Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call to end
birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants has refueled
the immigration debate and spilt the GOP field and legal experts who
question whether such a change is possible.
Trump’s plan goes after the 14th amendment, which grants citizenship
to essentially anybody born in the United States. But he is particularly
focused on stopping pregnant women from illegally crossing the
U.S.-Mexico border for the purpose of having a child or an
“anchor
baby,” which reduces the likelihood of the parents being deported.
Trump announced his plan Sunday, calling the amendment the country’s
“biggest magnet for illegal immigration.” And he continues to suggest
that his lawyers think the amendment might not withstand a court
challenge.
“I was right,” Trump, the billionaire businessman and top GOP
candidate, said Friday night at a rally in Alabama. “You can do
something, quickly.”
However, other candidates and legal experts are split on the issue.
“Trump thinks ‘our country is going to hell.’ Well, there is likely
little more than a chance in hell that we are going to amend the
Constitution,” Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola University of
Los Angeles, said Wednesday. “Amending the Constitution is one of the
most serious things that lawmakers can do. Therefore the path to doing
it is rightfully arduous. I would put the chances … as beyond a
longshot."
To be sure, changing the Constitution, the supreme law of the land,
would require a two-thirds vote in Congress, then ratification from
three-fourths of state legislatures. It could also be changed through a
constitutional convention in which at least 34 states convene to vote on
an amendment, which would then need ratification from a minimum 38
states.
Trump since announcing his candidacy in mid-June has made illegal
immigrants from Mexico a top concern and has suggested several solutions
-- including a wall along the southern border and the change to
birthright citizenship.
“Many lawyers are saying that’s not what (the amendment) is,” he told
Fox News on Monday. “They say it’ll never hold up in court. It’ll have
to be tested.”
Trump's six-page immigration proposal was released on the campaign
website on Sunday. And within hours, questions about it had become a
litmus test for fellow GOP White House candidates and has largely
divided the field.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Monday said he agreed that birthright
citizenship should be ended but that he didn’t back the part of Trump’s
plan that calls for deporting the so-called anchor babies.
“I categorically disagree with Trump and Gov. Walker on this point,”
2016 GOP candidate and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore said a day
later. “Denying people citizenship is wrong. … I’d very surprised if any
lawyer would tell Donald Trump anything like this.”
On Thursday, fellow Republican candidate and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush defend using the term.
“You give me a better word and I’ll use it,” he told reporters on the
campaign trail. Bush earlier in the week commended Trump for producing a
comprehensive plan but suggest the issue of what to do with illegal
immigrants in the United States must be addressed in a more “realistic”
way.
The amendment was ratified to the Constitution in 1868, roughly 11
years after the landmark Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sanford
that denied citizenship to African Americans, whether free or slaves.
And the amendment has already withstood a Supreme Court test. In
1898, the high court ruled that San-Francisco-born Wong Kim Ark was a
citizen despite being born to parents of Chinese descent living in the
U.S.
Ben Carson, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon and another of the 17
major GOP candidates, said Tuesday that the U.S.
allowing the so-called
anchor babies “doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Republican candidate and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham also
agreed this week that the birthright citizenship issue must be addressed
but told CNN that fixing the county’s broken immigration system must
come first and that he disagrees with Trump’s call for “forced
deportation.”
Supporters of such a change argue that most European countries don’t
automatically grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants.
The issue has also been a complicated one for GOP candidate Texas
Sen. Ted Cruz, a former Supreme Court lawyer who in 2011 suggested that
conservatives would be making a “mistake” in trying to mount a legal
challenge to the amendment.
This week, Cruz, born in Canada to an American-born mother and
Cuban-immigrant father, said he supports changes to birthright
citizenship.
Critics of the amendment are trying to make the argument before
voters that the hundreds of thousands of children who fall into that
category are costing them millions in tax dollars.
However, Levinson questions whether enough Americans will buy the argument.
“It may be politically popular with a certain segment of the
electorate, but I do not believe this is a mainstream view,” she said,
arguing two-thirds of Americans support a path to citizenship or
permanent legal status for illegal immigrants. “This is an argument that
is likely to gain traction in the primary elections, but I think it
could be viewed quite differently in the general election."