My funny bone has officially stopped vibrating. To return to the theme of American immigration, I will now blend statistics, psychology and anecdote to "prove" a hunch of mine.
To return to the debate over "birthright citizenship." There's a piece about this up on FP, but for the purposes of my argument, the key line is a quote that comes halfway through.
"To treat [the children of immigrants] differently and to make them second-tier residents isn't likely to reduce unauthorized immigration -- it's likely to lead to further polarization, inequality, and exploitation," according to Marc Rosenblum, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
According to the US Census, immigrants (foreign-born, which I assume includes citizens who have naturalized) make up 12.1% of the US population. Consider the effects of automatically stripping citizenship from these people's children. Even assuming that some of them naturalize prior to having children, many might not (for various reasons). That means that up to a tenth of the future American population would suddenly become stateless, which means they will have no right to the legal protections enjoyed by citizens of any country.
Even if there are special provisions that allow them to live in the United States, these 30 million children will grow up knowing that their state considers them inferior to the other kids they've grown up playing with, going to school with and seeing on the street. They will get second-class treatment in education and jobs, since citizens will retain priority. Slowly, the educational and professional attainment of immigrants' children will lapse behind those of their counterparts. Loss of citizenship will create two segregated societies. Children of immigrants will be fated, thanks to their birth, to earning less money throughout their lives.
Pretty picture? Okay, maybe you're a white supremacist and you just want all of us out of your backyard. So let's go further.
Repealing the 14th Amendment (which is, incidentally, a part of the Constitution) will not stop immigration to the US. In fact, the United States will continue to see a surge in immigration.
But it will see a dramatic change in the type of people who choose to immigrate.
One of the primary reasons that people immigrate is to give their children a better life. If American law guarantees that the children of immigrants will lead a sub-par existence, the people who choose to come to this country will be those whose children are already fated to a poor existence in their home country.
Why does it matter? The same people who hate immigrants like to trot out statistics like these: "Immigrants were once significantly more likely to have a college degree, but the new data show that natives are now as likely as immigrants to have a bachelor's or graduate degree." This is because natives have become more educated, not because immigrants have become less so.
But what if that happened?
This is where this whole thing becomes anecdotal. I moved to India a year and a half ago. Since that time, I've met tens of people who have studied in the US. Obviously, not one of them has stayed. In fact, starting in 2001 (a year that coincided with tightening of US student and work visa norms, a trend that has continued through the outsourcing hysteria and has now reached proportions so epic that even US officials, in international fora, refer to it as a "major problem") there has been a marked increase in the number of students who return to India after getting their degree.
Many of them no longer believe that they and their children will have better lives in the United States. Many factors contribute to this change: the first is the rapid growth in Indian opportunity and standard of living , compared to the stagnant US economy. Then there's American xenophobia, which hardly eases the trauma of leaving home.
Laws that guarantee unfair treatment to these immigrants' children will only encourage people who can afford it to stay home. That's hardly ideal.
And most troubling of all? The law likely won't curb the number of immigrants who enter the United States illegally, or at least not much - they're already willing to risk imprisonment, physical hardship and low wages just to get to the US in the first place.
At the worst, the urge to revoke the 14th Amendment reflects the most racist and xenophobic urges in the contemporary American psyche. At best, it reflects a poor understanding of how incentives operate. (Of course, since the Supreme Court already cut down one attempt to revoke the 14th, it's unlikely another will succeed. But still.)
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