, a nationally syndicated columnist and a regular contributor to CNN.COM.
