Assault on birthright citizenship: clever propaganda but rotten history
BY LINDA CHAVEZ, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 07/27/18 07:00 AM EDT
With President Trump’s unprecedented rhetorical and policy assault on immigrants, opponents of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which grants birthright citizenship, have come out of their caves, seeing this as their best opportunity to repeal this longstanding right ...
This effort .. depends on a tortured reading of the Amendment and the Congressional debate that led to its enactment. Anton hangs his argument, as do others, on the Amendment's phrase "under the jurisdiction thereof" ...
To advance his claims, Anton misrepresents the debate surrounding the inclusion of those four words. Most of the arguments centered on whether Native Americans were to be given citizenship, given treaty obligations entered into between the United States and Indian tribes. Yet Anton focuses instead on a rather short discussion of which persons born to foreign-born parents would be included. In the process, he misquotes Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, who proposed the clause, claiming Howard said that “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, <or> who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers” should not be granted birthright citizenship.
... Sen. Howard did not utter the word “or,” as Anton’s use of brackets in his Washington Post piece acknowledges. Taking “or” out of the phrase completely changes its meaning. Without “or,” the phrase does not exclude all foreigners and aliens (the latter word included in apposition to foreigners as a simple synonym) but only those who belong to diplomats’ families, a matter of long-established practice. Furthermore, Anton and others who use the same misquote abridge the Howard quotation to leave out the rest of Howard’s statement that citizenship “will include every other class of persons born in the United States” ...
https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/399118-latest-assault-on-constitutional-birthright-citizenship-is-clever
