President Neelix tries to void birthright citizenship through executive order

[G-Man]

(a) "The only alternative is to create a stateless slave-class."

No one is suggesting that we have people staying here permanently without being able to get citizenship. People who want to deny birthright citizenship to the children of tourists generally want the tourists to leave and take their kids with them. Same with illegal aliens.

(b) The interpretation that anyone other than those with diplomatic immunity are "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" makes that clause almost meaningless; and it flies in the face of the intentions of the writers. Moreover, that case only specifically applies to people who are here permanently. There has never been a case on birthright citizenship for someone not here legally.

(c) "This is not exactly a NEW policy. If we've been doing it differently than what was intended, we've been going astray for a LONG time."
We've been doing a lot of stupid things for a long time.

(d) "We gain citizens without a great deal of control - anyone born here becomes a citizen, so we get to be slightly less choosy than other countries. However, we're also one of the few countries that taxes citizens even on money they make overseas, so generally speaking, more citizens is better for us. At any rate, the cost of this seems quite negligible."

Are these people mostly net taxpayers?

(e) "Everyone joins the club eventually. Sure, the folks that got into the country illegally from Honduras may never really integrate. They don't speak the language, don't have the papers to properly participate in the economy, and don't ever really understand or practice the culture. But their children are citizens. They can go anywhere, work anywhere, attend school anywhere - and the evidence suggests that they do exactly that. We don't end up with permanent ethnic enclaves, because the children just won't stay. And why would they? They are part of the club - there's a whole country at their fingertips. "

Do they, though? Are we creating a large assimilated country, or just creating large numbers of people with incompatible cultural ideas with a right to vote?

(f) "Of course birthright citizenship is one of the best things ever to be thought up in human history! It means that one day, we can assimilate the entire world. Just invite people in until their kids and grandkids are all Americans, which not coincidentally will help with the population disadvantage we have against, say, Russia (out of the major powers, we're the one that historically AVOIDS human wave tactics and for good reason). "

Right, because making someone legally an American citizen means that they are culturally American, and respect our history, etc.

(g) "Nobody else can really DO this. We can get millions of free citizens in 25 years--citizens who work, pay taxes, bring billions of dollars of value to our GDP."

Uh - immigrant led households use welfare at a much higher rate than native households. They're not "free" (as in free to the rest of us) citizens.

"Europeans will ask "how are those _insert country name here_ people accepted?" and we'll say "What _insert country name here_ people? Those are Americans. Sure, 25 years ago their parents immigrated here, and there's some nativists who still hate them, but those idiots are dying off and these guys, wherever their parents came from, they're just Americans."

Right, because no one other than old fuddy-duddies see race or nationality. It's not like we are constantly being told that "I don't see race" is racist white privilege. It's not like we have specific programs, like affirmative action, deliberately designed to deal differently with people based on national origin.

When the left shuts up about "white privilege" and when they demand that organizations such as MALDEF and La Raza disband, I will believe that they want these people to be "just Americans."

If you want me to take you seriously about us all being Americans, you need to support massive assimilation measures, and oppose, e.g., bilingual education. You need to support making English the official language of the United States. Multiculturalism should be rejected. You need to reject the "salad bowl" for the melting pot.

But for a lot of people, it seems they do not want assimilation, it seems they want to give them American citizenship, but still have them think of themselves as a distinct people within the U.S.

(h) "They're so panicked over a few million immigrants--well-behaved, peaceful refugees who just want work and a safe place to sleep because their home country's in the middle of a civil war--that they're going to be forcing kids from "ghettos", as they call immigrant-dominated low-income areas, into mandatory state-run indoctrination schools to try to forcibly introduce them to the Danish culture that they'll never really be accepted in because of their skin color. "

Well-behaved and peaceful? Cologne, anyone? Also, are you opposed to these "indoctrination" schools? Don't you want these students to become Danish? Isn't that the whole goal? Or do you want them to become Danish citizens while not actually adopting the Danish culture?

A lot of people here seem to argue that birthright citizenship is good because it turns all these people into Americans, but you don't really seem to think that any actual allegiance to the culture and history of America is necessary to be an American.

If the policy creates a permanent class of voting citizens who have no need to develop loyalty to the country or the culture, I think that poses a problem.

(h) "Even if we accept that tourism babies are a thing (and ignore that they aren't mostly rich Russians), I don't think anyone is like, super in-favor of that. It's just a by-product of the policy meant to avoid a massive civil war and daily domestic terrorism."

