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While I'm quite sympathetic to your position, it's harder to be sympathetic to your mother and other people like her. She knowingly and willingly broke the law of a country that was kind enough to let her in. She is, in a quite literal sense, a criminal. Ultimately, laws only work if they are enforced. All Trump is planning to do is actually enforce rules that most of the political class (claim to) agree with.
It's about time that the US got rid of birth right citizenship too. It's a bizarre custom which seems to only exist in the Americas for some reason. Like the right of a asylum, it's a gigantic moral hazard. If you want people to obey the laws of your country, you shouldn't reward them for breaking those laws.
While I'm grumbling, the disingenuous conflation of 'immigrants' and 'illegal immigrants' is also very frustrating. Conflating the two is like conflating renters with squatters or shoplifters with customers. Ditto for euphemisms like 'undocumented immigrants' (did they leave their visas at the hotel?) or 'irregular migrants' (A North Korean migrant is irregular, a Mexican who snuck is just a regular criminal).
I don't think most of the political class agree with every variation on retroactive enforcement, especially when it comes to children that grew up here.
And I think this can be earnestly true even in such cases where an individual believes that we should be stricter in enforcement prospectively.
Sometimes it takes time for the criminal to be apprehended, but if the laws which the criminal is said to have broken, were already in force when the crime is said to have been committed, there is no "retroactivity".
What I mean is that the ruling mentioned appears to postdate the actions under question.
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Do you mind justifying this statement more? Here's the standard defense for birthright citizenship: two kids who grew up in the same neighborhood and are equally connected to their surrounding community, equally adapted to the local culture, etc. should not be treated differently under the law just because of who their parents are. Not doing this is extremely inegalitarian---it's not about "rewarding" the parents, it's about not capriciously punishing the kids for something they have no responsibility for or control over.
Given all this, it might even be justified to claim that it's bizarre that it doesn't exist in other countries (particularly European ones) that pretend to buy into classical-liberal ideals. This is in fact my goto counterargument when the inevitable America-bashing discussions start with European or progressive colleagues.
What does this have to do with foreigners getting on airplanes while pregnant in order to secure a US passport by technicality?
Life is inegalitarian, and that isn't going to be fixed any time soon. Make the case that it is bad on its own merits, or don't.
Bad things happening to you need not be punishment.
And you don't care about the actual citizens being punished, who also have done nothing wrong and do not deserve to have their citizenship devalued as it has been.
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Well as I said, it's a giant moral hazard. If you grant any child born on US soil citizenship, then you allow the parents to stay to look after the child, then you incentivise parents to come to your country illegally. You reward criminals instead of punishing them, which incentivises the crime. The appropriate thing for parents who give birth abroad to do is to go back to their home country, where all three members of the family have citizenship. That's what the rest of the world does and it works absolutely fine. Nobody thinks there's any wrong being done when foreign tourists take their newborn home rather than using them as a tool to stay in a country they are not allowed to be in.
Indeed, the justification you gave conveniently skips the decade or so when the parents could have returned to their home country. There is zero reason for a newborn to stay in a foreign country, even if he was born there. He's not losing any emotional ties or severing any relationships. Indeed, that justification only works if a country has de facto open borders and gives illegal immigrants all of the benefits of legal residence in spite of their crimes. And well, we don't need to speculate about what happens when a country does that.
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Except they're not equally connected to the surrounding community, and cannot be, because one of those connections — perhaps the most important connection — is ties of blood, of kinship. This is something I'd say most people in history, from ancient Athens to modern Dubai, have understood well. "Nation" and "state" are not synonyms, and their conflation by many modern people reduces our grasp on the relevant concept spaces.
I think you're smuggling in an assumption here: that the kids in question in some sense deserve or are entitled to citizenship, such that it constitutes a "punishment" for them to be deprived of it. Does a club "punish" everyone to whom it fails to grant membership?
Except that the US as a country has specifically rejected that blood and kinship ties are important since it's founding---I feel like I repeat this so much here but no one ever seems to remember "All men are created equal". This is what enlightenment, classical liberal, or whatever you call it values means! And yes, they are drastically different from any values anyone had before the 1700's---this is why the enlightenment was such a big deal and why we think of older civilizations as morally hopeless and barbaric. We definitely don't think of places like Dubai that are blatantly not onboard as reasonable.
It's also funny to get this reply when I've just had a bunch of discussions here about the prevalence of explicitly racialist values on the Motte. @Felagund, Let's see how much the peanut gallery supports this.
All men are created equal, not all men are created American.
Those other, non-Americans can go on being equal somewhere else.
