Here is an important article about the controversy surrounding birthright citizenship and it’s another great example of the terrific material our side produces…that so few get to benefit from because conservatives don’t know how to fight the information war. This is Paul Gottfried writing at American Thinker:
Michael Anton, who was a speechwriter for George W. Bush’s administration and later a pro-Trump blogger for the Journal of American Greatness, has acquired additional fame as a critic of granting citizenship to the offspring of illegal aliens. Anton’s work has not gone unnoticed. dvocates of giving instant citizenship to “anchor babies” have predictably attacked him as a racist for questioning their generous gesture. Supposedly, the Fourteenth Amendment provides for a right to citizenship for anyone born on American soil. And though the same amendment requires that those who are granted this right are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the American government, those groups who were thought to be outside this jurisdiction, we are told, are Indian tribes and the children of foreign diplomats. Presumably, in both these cases, those who were born on American soil were subject to another jurisdiction, whether a foreign government or a tribal council with specific rights granted by Congress.
In a long article in Claremont Review, Anton shows that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not mean to grant citizenship to the babies of whoever came here illegally or in order to have babies on American soil. His arguments warrant our attention. It is highly unlikely, as Anton’s opponents concede, that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment had in mind “anchor babies” when they discussed birthright citizenship. They were thinking specifically about negro freemen, who had recently been slaves. The authors were undoing the effects of the Dred Scott decision issued by the Supreme Court in 1857 that denied that blacks were eligible for citizenship under the Constitution.
Read more: American Thinker
