Anchor Babies: What is This All About?

Should Breaking Immigration Law Be Rewarded?


Of course it should not, but the present law is that if two foreigners come here on vacation or illegally and bear a child, the child automatically gains American citizenship. It is claimed that the 14th Amendment says anyone born in this country (except to foreign diplomats) is a citizen of the United States and the state where they live regardless of the legality of the parents. Foreign diplomats are here legally. Why would their legal presence prohibit their children born here from being citizens and the children born to those in the country illegaly automatically get blessed with citizenship? It is absurd, but what is absurd the law as executed or the law as written?


Tha actual language in Section 1:


Section 1. 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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.


The phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was intended to exclude American-born persons from automatic citizenship whose allegiance to the United States was not complete. At common law, every person born within the realm of the British Crown was a British subject. This meant that to be a British subject, one simply had to be born in any territory under the sovereignty of the British Crown. The only exception at common law was that the children of foreign ambassadors, but that defined subjugation and not citizenship.


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