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When the founders said that all men were created equal, what they were endorsing was an equality before the law, and a lack of hegemony. In particular, they were opposed to the deprivation of the traditional English rights from the American colonies, which they saw as antithetical to living freely, and were also opposed to titles and legal birthrights and so forth, supporting rather a republican form of government. If I remember rightly, they considered adding a prohibition on titles to the Constitution. (Yes, all this seems incompatible with slavery, but there's nothing forcing individuals to be consistent.)
So yes, I do think that Dubai and similar, where there is a large labor class with diminished rights would be contrary to American values, even if, given slavery, something more extreme than that already existed. (And even if I personally wouldn't be all that opposed to one existing, consensually of course, in the United States on economic grounds.) And so I do not think it would be American for there to be a class of permanent residents without other allegiance who are not citizens.
In practice, this would seem to mean that having a de facto class of people without birthright citizenship living out their lives in the country for generations would be contrary to American values. This seems to be what @atokenliberal6D_4 thinks removing birthright citizenship would be like.
At the same time, this vision does not seem to require that those with a more tenuous connection be granted the same affordances. So if lack of birthright citizenship were followed by immediate deportation, that doesn't seem to be obviously in conflict to me. An equality among men does not grant them a right to your sovereign territory, and as long as you are being consistent in not setting up a two-tier citizenship, this does not seem contrary to founding principles. I imagine this is what @Capital_Room would endorse.
But that's merely trying to spin out a philosophy from the declaration. The U.S. Constitution, following the abolition of slavery, acquired the 14th amendment, saying, among others,
This seems designed to, among other things, overturn the effects the infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that people of African descent could not be citizens (and which Lincoln, along with many others, thought was wrongly decided).
I imagine @Capital_Room would lean on the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause, which, from looking online, was originally meant to be excluding foreign nationals and some Indians (cf. "Indians not taxed") from what is under discussion here.
My reading of this would seem to allow for broader exceptions to birthright citizenship than currently are in place. But I'll also note that, contra @Capital_Room this does not seem to be about blood or an ethnic Nation, as this was deliberately to bring in people (Blacks) who were, to that point, excluded from citizenship based on blood.
So, I suppose, I think both of you have points?
Now I want to read Dred Scott and Lincoln on these matters some time. That would be fun.
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A lot of things violate equality or hurt the kids other than just saying the kids can't be citizens. What if one kid has a car given to him by his parents, but another kids had parents who stole a car and gave it to him? Should we refuse to confiscate the car and return it to its owner on the grounds that the kid didn't commit the theft and taking it away makes the kids in the two families unequal? What if one set of parents is just ordinary criminals, should we refuse to send them to jail for bank robbery because doing so impacts the lfe of the innocent kid?
If you don't "capriciously punish" the kids, you create a moral hazard that encourages parents to illegally immigrate (or steal cars, or rob banks).
(@4bpp too) Values come in conflict a lot and you need to make trade offs. The cost of allowing theft for sake of children to be ok is much more than that of allowing birthright citizenship. The same holds for the massive wealth distribution equalizing inheritances would require (I think this is another related example people bring up a lot). In particular, the anchor baby problem has been and can still be mitigated in a much more morally acceptable way by tightening border security than by outright getting rid of birthright citizenship---if you make the moral hazard hard enough to actually take advantage of, it'll happen infrequently enough that the cost is an acceptable trade-off, I think for almost everyone's relative weightings of the values. (For full disclosure, I weight the values in way that, for example, much more dramatic redistribution of inheritances than we have today would be a good idea, but I'm trying to make sure this argument works even if you weight differently).
By the way, it's also important to emphasize that most people's morality is actually ok with some level of theft for the sake of children in extreme circumstances---Jean Valjean is the hero of the story after all.
I don't think this is quite what Les Miserables is doing. The book doesn't spend all that much time downplaying his crimes and so forth; rather, it presents him as, at least after some time in prison, a hardened criminal redeemed only by the mercy of the bishop, and who becomes afterward a great man. To be fair though, stealing bread there was to give maximal sympathy, so I don't know that I disagree with your overall point as to what you can draw from that, just, I don't think that his crime was minor is really very related to him being the hero. It's probably closer to a reflection on the legal system as a whole, and so, if anything, would reflect more on Javert than Valjean, even though Javert was, to the best of my recollection, entirely uninvolved.
It's a great book.
Something that may appeal to a few people on this forum is that Thomas Aquinas allowed for theft, or well, considered it not theft, in such extreme cases. This is not unique to him either; there are Protestant authors that say the same, as well as political philosophers like Locke.
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There is a model of anchor babies that would see them as comparable to a hostage situation: the parent essentially says "let me stay here (too), or else this innocent child suffers". Do you also believe in a general moral obligation to yield to hostage takers if the hostage can't be saved otherwise, the argument that this encourages more hostage-taking notwithstanding?
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