Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
14th Amendment
Arizona May Finally Be Ready to "Take a Time Out" on Immigrant Bashing
010 months ago
Arizona legislators finally gave the state’s immigrant community something to celebrate last night when the state Senate rejected five anti-immigrant bills, including a pair that would have denied citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants. Arizona was expected to lead a multi-state effort to roll back birthright citizenship, but now some other state will have to lead the charge.
“It’s time for us to take a timeout,” said Republican Sen. John McComish, the AP reported. “It’s something that the people don’t want us to be focusing on.”
Yesterday, Arizona Senate Republicans split over SB 1308 and 1309, the two birthright citizenship bills that attempted to create a new two-tiered state citizenship. Those born to undocumented immigrants would have received one kind of birth certificate and those born to at least one permanent resident or naturalized citizen would have gotten their own birth certificates. The second bill would have attempted to create a state compact declaring cooperation on the issue, which other states would have had to sign onto and then would have required congressional approval.
Right-wing advocates of the birthright citizenship bills were explicit about their intention to pass the bills in order to trigger a Supreme Court review of the 14th Amendment. Immigrant rights groups have argued both bills violate long-held interpretations of the Constitution
“The 14th Amendment was never intended to be applied to illegal aliens,” Senate President Russell Pearce told the Washington Times. “[The sponsors] specifically said it didn’t apply to foreigners or aliens. That amendment belongs to the African Americans of this country. It’s their amendment.”
“If we get the correct court decision … we will not be dispensing citizenship like a door prize,” Arizona state Rep. Kavanagh told Colorlines when he filed the House version of the bill. “Especially not for those whose parents snuck into this country illegally through the back door.”
The other bills that were shot down on Thursday were SB 1405, which sought to require hospital workers to ask for someone’s papers before they delivered non-emergency health care, and SB 1407, which would have required schools gather immigration data on their students. SB 1611, an omnibus bill, would bar undocumented youth from attending public schools and would forbid undocumented immigrant families from accessing public benefits of any kind. People would have had to show their papers before they could buy or register a car and would be barred from enrolling in a community college.
“These are major wins for the fight for a better Arizona,” said Jennifer Allen, executive director of the border human rights organization Border Action Network.
Business vs. Pearce
Last night’s vote was a strong rebuke to Pearce, who was the most visible Arizona legislator calling for birthright citizenship rollbacks. Pearce has staked his political career on anti-immigrant enforcement measures, and was one of the architects of SB 1070, which was the harshest anti-immigration measure of its kind when it became law last April. SB 1070 required law enforcement officers to detain and investigate the immigration status of anyone they had “reasonable suspicion” to believe was undocumented while they were enforcing other laws. It is currently being challenged by the federal government.
In the run-up to last night’s Senate vote, the birthright citizenship bills were repeatedly held back in committee and shuffled around the back channels of the legislature as the Republican-controlled Senate struggled to find enough votes for their anti-immigrant attacks. Immigrant rights advocates said that even SB 1611, the omnibus immigration bill that combined several legislators’ immigration-related proposals, was a sign of desperation.
Legislators were clearly listening to the protests of the business community. This week the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, together with 60 CEOs from Arizona-based businesses, delivered a letter to Pearce urging him to reconsider his anti-immigrant attacks.
The list of signers included W. Douglas Parker, chairman and CEO of U.S. Airways; Philip Francis, chairman of PetSmart; and Linda Hunt, president and CEO of CEO, St. Joseph’s Hospital and Stephen Rizley, senior vice president of Cox Communications.
Also on the list? Robert Delgado, president and CEO of Hensley Beverage Company. That would be the Hensley Beverage Company founded by Cindy McCain’s family. Hensley was one of the targets of the boycott that immigrant rights organizations called for in the wake of SB 1070. An economic impact analysis released by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress last year found that boycotts cost the state $140 million in lost convention business alone.
“It is an undeniable fact that each of our companies and our employees were impacted by the boycotts and the coincident negative image,” wrote the business executives.
“These bills are a waste of our time, our money and our resources,” said Border Action Network’s Allen. “It’s time for our legislators to focus on making Arizona strong, and to implement the real solutions for our state and our children’s futures: health care, jobs, education and public safety.”
Read the business leaders’ letter in full below.
Dear President Pearce,
Thank you for your willingness to serve Arizona as a Member of the Arizona State Senate. We, like you, are concerned about the challenges facing our State, particularly the need to address our structural deficit and insure an economic environment that attracts and retains high quality jobs.
While we recognize the desire for states like Arizona to fill the leadership vacuum left by federal inaction on immigration, we strongly believe it is unwise for the Legislature to pass any additional immigration legislation, including any measures leaving the determination of citizenship to the state.
We agree with you that our borders must be protected first, and now. We also believe that market-driven immigration policies can and should be developed by the federal government that will sustain America’s status as a magnet for the world’s most talented and hard-working people and preserve our ability to compete in the global economy.
