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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kumar who wrote (85031)	11/9/2004 9:42:32 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793931

I think the situation Kholt is talking about is the propensity of pregnant Mexican women to cross the border for the sole purpose of ensuring that their child is born in the US, because that child can be used as leverage to get the rest of the family the right to stay in the US. I think her point is that the mother had no right to be in the US to begin with, and is using the child to manipulate the system. I have no idea how common this practice actually is. I can tell you that Northern VA (where both Kholt and I live) has thousands and thousands of illegal Hispanics who live and work without any difficulty from immigration or any other law enforcement authority.

To: kumar who wrote (85031)	11/9/2004 1:49:30 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 793931

If you think the US does not belong in the group, we now have a different line of discussion. No, I don't think that. There are apparently two generally accepted ways of handling citizenship at birth. What we do is not unusual although hardly ubiquitous. Did you notice that some countries are changing their laws to deal with just the problem I cite? I go back to the basic point of "do not blame the child for the parents actions". I understand your point about the parent's act punishing the child. But I don't think that's the way to look at it. The child isn't being punished. He's simply not being awarded automatic US citizenship because of where he landed when he slid out of the birth canal. His citizenship is instead a function of his parentage. Either way of doing it is legitimate. Sweden and Switzerland are "generally accepted democratic nations" and they don't have a citizenship birthright. If the kid isn't automatically a citizen but his parents make a home here under the radar, he grows up American, and he wants to become a citizen, he can get citizenship when his parents do or he can apply for citizenship later on his own. It's not like we were condemning him to a lifetime of statelessness, for heaven's sake. It's arrogant to assert that giving a kid Mexican citizen rather than a US citizen is a punishment. Mexicans love their country, too.