I don't think that a ridiculously loose interpretation is necessary to avoid the civil war. Actually, I think that a policy that results in giving voting rights to people while not requiring them to learn the language, that results in populations who get affirmative action benefits and in whose favor we routinely discriminate against Americans whose ancestors lived here for generations, and whose ethnicities are constantly being considered in government policy, is more likely to result in a civil war, particularly when citizenship carries with it all privileges, and no burden of loyalty.

(i) "Like how, it isn't anyone's intention that sometimes guilty people go free, but that's the cost of doing business in a fair and just penal system. Every decision has a trade."

If the issue were a few thousand people a year, it would be fine. We are talking something like one in thirteen babies in the U.S. is born to an illegal alien. And the idea that we have to accept that because the only alternative is not to give citizenship to the children of legal permanent residents (it isn't) is ridiculous.

(j) "It also strikes me as bizarre that the focus group that most wants us to adopt this sort of measure, are also the ones most likely to spontaneously ejaculate that we're just like the declining Roman empire. You know, the Romans who famously wrote of the 4th century that their great failing was forgetting how to assimilate subject peoples."

It's not bizarre at all, because birthright citizenship does not mean assimilating them - it means giving them the benefits of citizenship WITHOUT requiring assimilation. It just means giving them the vote and the right to access public benefits. You seem to think that granting someone citizenship, making them an American on paper, will prevent the Roman fate. Making people Americans on paper without a requirement that they assimilate is going to make things worse, not better.

(k) "Of course, Trump's pals the Israelis are the archetypal example of why you shouldn't want to become a two-caste state. I'll be damned if I see the United States Army need to post signs that say "60 days without a workplace massacre"."

But what if the alternative for Israel being a two-caste state is Israel becoming an Islamic state?

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

But what if the alternative for Israel being a two-caste state is Israel becoming an Islamic state?

This. This is where I throw up my hands and stop engaging in debate with you.

You just see an us-vs-them dichotomy. Winner or loser, butch or bitch, and you're dedicated to making sure you and your side are the butches instead of the bitches.

Any talk of the logistics of immigration, the nuances of multi-culturalism, or the unique position of America in the western world is going to be lost on you because they aren't relevant to your core thrust of "we need to be in charge, if we let these people have power, they will be in charge instead."

You need to learn that we are a diverse country, not a Borg cube.

[Karha of Honor]

But what if the alternative for Israel being a two-caste state is Israel becoming an Islamic state?

This. This is where I throw up my hands and stop engaging in debate with you.

You just see an us-vs-them dichotomy. Winner or loser, butch or bitch, and you're dedicated to making sure you and your side are the butches instead of the bitches.

Any talk of the logistics of immigration, the nuances of multi-culturalism, or the unique position of America in the western world is going to be lost on you because they aren't relevant to your core thrust of "we need to be in charge, if we let these people have power, they will be in charge instead."

You need to learn that we are a diverse country, not a Borg cube.

The US is diverse country already but newcomers better learn some basic civic norms enshrined in the Constitutiopn or not only it stops becoming America but also certain progressive gains will also suffer.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

But what if the alternative for Israel being a two-caste state is Israel becoming an Islamic state?

This. This is where I throw up my hands and stop engaging in debate with you.

You just see an us-vs-them dichotomy. Winner or loser, butch or bitch, and you're dedicated to making sure you and your side are the butches instead of the bitches.

Any talk of the logistics of immigration, the nuances of multi-culturalism, or the unique position of America in the western world is going to be lost on you because they aren't relevant to your core thrust of "we need to be in charge, if we let these people have power, they will be in charge instead."

You need to learn that we are a diverse country, not a Borg cube.

The US is diverse country already but newcomers better learn some basic civic norms enshrined in the Constitutiopn or not only it stops becoming America but also certain progressive gains will also suffer.

Ah yes, the constitution, with such wonderful bits as The Fourteenth Amendment.

[Karha of Honor]

But what if the alternative for Israel being a two-caste state is Israel becoming an Islamic state?

This. This is where I throw up my hands and stop engaging in debate with you.

You just see an us-vs-them dichotomy. Winner or loser, butch or bitch, and you're dedicated to making sure you and your side are the butches instead of the bitches.

Any talk of the logistics of immigration, the nuances of multi-culturalism, or the unique position of America in the western world is going to be lost on you because they aren't relevant to your core thrust of "we need to be in charge, if we let these people have power, they will be in charge instead."