If the Legislature believes it is worthwhile to debate the question of citizenship, we believe that debate is best held in the U.S. Congress. Already, Sens. David Vitter of Louisiana and Rand Paul of Kentucky have introduced legislation aimed at amending the 14th Amendment to deny ‘birthright citizenship’ to those born to individuals living in the U.S. illegally. Iowa Rep. Steve King has introduced similar legislation in the U.S. House.
Arizona’s lawmakers and citizens are right to be concerned about illegal immigration. But we must acknowledge that when Arizona goes it alone on this issue, unintended consequences inevitably occur. Last year, boycotts were called against our state’s business community, adversely impacting our already-struggling economy and costing us jobs. Arizona-based businesses saw contracts cancelled or were turned away from bidding. “Sales outside of the state declined. Even a business which merely had ‘Arizona’ in its name felt the effects of the boycotts, compelling them to launch an educational campaign about their company’s roots in Brooklyn. It is an undeniable fact that each of our companies and our employees were impacted by the boycotts and the coincident negative image.
Tourism, one of our state’s largest industries and employment centers, also suffered from negative perceptions after the passage of SB 1070. The fact Gov. Brewer directed $250,000 to repairing Arizona’s reputation strongly suggests these efforts – whether fair or unfair – are harmful to our image.
Let us be clear: Our dissension with legislative action on the state level does not translate to our being ‘pro-illegal immigration.’ To the contrary, we believe Congress must address border security, identity theft, sound and implementable employment verification systems and policies and the creation of a meaningful guest worker program. Therefore, we urge the Legislature to redirect its energy by joining us in pressing the federal government for meaningful immigration reform. Together, we can get results.
Respectfully:
- Drew Brown, managing director, DMB Associates Inc.
- Philip Francis, executive chairman, PetSmart Inc.
- Ronald Butler, Arizona managing partner, Ernst & Young
- W. Douglas Parker, chairman, president, CEO, US Airways Group
- Ronald Brown, president, Atrium Holding Co.
- Richard Dozer, chairman, GenSpring Family Offices
- Stephen Rizley. senior VP, GM, Cox Communications
- Daniel Connor, president, CEO, Blood Systems
- John Graham, president, Sunbelt Holdings
- Peter Fine, president, CEO, Banner Health
- Craig Phelps, provost, A.T. Still University
- Jeff Whiteman, president, CEO, Empire Southwest
- Thomas Sadvary, president, CEO, Scottsdale Healthcare
- William Coats, CEO, Leona Group
- Herman Chanen, chairman, CEO, Chanen Corp.
- Lee Hanley, chairman, CEO, Vestar Development Co.
- William Schubert, chairman, Kitchell Corp.
- Jon Pettibone, managing partner, Quarles & Brady
- Paul Dykstra, chairman, president, CEO, Viad Corp.
- David Bruno, vice chairman, managing director, DHR International
- Marty Laurel, vice president, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona
- James Gentile, president, CEO, Research Corp for Science Adv.
- Roger Vogel, chairman, president, CEO, Vante Medical Technologies
- Michael Duran, vice president, chief development officer, TMC Healthcare/TMC Fund
- F. Michael Geddes, chairman, president, Geddes and Co.
- Bruce Beach, CEO, BeachFleischman PC and chairman, SALC
- J. Doug Pruitt, chairman, CEO, Sundt Construction
- Brian Johnson, managing director, Lowes Ventana Canyon
- Peter Likins, president emeritus, University of Arizona
- Robert Delgado, president, CEO, Hensley Beverage Co.
- Michael Kennedy, president, Gallagher & Kennedy
- Bruce Dusenberry, president, Horizon Moving Systems
- Robert Underwood, CEO, Underwood Brothers Inc.
- Shelly Esque, VP, legal/corporate affairs, Intel Corp.
- Denise Resnik, president, Denise Resnik & Associates
- Vince Roig, chairman, CEO, Helios Foundation
- Constance Perez, CEO, Adreima
- Susan Williams, president, HR Choice
- Kevin Sandler, president, CEO, ExhibitOne Corp.
- Debbie Johnson, president, CEO, Arizona Hotel & Lodging Associaton
- Jim Click Jr., president, Jim Click Automotive Team
- David Cohen, executive VP, BeachFleishman PC
- Donald Pitt, president, Campus Research Corp.
- Alan Klein, chairman, Southern Arizona Lodging & Resort Association
- Michael Kasser, president, Holualoa Cos.
- Linda Hunt, area president, CHW Arizona, and president, CEO, St. Joseph’s Hospital
- John Zidich, CEO, publisher, Arizona Republic
- Howard Fleischmann, owner, Community Tire & Auto Repair
- Nancy Stone, president, ILX Resorts
- Janice Cox, retired CEO, Carondelet Foundation
- Don Budinger, chairman, Rodel Foundations
- David Anderson, president, Off Madison Avenue
- Steven Wheeler, chairman, Greater Phoenix Chamber
- Bill Calloway, plant manager, Nestle-Purina
- J.R. Murray, chairman, Flagstaff Forty
- Kenneth Lamneck
- Frances Merryman
- Reginald Ballantyne III, senior corporate officer, Vanguard Health Systems
- Gerrit van Huisstede, regional president, Wells Fargo Bank
- Earl Petznick Jr., president and CEO, Northside Hay Co.
