Reihan Salam and Will Willkinson have put forth non-xenophobic arguments for ending birthright citizenship. . Tim Lee had a number of good points in response.
I personally don’t think replacing the cumbersome process for becoming a citizen with a cumbersome process for becoming a non-citizen guest worker will alter the economic incentives to come and work the U.S. illegally. Beyond the potential humanitarian effects of creating a class of stateless people and extra burden repealing birthright citizenship would put on current citizens, amending the Constitution with the specific goal of denying citizenship to brown-skinned, Spanish speaking immigrants is a spectacularly bad idea that will have serious political implications for the future. Obviously just because a bigot agrees with your position on something doesn’t mean you share his rationale or that you yourself are a bigot, but neither can the social and moral impact of a proposal given political momentum because of animus towards a particular ethnic group be dismissed. It should go without saying that Wilkinson and Salam are not looking at this the same way as Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, but the ends do not justify the means.
I think reforming birthright citizenship is an answer in search of a problem. Both Salam and Wilkinson point to other countries that have modified their jus soli citizenship laws as models for how birthright citizenship could be amended in a practical and humane fashion. But this new Pew Hispanic Center study raises questions about how much repealing birthright citizenship would do to reduce the population of children born to illegal immigrants:
One byproduct of these demographic patterns is that a substantial share of the undocumented population of this country lives in a so-called mixed-status family—that is, a family with at least one unauthorized immigrant parent and at least one U.S. citizen child.
Pew says there were four million U.S. born children in this country in 2009. Pew doesn’t give numbers, but it claims a “substantial share” are mixed status, which means that even in the foreign modified jus soli systems Wilkinson and Salam are suggesting, many of these so-called “anchor babies” would still be American citizens, since they all grant citizenship to the children born to at least one parent who is a citizen.
Matthew Yglesias has dismissed this argument on the basis that he’s not interested in hypothetical political compromises. Repealing the 14th Amendment is also a very unlikely outcome. But given the fact that legislators interested in repealing birthright citizenship will probably be aware of the fact that a “substantial” number of children born to illegal immigrants are from so-called “mixed status families,” I think whatever hypothetical proposal they come up with is likely to be substantially less humane and just than what Wilkinson and Salam have in mind.