You need to learn that we are a diverse country, not a Borg cube.

The US is diverse country already but newcomers better learn some basic civic norms enshrined in the Constitutiopn or not only it stops becoming America but also certain progressive gains will also suffer.

Ah yes, the constitution, with such wonderful bits as The Fourteenth Amendment.

I did not say all Amendments needed to be embraced, did i?

[SuccubusYuri]

(d) "We gain citizens without a great deal of control - anyone born here becomes a citizen, so we get to be slightly less choosy than other countries. However, we're also one of the few countries that taxes citizens even on money they make overseas, so generally speaking, more citizens is better for us. At any rate, the cost of this seems quite negligible."

Are these people mostly net taxpayers?

Well, for anyone who's actually confused, how many AMERICANS are net taxpayers?

Almost all immigrants are net taxpayers. And this goes not only from the basic stuff, like the fact immigrants still pay sales taxes and any of those "ghost" transactional fees, and don't receive any tax returns, obviously.

But when did you start becoming a net taxpayer? When you graduated high school or college at 18/22ish and started your first real full time job? Got to see your paychecks with those deductions in it and send you into righteous fury?

No, not so fast Jimmy.

See we have to deduct the cost of raising you in this country. If you were born under Medicaid or an uninsured mother who couldn't necessarily pay out of pocket, or even if you weren't in those groups but are still low income, you are automatically in the red for prenatal care, which is a heavily subsidized medical service. As a child you also, very likely, got some subsidized services in hospital, or if you are in those two former groups, pretty much every medical expense you gathered adds to your collective societal debt.

But now we have to calculate the cost of educating you. Homeschoolers have a slight edge, but people still need to monitor and standardize (as well as they do) your rubric. But, if you are like a majority of Americans and a public school was your primary vehicle, you're looking at, maybe, $130,000 in the red by the time you graduate high school, and that's assuming your district was pretty shoestring. Tack on another...oh...40-50k if you went to a state university?

Now let's get to your adult life. Do you use a public transit system? You're probably not paying your fair share. Most busing systems in the United States are subsidized by people who don't ride them. Subways tend to be a little more even keeled, though if you've lived in New York anytime in the past five years you've probably noted how just keeping level works out. How many roads did you benefit from when you weren't the one buying gas?

Children are a HUUUUGE drain (oh, sorry, yuge), from a utilitarian perspective, and the average American doesn't pay off their debt for their childhood until they are in their mid-30s. If you're someone like me who works near-enough minimum wage, hell, I'll probably NEVER be able to get out of that red.

[LittleRaven]

No one is suggesting that we have people staying here permanently without being able to get citizenship. People who want to deny birthright citizenship to the children of tourists generally want the tourists to leave and take their kids with them. Same with illegal aliens.

Yes, but you assume everything else would stay as it is. That would almost certainly NOT be the case.

Imagine we implement your scenario. Children of illegal immigrants are no longer citizens. Fine. But we know from looking at places without birthright citizenship that people still immigrate illegally. So we'll still be getting lots of illegal Mexican immigrants, but their kids will no longer be citizens. But now Mexico decides to throw a curveball. They decide that as long as we're changing immigration status, so should they. They declare that children born abroad to Mexican nationals are no longer Mexican citizens. Now we can deport the parents, but not the children. But the children aren't citizens. And any children THEY have while here won't be citizens either.

This is not a trivial problem. There are MILLIONS of illegal immigrants in this country. They have millions of children. We would very quickly end up with a LARGE number of people who are here, and can't go anywhere else, but are not citizens. This is bad. Very bad.

(b) The interpretation that anyone other than those with diplomatic immunity are "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" makes that clause almost meaningless; and it flies in the face of the intentions of the writers.

And when you get on the Supreme Court, you are welcome to make that call. But until then, you and I only get to have opinions. The 9 wise men are the ones that actually get to make the law, and they have shown zero indication that they agree with you. We have over a century of established law and rulings on the subject. The odds that they decide to overturn this are....low.

We've been doing a lot of stupid things for a long time.

We've also become the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. So they can't be THAT dumb.

Are these people mostly net taxpayers?

That is a very complicated question, because our tax laws are very complicated. But they certainly don't do any worse than any other group of Americans.

Do they, though? Are we creating a large assimilated country, or just creating large numbers of people with incompatible cultural ideas with a right to vote?