Birthright Citizenship Bills Stalled in Arizona Senate
012 months ago
Monday marked an important short-term victory over Arizona’s efforts to pass birthright citizenship bills in the state legislature. The effort stalled in the Senate yesterday, reports the Arizona Daily Star.
After more than three hours of testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Ron Gould, R-Lake Havasu City, yanked the two measures. Gould said he lacked the backing of four other members of the Republican-controlled panel, which he chairs.
Gould said he will keep trying to secure votes. And Senate President Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, said, if necessary, he will reassign the proposal to a more friendly committee.
It’s still unclear what will happen with similar bills that were introduced to the House several weeks ago. That effort’s being led by state Rep. John Kavanagh, who made it clear that the bills are intended to trigger a Supreme Court review of the 14th Amendment.
Julianne Hing recently spoke to Kavanagh and reported:
One of the House bills seeks to amend the state constitution to create a new category of Arizona state citizenship. Kavanagh’s bill says that in order to be granted state citizenship, a child born in the U.S. would need to have at least one parent who is a legal permanent resident or a U.S. citizen. The bill’s language is tricky. It interprets the 14th amendment to mean that only the children of “at least one parent who owes no allegiance to any foreign sovereignty, or a child without citizenship or nationality in any foreign country” are eligible for state citizenship.
That effort to reinterpret the 14th Amendment didn’t work so well in the House. The bills’ failure came after nearly an hour of testimony by Chapman University law professor John Eastman, who argued that there was no constitutional basis for giving citizenship to all children born in the United States, despite the legal status of their parents. Even some Senate Republians were unmoved.
“I am a conservative Republican, and I am a little confused, because I take very seriously the oath . . . to uphold the Constitution,” Senate Republican Adam Driggs told The Arizona Republic. “I will not take any challenges to the U.S. Constitution lightly.”
Linking Citizens United to Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction
01 year ago
Over at AlterNet, activists and writers Adrienne Maree Brown and Dani McClain discuss the 14th amendment and the role of corporations in U.S. democracy. They ask, “Corporations ain’t people, so why do they have the power of citizens?” It’s a discussion that was sparked in part by the January 21 anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, which allowed unlimited corporate spending on political campaigns. But it expanded more broadly from email discussions around ongoing attacks on the 14th amendment that go back long before the Court’s controversial ruling. Yet what makes this conversation different from most? It’s honest and hopeful talk. And invokes the wisdom of famed black science fiction writer Octavia Butler:
McClain: …What would Octavia Butler say about the way corporate power is growing? What solutions would she write into a novel in which people who had for generations gained citizenship by virtue of their humanity and place of birth are slowly edged out of citizenship because they lack access to money?
Brown: Oh, she foresaw this. In the Parables she knew this was coming and warned us, in her way. Her solution was to rethink our purpose as human beings, and change how we live - even if that means leaving what we perceive as safety. Part of why we held the Octavia Butler Symposium at the Allied Media Conference last year was to explore how we connect ideas like hers to how we are living and organizing in the world. I feel like she did a powerful job, for instance, of challenging the idea that our future lies in the struggle to act as a nation, when our destiny might actually be something much more global, or universal. In her stories, our way to evolve is to leave behind the right-wing politics and struggles of earth and go to space.
Of course, the conversation is much more than that, and includes powerful insights on the state of national organizing, mainstream media, the Tea Party, and net neutrality. So if science fiction and constitutional law are your sorta thing, read more.
Sens. Vitter and Paul Introduce Birthright Citizenship Bill
01 year ago
On Thursday Sens. David Vitter and Rand Paul announced a bill to amend the Constitution and redefine the very notions of American citizenship. Their bill would end the constitutional right to citizenship that is automatically conferred upon every child born in the U.S.
“For too long, our nation has seen an influx of illegal aliens entering our country at an escalating rate, and chain migration is a major contributor to this rapid increase – which is only compounded when the children of illegal aliens born in the U.S. are granted automatic citizenship,” Vitter said in a joint statement with Paul. “Closing this loophole will not prevent them from becoming citizens, but will ensure that they have to go through the same process as anyone else who wants to become an American citizen.”
The birthright citizenship bills have been widely condemned by immigrant and civil rights groups. “The right of citizenship at birth has long been the law of the land and for good reason,” said Deborah Vagins, ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel. “The 14th Amendment was intended to heal a great wound inflicted on our country after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott, denying citizenship to African-Americans and their descendants. Any proposed subversion of such constitutionally protected rights should be soundly rejected.”
Vagins called birthright citizenship one of the Constitution’s “most essential tools to ensure equality and fairness under the law…regardless of who their parents are or whether Congress approves of them.”
“Our nation’s extraordinarily accomplished early history is marred by a pattern of legally-sanctioned exclusion and racism,” Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said in a statement. “The ratification of the 14th Amendment–and its Citizenship Clause in particular–permanently altered this extraordinarily regrettable pattern.”
“This week’s introduction of a proposed constitutional amendment to return this nation to its pre-Civil War infamy will earn a permanent place in the annals of shameful senatorial conduct.”
