The 14th Amendment states that “All persons, born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
-Because it’s people “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” we’re not talking about foreign visitors, ambassadors, etc… we’re talking about people who live here and live under the constitution like everyone else.
We (CFS) are taking a consequentialist argument. We’re not looking at it as a human rights argument, we’re not saying anything about what we as a country “owe” to these people, we’re not talking about a moral obligation. We’re simply saying that the consequences of not granting these children citizenship far out way the consequences of granting them citizenship.
Consequence 1:
FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) estimates about 363.000 children born to illegal aliens each year. If these children are not considered citizens, then we as a country have 363,000 children growing up without an education in America.
-This leads to a lot more problems, one of which is the money we then have to spend on jails, where uneducated people often end up. (Recall that these people ARE subject to jurisdiction, so we can still send them to jail even if we can’t send them to school…)
-The argument can be made that parents come to the U.S. in order to make their children U.S. citizens, and thus the number of illegal immigrants would go down if we took away this law. Many illegal immigrants come here for work opportunities or other reasons, however, and when they have children, the above problem still remains.
Consequence 2:
Children of illegal immigrants are statistically more likely to become orphaned or suffer from unstable family circumstances due to deportation or other circumstances. If these children are not citizens, social services cannot help them, and our country is left in a sticky situation. These children do not have citizenship in any other country, and so they will be left without care.
--this is sort of a weak point in the argument, we don’t have much evidence/it seems a little weird… look into this?
Consequence 3:
Healthcare-esp. for women giving birth.
-Look up hospital in L.A. (I can’t remember the exact statistic), but if these children aren’t considered citizens, we are leaving A LOT of women and children in danger by denying them help during birth.
Consequence 4:
If we don’t adopt these children as citizens, we leave them without any citizenship. Just because their parents are from somewhere does not mean that they will be granted citizenship in that place.
-if we do grant them citizenship, we avoid the above consequences. With support, they have as much potential as anyone t grow up to be productive citizens.
-It is a law for children to attend school because it allows them to grow up and support our society—in other words, because it’s for OUR OWN GOOD. This is no different for children who live here now whose parents happen to be from somewhere else.
Consequence 5: The creation of a permanent underclass, or shadow population. It’s not just the chidren of illegal immigrants who aren’t citizens, but their children, and their children’s children, etc. We will have effectively created a society with a dead end for immigration, something our country was founded on. The above consequences will also not be restricted to short term, one generation; they will be a continuous problem until something is changed.
