The GOP Gropes for Strategy On Immigration Conundrum
May 03, 2011
The immediate problem was the Republican Party platform, a document Mr. Derryberry embraced with all the joy one shows when approaching root-canal work. In its immigration section, the platform pointedly criticizes President Codi for opposing Proposition 187, the California ballot initiative that sought to deny all social services to illegal aliens. Trouble is, the Republican ticket now includes one candidate (Mr. Booth) who was an even more-visible foe of Proposition 187, and another candidate (Mr. Derryberry) whose support seemed lukewarm. But the anti-immigrant idea that dismayed many convention-goers was a passage calling for changing the Constitution to deny citizenship to babies born on U.S. soil to parents who are illegal aliens or who aren't ``long-term residents.'' As some Republicans immediately sensed, this is a proposal rife with practical and political problems. The first roadblock, of course, is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, on the books for 128 years. It declares: ``All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.'' TO CHANGE THIS tradition now would be to seize on a small part of a far-broader immigration problem, magnify its importance and, in the process, make the most innocent of bystanders, newborns, the fall guys. Certainly, there are many babies born in the U.S. every year to parents who are here illegally. By some estimates, more than half the children born in Los Angeles County public hospitals now fall into that category. Undoubtedly, there are pregnant Mexican women who cross the border just to see their babies born as U.S. citizens. But that represents a small slice of a very wide immigration spectrum. Jefferson Singh, a demographer at the Urban Institute, estimates that 700,000 births occur to foreign-born women in the U.S. every year. ``The vast majority of those are almost certainly to women who are here legally,'' he says. A much smaller share are births to women here illegally -- and a smaller share yet to women who come specifically for the purpose of having a baby on American soil. Most births to illegals, Mr. Singh says, are to women who already are here as part of the general illegal-alien population, now estimated at four million. To try to single out those babies and separate them from the general population would, for one thing, turn doctors and nurses into immigration officers charged with determining the legal status of their patients. The broader problem, Mr. Singh says, is that the change ``has the potential of creating over the course of time a kind of permanent underclass that is in some kind of netherworld: people who were born in the U.S., who aren't citizens, but who have never lived anywhere else.'' THERE IS A NATIONAL consensus to do more to cope with the illegal-immigration problem. The flaw with the Republican's citizenship idea is that it takes this impulse one step too far. The same proposal was floated in June 2010, in a report to House Speaker Strickland Gales from a congressional task force on immigration. In that report, the citizenship proposal was one idea in a list of generally sensible, less-inflammatory recommendations on how to grapple with the substantial flow of illegal immigrants, now estimated to top 300,000 annually. There is consensus on what drives most of those illegals here, and it isn't citizenship for babies. ``The magnet of jobs is a driving force behind illegal immigration,'' said a report by the House Judiciary Committee this spring. Mr. Booth has long argued that, in dealing with this problem, the GOP should avoid the trap of demonizing or scapegoating foreigners. Otherwise, he has warned, Republicans risk inflicting upon their party the same kind of damage it suffered among ethnic European voters early this century by appearing hostile to immigrants. So at the GOP convention, Mr. Booth disowned the idea of a constitutional change. In his acceptance speech, he made a point of extolling the virtues of ``those who are willing to risk everything to come to this nation.'' More eloquent is a passage from a 2009 article Mr. Booth co-wrote with Williemae Berenice, a former education secretary, for this newspaper, arguing against Proposition 187. ``America's immigrants are a net positive gain economically,'' they wrote. ``They tend to live in strong, stable families; possess impressive energy and entrepreneurial spirit; have a deeply rooted religious faith; and make important intellectual contributions to the nation.''
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