Vitter and Paul do not see citizenship as a fundamental right that is guaranteed by the Constitution, even though that is how the 14th Amendment has been interpreted and upheld in the courts for nearly 150 years, beginning with the landmark Supreme Court case U.S. v. Wong Ark Kim in 1898, in which the Court ruled that the U.S.-born son of a Chinese-born couple was indeed a U.S. citizen. Still, Vitter and Paul said that the 14th Amendment does not grant U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants citizenship in either “language or intent.”
Vitter and Paul are itching for another Supreme Court review on the matter. Their bill is part of a coordinated effort to revisit the topic and force a change. State legislators who’ve introduced similar bills have been very direct about stating their intentions. Yesterday, Arizona State Rep. John Kavanagh and State Sen. Ron Gould introduced their own bills attacking birthright citizenship.
In order to amend the Constitution both houses of Congress will have to pass the legislation with a two-thirds majority, after which three-fourths of the states will have to ratify the amendment. It’s a laborious process.
Legal proceedings aside, discussions about American citizenship are at their heart debates about who belongs in this country and who does not. It’s a debate, and an entirely racialized one at that (See: Vitter’s campaign ads from last November) that hinges on fear and racial hatred.
“Citizenship is a privilege, and only those who respect our immigration laws should be allowed to enjoy its benefits,” Paul said.
Birthright Citizenship Fight–From Ariz. to the Supreme Court?
01 year ago
True to its word, Arizona dropped its long-promised anti-immigration bills attacking birthright citizenship. Arizona State Rep. John Kavanagh filed two bills today in the Arizona House, and State Sen. Ron Gould was also expected to file his own.
“Those two companion bills have one purpose,” Kavanagh told Colorlines. “We want to trigger a Supreme Court review of the phrase ‘subject to jurisdiction thereof’ which is contained in the 14th Amendment.”
Kavanagh said he believed that statements from the 14th Amendment’s authors and initial Supreme Court decisions reveal that the amendment was never intended to grant citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants.
“We believe the current interpretation is wrong,” he said.
One of the House bills seeks to amend the state constitution to create a new category of Arizona state citizenship. Kavanagh’s bill says that in order to be granted state citizenship, a child born in the U.S. would need to have at least one parent who is a legal permanent resident or a U.S. citizen. The bill’s language is tricky. It interprets the 14th amendment to mean that only the children of “at least one parent who owes no allegiance to any foreign sovereignty, or a child without citizenship or nationality in any foreign country” are eligible for state citizenship.
Immigration rights advocates and legal scholars who oppose the bill insist that this is unconstitutional.
“These bills seem to try to manufacture a novel definition of state citizenship which really contravenes the understanding and well-established principle of citizenship that the 14th amendment brought and codified almost 150 years ago,” Vivek Malhotra, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said on a press call last week, before the bills were delivered.
The ACLU and a host of other civil and immigrant rights organizations joined together earlier this year to form a coalition called Americans for Constitutional Citizenship to protect the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
“These legislators want to pass state laws that would create two tiers of citizens–a modern-day caste system–with potentially millions of natural-born Americans being treated as somehow less than entitled to the equal protection of the laws that our nation has struggled so hard to guarantee,” Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and a member of the ACC, said on the day of the coalition’s launch.
Those who oppose the birthright citizenship bills point to the 14th Amendment which says, “All persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” There is no mention about the immigration status of a child’s parents. The sentence ends abruptly. They argue that very next line of the U.S. Constitution precludes Kavanagh and Gould’s efforts: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the U.S.”
Kavanagh welcomes the opposing arguments. ”I’m glad they think that,” he said. “Let us go to court and we’ll have the U.S. Supreme Court eventually decide because that’s the way we settle disputes in this country.”
The second bill seeks to initiate a state compact that would need other states’ commitment and eventually Congressional approval. If Congress authorizes the compact it would, in effect become federal law. It’s a convenient avenue to try to attack the Constitution without having to go through the laborious process of actually amending it.
Under the bill, member states would join together in their new interpretations of state citizenship.
While legal scholars are confident that that the bills are unconstitutional, these bills undoubtedly affect the political climate in Arizona, which is still reeling from the anti-immigration bill SB 1070 which was just signed into law last year. Parts of SB 1070 were enjoined and that fight is winding its way through the courts right now, but portions of the law are still in effect. “This divisive legislation is appalling and shameful,” said Jennifer Allen, executive director of the Tucson human rights group Border Action Network. “Our legislature already dragged our state’s name through the mud with SB1070 and by driving our economy and services into the ground. They need to stop with these divisive, counter-productive and uncivil attacks on Arizonans and our nation as a whole.”
“We’re not going to sit by and allow these attacks to go on,” said Salvador Reza, an immigrant rights activist and organizer who was on his way to the Arizona State Capitol to protest the new bills this morning. “We will organize, and we will do whatever we need to to fight these attacks.”
“The hate and the animosity that they have created and that is spreading throughout the rest of the country, it’s out of control.”
