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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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