Well, look around. Do you see any ethnic enclaves where the people inside don't consider themselves to be 'really American?' These things happen all the time in other countries. Check out Savile Town in Britain.

From the window of her flat overlooking the canal path in a suburb of Dewsbury in Yorkshire, a blonde woman watches two female figures walking past as they chatter in a foreign tongue.

Both the passers-by are covered in black Islamic gowns, only a glimpse of their eyes show from the 2 in gap in the veils across their faces.

They, like many Muslim women who live here, speak little or no English. Lots of them will have no contact with any person from another religion or culture. Many, I imagine, have been brought to the UK to wed the British men of south Asian heritage who have made this area their home.

We don't have anything like this in America - anywhere. And not because we have fewer Muslims. We have more Muslims than Britain does. But they're part of the club. So they spread out, marry outside the faith, watch Supernatural, and just generally become Americans like everyone else.

[SuccubusYuri]

No one is suggesting that we have people staying here permanently without being able to get citizenship. People who want to deny birthright citizenship to the children of tourists generally want the tourists to leave and take their kids with them. Same with illegal aliens.

Yes, but you assume everything else would stay as it is. That would almost certainly NOT be the case.

Imagine we implement your scenario. Children of illegal immigrants are no longer citizens. Fine. But we know from looking at places without birthright citizenship that people still immigrate illegally. So we'll still be getting lots of illegal Mexican immigrants, but their kids will no longer be citizens. But now Mexico decides to throw a curveball. They decide that as long as we're changing immigration status, so should they. They declare that children born abroad to Mexican nationals are no longer Mexican citizens. Now we can deport the parents, but not the children. But the children aren't citizens. And any children THEY have while here won't be citizens either.

I would add that this line of thinking is also predicated on the idea that the only people who would be illegal are the people CURRENTLY considered illegal. The whole clause exists because we had a stateless caste (freed slaves) that we needed to figure out how to handle. If that protection no longer exists, how far back does that go?

"Well, obviously," proponents say, "we wouldn't count it against African-Americans, they get grandfathered in." But, why? That's a judgment of empathy, not legality. If it doesn't count now, it therefore has to reach back. If a slave is brought to the western hemisphere, presumably they have allegiance to their homeland, as we know pretty clearly that they didn't come here of love for their new residence, and we know a good number resisted that lawful order of things. So thus it should pass to their children. And their children.

Unless we're going to make the argument that their forced baptism constitutes falling under "jurisdiction". Because, hell, why not force everyone who enters our borders to be citizens in order to pass the border check? Think of all the tax revenue that would garner!

[LittleRaven]

I would add that this line of thinking is also predicated on the idea that the only people who would be illegal are the people CURRENTLY considered illegal.

Excellent point. There are a lot of potential downsides to this proposed policy, and very few benefits that I can see.

I mean, if your concern is that we have too many illegal immigrants...fine. There are ways to address that. We can put more resources into enforcement, crack down on employers, whatever. But ending birthright citizenship to combat illegal immigration is like setting a controlled blaze inside of your house to flush out spiders.

[Worffan101]

The simple fact of the matter is that the USA has been a multiethnic and multicultural nation from its creation, and this fact has been recognized from very early on. We were the first Western nation to give Jews proper citizenship, formally. We've never had a pogrom. Antisemitic violence, pre-Trump, was always very low in the USA especially when compared to Europe. Why? Because the USA was literally founded (and the more important, Northern half of the rebellion largely promulgated by) ethnic and religious groups that felt oppressed in Britain and sought to carve out a place to live in peace here in America--lowland Scotsmen, Quakers, Puritans, Irishmen, lower-class folks who just wanted to get a better life. The South was a bit different due to retaining a lot of aristocracy in the form of the corrupt, obsolescent, and morally bankrupt planter class, but after we showed Johnny Reb to mind his Uncle Sam in the War of Southern Aggression we kicked those no-good slave-owning sons of bitches but good and made the South a lot more egalitarian.

Point is, our Union's been multiethnic and multicultural from the START, and despite the expected amounts of reflexive xenophobia popping up, historically we've been fantastic at assimilating immigrants.

Mexicans and Central Americans, frankly, are no different from the Irish and the Italians and the Poles and the Chinese and the Japanese and Vietnamese and Cubans et cetera ad infinitum. People hate 'em now for the usual moronic reasons, but in 25 years once they've assimilated, only fringe Nazis will give a damn and everybody will look down on those primitive Nazi bigots as the worthless scum they are.