Kavanagh could offer no immediate details about when the bill will move to committee or hearing. He and other Arizona legislators like Russell Pearce have faced criticism for pushing ahead with immigration bills when the state is mired in difficult budget conversations and facing an unprecedented deficit. He said he would wait until the budget was settled before bringing his bills to the floor. “The budget is very important,” Kavanagh said. “But we can do more than one thing at once.”
“If we get the correct court decision…we will not be dispensing citizenship like a door prize,” Kavanagh said. “Especially not for those whose parents snuck into this country illegally through the back door.”
Protesters Don’t Let 14th Amendment Rollback Happen Quietly
01 year ago
You probably read the headlines Wednesday about the right-wing assault on birthright citizenship, but have you seen the footage of the press conference?
Members of the State Legislators for Legal Immigration announced their plans to launch a state-based anti-immigration campaign to rewrite citizenship laws in the country at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. yesterday. They were joined by immigrant rights protesters who injected their message into the event.
SLLI is backed by FAIR, the anti-immigration group that the Southern Poverty Law Center called an “anti-immigrant hate group.” FAIR helped design Arizona’s SB 1070 and has coordinated similar state and local anti-immigration initiatives around the country.
“The bill is ignorant and wrong,” a man shouted from his second row seat and he was escorted out of the room. “It’s [an] inhumane, racist bill and it will be stopped, it will be stopped I’ll tell you that.”
SLLI is leading the coordinated state assault on immigrant communities. States have pledged to introduce bills in their legislatures in the coming weeks that confer “state citizenship” only on U.S.-born children who have at least one permanent resident or citizen parent. On Thursday, California Rep. Steve King introduced his own bill to revoke birthright citizenship in the House. The bill has 95 initial sponsors. It’s the beginning of a new stage in the country’s fractious fight over immigration.
Later, another man stood up and interrupted the press conference: “Senators,” he said, “the inscription on the Statue of Liberty reflects openness and welcoming nature that has made our country great.” He went on to read the most famous line from the Statue of Liberty–”Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and then asked: “Does this sound like what you all are working towards today? This is what has made our country great.”
Not according to the SLLI. Wonk Room reported that at Wednesday’s press conference South Carolina Sen. Daniel Verdin called undocumented immigrants a “poison” who’ve infected the country with a “malady” that can only be cured by denying the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants citizenship.
Hostile State Battles Now Define Immigration Debate
01 year ago
A coalition of conservative state legislators made shocking headlines Wednesday as they unveiled a coordinated effort to deny citizenship rights to the children of undocumented immigrants and force a reconsideration of the 14th Amendment. The bracing new campaign follows the shifting geography of the fight over immigration policy. With Congress having failed to pass any immigration reform bill, the debate’s center has moved to the state and local level, where anti-immigration laws and ordinances have flourished in the past decade and will likely intensify in the next two years.
Conservative local lawmakers have consistently pointed to Washington’s inaction on immigration enforcement when passing new anti-immigrant laws. But ironically, the shift is driven largely by Washington’s active devolution of immigration enforcement to state and local law enforcement over the past several years. The Obama administration has continued that trend. The result is that the country is now covered in a lattice work of increasingly hostile localized laws and practices that are fueling an intensifying confrontation between immigrant rights advocates and anti-immigrant policy makers in state and local governments.
A New Line of Attack
Yesterday’s coordinated announcement by state legislators, many of whom are affiliated with the group State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), an arm of the anti-immigrant group FAIR, opens up a new point of conflict at the state level. Legislators in 14 states said they intended to challenge the 14th amendment’s guarantee of immediate citizenship for anyone born in the United States. Ultimately, the group hopes that state laws, which would refuse to recognize children of undocumented immigrant as citizens, will push the birthright citizenship issue to the courts.
“All we’re asking for is for these bills to prompt the Supreme Court to re-evaluate what we believe is an erroneous interpretation of the 14th Amendment,” said Arizona state Rep. John Kavanagh.
The lawmakers and their backers also believe that the law will remove an incentive for immigration, arguing that people come to the United States to birth they’re children. The laws, if passed, would create a two tiered system in which the children of undocumented immigrants would be granted different birth certificates.
It’s unclear how many states will adopt the birthright citizenship proposals but the announcement has now pushed the once outlandish question of reconsidering the 14th Amendment into the policy arena. And on the same day as the state legislators declaration, Iowa Rep. Steve King dropped his own federal bill to revoke birthright citizenship through statute. He told Politico, “We need to address anchor babies. This isn’t what our founding fathers intended.”
States vs. the Feds
Alone, the 14th amendment challenges are chilling for immigrant communities. Yet Wednesday’s events are only part of a larger and growing constellation of state and local anti-immigration initiatives. The most notable component in that mix is a set of state proposals to replicate Arizona’s SB 1070. Legislatures in at least seven states–Georgia, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Tennessee– will likely introduce copycat bills this year.
While the birthright citizenship laws are meant to force a court case over the 14th Amendment, the SB 1070-style laws are pushing courts to weigh where power over immigration enforcement resides.
