Between the lines
At the risk of causing apoplexy among some readers, let me make a confession: I'm ambivalent about so-called birthright citizenship. This is a cause celebre among many conservatives. As the New York Times reports, "Arguing for an end to the policy, which is rooted in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, immigration hard-liners describe a wave of migrants…stepping across the border in the advanced stages of pregnancy to have what are dismissively called 'anchor babies.' ”
They have a point. As Jack Rakove writes in his indispensable The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, the writers of the 1868 14th Amendment were entirely focused on the end of slavery and Reconstruction. First, they wanted to reverse Dred Scott, which held that even free African-Americans were not citizens; second, they wanted to give constitutional authority for the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and its efforts to prevent the old Southern ruling class from keeping the freedmen in serfdom (Jim Crow killed that ideal for a century). Yet I'm not thinking so much as an originalist as someone who believes the framers intended the Constitution to be malleable enough to change with the times. Neither they nor the writers of the 14th Amendment envisioned an overpopulated Third World country on our border, or our unthinking and venal appetite for its cheap labor.
We owe something to the immigrants we have exploited, particularly in Arizona and the Southwest (the anti-illegal immigration forces would deny even that). I'm just not sure citizenship for their children should be part of it. It's one of many areas that I come down between the battle lines that are neatly drawn by talk-radio ideology.
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