The Arizona law makes it a crime to be an undocumented immigrant and requires police to check the immigration status of anyone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant. A federal judge stayed the most controversial portions of the law last year. The Justice Department has argued in court that immigration enforcement is the sole responsibility of the federal government and that state attempts to enforce immigration law amount to preemption.
Most legal experts expect SB 1070 to make its way to the Supreme Court. But it could take years to get there and until the Supreme Court rules on the legality of that law, other states can pass their own versions. Advocates and the federal government will be forced to challenge each new state copycat law individually.
But these are just highest profile challenges to federal authority. A November report from the Migration Policy Institute finds that between 2000 and 2009, 107 U.S. towns, cities, or counties passed anti-immigration laws. They included over 50 local laws intended to stop immigrants from getting jobs by targeting employers who hire undocumented workers, 33 English-only ordinances and 17 laws fully prohibiting landlords from renting to undocumented immigrants.
Most of the laws were passed in jurisdictions where immigrant populations grew rapidly in the past decade.
“What anti-immigrant groups are doing is seeing how far they can push the envelope,” says Bill Hing, law professor at University of San Francisco. ”They know the laws will be challenged in court, but they are trying to see what sticks.”
Many of the laws are likely be found unconstitutional but “some, or parts of some, could be upheld by the Supreme Court,” says Hing. “I just cant say that all of it will be thrown out.”
Democrats’ Frankenstein Policies
Supporters of the anti-immigrant laws say they’re necessary because the Obama administration and Congress have failed to act on immigration enforcement. But the Obama administration has in fact built up detention and deportation to unprecedented levels, setting consecutive historical highs for official deportations, and it has done so by further beefing up the very local powers its now forced to fight in court.
The administration’s unstated logic in perusing a tough-on-enforcement policy is to attract conservatives to support broader reforms. The strategy, which is consistent with Democrats’ approach since at least the late 1990s, has not drawn enough supporters to pass either a comprehensive reform bill or a standalone bill like the DREAM Act. It’s succeeded only in creating a massive and often out of control deportation dragnet that is woven largely out of programs that devolve power to states and localities.
Increasingly, local cops act as immigration agents. Among the most controversial of these programs is Secure Communities, which empowers local law enforcement to check the immigration status of anyone booked into a jail. The government says the program targets criminals for deportation, but government data obtained by Uncover the Truth, a coalition of immigrant rights groups, show that most of those deported by Secure Communities were convicted of no crime or of a low-level offense like a traffic violation.
The administration has said it plans to implement that program in every jurisdiction in the country by 2013. Though the Department of Homeland Security initially told localities that they would be allowed to opt out of the program, the government recently changed course, indicating that Secure Communities is mandatory.
The policy exposes the Obama Administration’s janus-face. As the federal government sues the state of Arizona for preemption it then turns around to fully authorize–and in the case of Secure Communities even require–local governments to enforce immigration laws.
A Localized Immigrant Rights Movement
All of this means immigrant rights advocates are increasingly taking their fight out of the House and Senate and moving it to the White House and to the states, where they will push simultaneously against local immigration laws and against localized federal immigration enforcement.
“Our members, have known that this has to be a local fight for a long time,” says Pablo Alvarado, who directs the National Day Laborer’s Organizing Project.
NDLON is one of a number of groups organizing county by county to stop Secure Communities. Four counties have voted to opt out of the program thus far. While it’s yet unknown if the federal government will force those counties participation, a judge in New York recently ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to at least state plainly whether the program was crafted as mandatory. Meanwhile, opt-out campaigns are underway in more jurisdictions across the country.
And in the wake of the DREAM Act’s failure, state based advocates are pushing to establish tuition-equity policies that allow undocumented state residents to pay in-state tuition fees. Ten states already have such policies.
National groups that have focused the bulk of their energies in recent years on passing immigration reform in Washington may also be forced to recalibrate. Frank Sharry, who leads America’s Voice, one of the country’s leading comprehensive immigration reform advocates, told Colorlines before the November elections that if Republicans made significant electoral gains “most of America’s Voice’s work in the future may be to join with advocates to say this enforcement is wrong-headed. We may need to adjust strategy to the state and local level, with Secure Communities. We’ll see how the election plays out but we’re thinking we need to throw down on fighting Arizona copycats around the country.”
Echoing this, Alvarado said, “What’s ahead of us is a campaign around enforcement that we have not seen in decades.”
But Alvarado added, “This is also a time when we have to do another kind of work. And that is the work to change hearts and minds. We have to change the way people think about us.”
Lawmakers in 14 States Coordinate Birthright Citizenship Attack
01 year ago
This morning leaders from 14 states marked the beginning of what will likely be this year’s biggest immigration fight when they officially announced their plans to join together in a state compact to pass laws that deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants.
Legislators in states like Pennsylvania and Arizona have pledged to attempt to pass a law that revives the old debates around “state citizenship” so that only babies born to at least one permanent resident or citizen parent would be granted citizenship in the state. Other states have promised to follow their lead. The goal, as anti-immigration legislators are not shy to admit, is to force the Supreme Court to take up the issue.
The coordinated state ambush is a joint effort between right-wing state legislators– immigration restrictionists like Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce and Kansas Secretary of State-elect Kris Kobach, both architects of Arizona’s SB 1070–and State Legislators for Legal Immigration, an anti-immigration group of lawmakers. SLLI got representatives from Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah, but not Kobach’s home state of Kansas, to attend.
The second part of their strategy is to create what’s called a state compact around the laws. Such compacts are not uncommon, said Walter Dellinger, a law professor at Duke University and a former Solicitor General; they’re often used to deal with things like garbage disposal, trade pacts and water rights. But the compact would need congressional approval and, if passed, would in effect become federal law–a tidy way to attack the 14th Amendment without having to rewrite the Constitution.
The compact would of course also force a Supreme Court case. “[State compacts] have no more authority than individual states or a Congress of the United States to change the clear constitutional rule of citizenship,” said Dillenger. “It simply seems in this context to be a distraction.”
Ultimately, the legislators want to create a two-tiered system of citizenship: babies born to undocumented immigrants would receive one kind of birth certificate while those born to American citizens would get their own birth certificates.
“The 14th Amendment was never intended to be applied to illegal aliens,” Pearce told the Washington Times. “[The sponsors] specifically said it didn’t apply to foreigners or aliens. That amendment belongs to the African Americans of this country. It’s their amendment.”
Critics argue it’s the SLLI group that misunderstands the 14th Amendment, and that the pact is plainly unconstitutional. “It’s just an agreement that they enter into that they will all violate the Constitution of the United States together,” said Dellinger.
“It would require a complete rewriting of constitutional jurisprudence to achieve the results these proponents are suggesting,” said Lucas Guttentag, director of the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project.
Immigrant and civil rights groups are confident that any attempt to pass a state law rewriting citizenship laws is patently unconstitutional. They’ve nonetheless joined together to form their own coalition, Americans for Constitutional Citizenship, which is dedicated to protecting birthright citizenship.
“It would be hard to concoct a proposal that is more misguided and contrary to the sacrosanct guarantee of the 14th Amendment,” said Guttentag, but added that it would be folly to think that such laws will have no impact on the real lives of immigrants in the country. “We need to understand the devastating consequences these kinds of laws have on our society, on the cohesiveness and on the culture of America. They should never see the light of day.”
“Indeed, they would drag us back to a time when minorities were not considered equal to whites nor worthy of being citizens,” said Karen Narasaki, whose Asian American Justice Center is also part of the new coalition. “While their language is more carefully chosen than that used a century ago, their motives are no less clear.”
In the 1898 Supreme Court case U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the Court ruled that U.S.-born children of Chinese immigrants were indeed citizens, and that citizenship by birth was required by the 14th Amendment. Immigration restrictionists insist the matter is not yet settled. Rep. John Kavanagh, an Arizona state legislator, has said very plainly that the strategy is to force the Supreme Court to take up the matter again.
“This issue has been raised as a political matter and every instance before in a racial context,” said Dellinger. “And it is always been raised as a divisive issue.”
Kobach has argued that other countries do not grant residents automatic citizenship if they were born in the country. He sees it as evidence the U.S. must change its policies. Others see it as proof of a fundamentally American ethos of equality and unity.
“With the birth of each new child in the U.S., questions of prior legitimacy are forever confined to each generation,” Dellinger said. “Every new girl or boy born in this country is simply, indisputably, an American.”
ACLU Lens: Citizenship At Birth Under the 14th Amendment
01 year ago
Today a group of state legislators announced they will introduce bills in their state legislatures intended to deny Americans the fundamental protections of the 14th Amendment by requiring states to deny standard birth certificates to many U.S. citizen babies born in the U.S. to immigrant parents. The proposed legislation directly contradicts the long-standing 14th Amendment guarantee that all people born in the U.S. and under its jurisdiction are citizens of the U.S. and the state in which they reside and subject to equal protection under the law. If enacted, the bills are unlikely to survive legal scrutiny since the Constitution can only be changed by amendment, not by state or federal statute.
"Who can be a citizen of the United States and enjoy the equal protection of the law should never be subject to the political and discriminatory whims of the day," said Dennis Parker, Director of the ACLU Racial Justice Project.
Lucas Guttentag, Director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said, "It would be hard to concoct a proposal that is more misguided and contrary to the sacrosanct guarantee of the 14th Amendment. Equality under the law for every person born in the United States is one of the Constitution’s central engines of equality and fundamental to our society."
In the News:
- Washington Post: Several States Want Court Ruling on Birthright Citizenship (1/6/2011)
- Wall Street Journal: The Case For Birthright Citizenship (8/11/2010)
- New York Times: Birthright Citizenship Looms as Next Immigration Battle (1/4/2011)
Get more information. Click here for the 14th Amendment hub page.
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(Links updated 1/6/2011.)
The Roots of the GOP’s Birth Citizenship Mania
01 year ago
Republican leaders have spent the last couple of weeks reigniting a 140-year-old constitutional debate: Whether the 14th Amendment should grant citizenship to everyone born inside United States territory. South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsay Graham, who was once considered an immigration ally for Democrats, demanded Senate hearings on the matter first, and party leaders have eagerly chimed in with support.
The most recent GOP big to pile on is House Minority Leader John Boehner, who would likely become speaker if the GOP wins in November. He told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday,
I think that there is a problem. To provide an incentive for illegal immigrants to come here so that their children can be U.S. citizens does in fact draw more people to our country. I do think that it’s time to secure our borders and enforce the law, and to allow this conversation about the 14th Amendment to continue.
So what, exactly, is the “conversation” Boehner wants? And is it at all grounded in constitutional law? Not really, but we’ll explain anyway.
First, here’s what the Republicans are talking about: The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, which was passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified in 1868. The clause comes as the amendment’s first words, stating, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United State and the States wherein they reside.”
Despite the apparently plain meaning of this provision, some critics argue that a close examination of the Congressional Record reveals that lawmakers never intended the provision to apply to the children of undocumented immigrants, even if they are born in the United States.
Michigan Sen. Howard Jacob, a Republican, authored the amendment’s birthright clause. During congressional debate over the clause’s language, Howard said that the provision would not grant citizenship to “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.” Today’s critics have seized on that statement. They claim it is why Congress included the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the citizenship clause. Immigrants today must conform to the laws of the U.S. to be subject to its jurisdiction, they argue, and therefore a person who’s in the country without papers cannot meet this condition and their children cannot claim citizenship by birthright.
Relying on original intent is certainly an important means of interpreting the Constitution, and our courts have long recognized this approach. But mounds of evidence point to a much different interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s original intent than the one drawn by critics of citizenship-by-birthright.
Prior to 1868, U.S. citizenship had been granted by the common law principle of jus soli, meaning place of birth. The record of congressional debates over the 14th Amendment shows that some senators supported the “birthright” provision on the belief that they were simply “constitutionalizing” this long recognized principle.
The same discussion came up during debate over the Civil Rights Act, which Congress also passed in 1866. In addition to the Act’s language calling for equal treatment of black people, it contained language that was almost identical to the birthright clause of the 14th Amendment. As Congress debated the Act, then-House Judiciary Committee Chair James Wilson of Iowa stated that, under the new law, “Every person born within the United States, its territories or districts, whether the parents are citizens or aliens, is a natural-born citizen of the Constitution.” Proponents went on to say that this language would merely codify the common-law tradition that already decided citizenship based on one’s residence rather than any other characteristic or status.
It’s also crucial to remember the larger sweep of history when divining original intent. The citizenship provisions of both the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment were each necessary congressional interventions to overturn the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which held that African Americans were not citizens of the United States and never could be–because they were “a subordinate and inferior class of beings” and the framers never contemplated them as part of the political community.
In 1898, in the case of in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court reviewed the citizenship-by-birth clause and held that a child born in the U.S., but to alien parents, is nevertheless entitled to birthright citizenship. Opponents of “birthright” claim that since Wong Kim Ark’s parents were legal residents, the court never really addressed the key jurisdictional phrase of the citizenship clause.
On the other hand, in more recent cases, such as Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court relied on the common law history in Wong Kim Ark and referred to the jurisdiction language of the 14th Amendment as having a “geographic” meaning. While a Ninth Circuit case called Rabang v. Immigration and Naturalization Service held that the court’s review of the citizenship clause in Wong Kim Ark addressed a very narrow question and cautioned against implying any expansive meaning to the term “subject to the jurisdiction.” Given the limited number of decisions in this area, it’s unclear whether any of these cases will be seen as the final word.
All of which is to say that the tension between America’s democratic ideals and its long history of racism on the question of citizenship lurks behind any discussion of the 14th Amendment. Until its ratification, immigration and naturalization were limited to white persons. Even after its passage, Native American children, though subject to U.S. jurisdiction, were typically declared members of a separate racial and national group and therefore not eligible for citizenship. Asians were for years denied the opportunity to seek citizenship and for a period were barred from even entering the country. Although African Americans gained citizenship through the 14th Amendment, the same Supreme Court that decided Wonk Kim Ark limited their rights with the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v Ferguson.
As America expanded its empire following the Spanish American War, residents of these new American territories asked several courts whether they or their children were now citizens, since they were clearly under U.S. jurisdiction. With few exceptions, the answer was a resounding no. In rejecting these claims, courts often referred to Filipinos, Puerto Ricans and Pacific Islanders in the same racially derogatory terms as they did blacks in the Dred Scott case.
While those sorts of overt, pernicious references to race have disappeared in more recent immigration lawmaking, it is clear that much of today’s anger over birthright citizenship is directed at the rapidly growing Latino population.
It’s not, however, the first time this has come up in modern times. Legislation to restrict the birthright clause was introduced in Congress in 1993, but never made it out of committee. New bills have surfaced in several committees since 2005. Some true believers have concluded that the only way to limit citizenship is though a constitutional amendment, a process that is both lengthy and difficult.
Today’s Republican leadership knows that’s not going to happen, but it doesn’t care. In the end, the 14th Amendment debate they’ve stirred is not about constitutional law; it’s about electoral politics and the 2010 elections.