Tykes on Trikes without Rights

 

Tykes on Trikes without Rights

“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.” 

Section 1, 14th Amendment

"Being a citizen in our country is a privilege, not a right. And Donald Trump is going to have everyone in this country who deserves to be here who is a citizen.” 

AG Pam Bondi, who must have flunked her Constitutional Law class.

“Birthright—that’s a big one… We think we have very good grounds.” 

 Trump on January 20, 2025 as he signed an Executive Order questioning birthrights of children born in the US of non-US citizens

I’ve been a practicing lawyer for the vast majority of my adult life. My UCLA Law School classmates and I were literally fed on notions of tolerance, equality and the goal of a level playing field for all in the eyes of the law. The United States was the global model for democracy in action, proving, we believed, that even one of the most heterogeneous and large populations could prosper under philosophical democracy, despite the legal struggles that constantly redefined our nation. Indeed, our post-WWII growth into the most powerful and economically successful nation on Earth seemed to confirm that assumption. And even as flawed as it is – our Constitution is the most difficult to amend among all the democracies in the world – we admired a document that was artfully planted a quarter of a millenium ago. Slavery was an unforgivable acknowledgement in the original Constitution (ultimately corrected), yet in a recent UN vote to decry slave trafficking in the modern era, the United States was one of only three nations to vote against that UN measure. Have we really changed that much?

I have always believed that our quality of life, our standard of living and our tradition of upward mobility, were direct and immediate results of that constitutional foundation. But today, upward mobility is relegated to the history books, our government openly prosecutes institutions focused on expanding opportunity, our military has denigrated women and racial minorities as second class soldiers, the legal system has been profoundly slanted in favor of mega-corporations and super-rich individuals (from tax cuts to deregulation to rewarding political loyalists with lucrative government contracts and privileges), as affordability has pushed post-secondary education and homeownership out of reach for a rapidly increasing number of Americans.

For the first time in our nation’s history, rising generations expect to do worse than the generations that preceded them. For those seeking correlations between the well being of American citizens, the big standout is that the more we gravitate toward one-man autocracy, the wider the disparity between rich and poor and the greater the disenfranchisement of middle- and lower-income Americans. America is proving what we always believed: autocracy assures success only for a privileged elite. The rest are expendable.

What does any of this have to do with birthright citizenship? Well, in an era of deporting a huge body of hard-working undocumented residents, where isolationist forces seek to erect massive trade barriers with the rest of the world, as we declare war without congressional approval, we are witnessing the push-pull of high inflation, fewer job opportunities, falling productivity and a dramatic plunge in our aggregate well-being. According to recent polls, we are ranked a shoddy 23rd on the global happiness index. We are shoving both workers and consumers out the door, such that our citizen birthrate (children per child-bearing aged couples) is down to 1.61… while we would need a birthrate of 2.1 simply to replace our citizens. Echoes of “they shall not replace us” echo across seeming conservative cohorts, and the notion of white Christian nationalism has become a rallying cry to the far right… notwithstanding the devastating impact of that belief even to our economy.

To put is very simply, this nation, built on immigrants entering our great nation to build and grow in what used to be known as the land of opportunity, cannot prosper either in an autocracy or without a serious growth in our population. As we ship cadres of workers and consumers out of the country, the vast majority of Americans suffer. We cannot improve our lot by shifting mountains of work and human productivity to AI-driven robots. Only the owners of those robots will generate benefits from that massive savings in labor costs. But diversity is our new “enemy,” and figuring out how to cull the voter roles, crushing paths to productive immigrants to citizenship, denaturalizing citizens where we can… and preventing a huge historical source of new citizens, constitutionally protected, from even achieving that status.

As Mark Walsh, writing for the March 26th edition of the Journal of the American Bar Association (of which I am a member), writes about the challenge to Trump’s Executive Order against birthright citizenship, now pending before the US Supreme Court. Walsh begins noting the government’s position: “The order declares that a person born in the U.S. is not subject to its jurisdiction and thus is not a citizen by birth under two circumstances: When the child’s mother is unlawfully present in the United States; or when the mother’s presence here at the time of birth is lawful but temporary, such as on a student, tourist or work visa. Both circumstances also require that the father not be a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of the birth….

“‘Automatic citizenship for children of illegal aliens provides a powerful incentive for illegal migration,’ U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer says in the administration’s main brief in Trump v. Barbara, which will be argued Wednesday. ‘Such children become citizens upon birth here, and their illegal-alien parents often promptly assert that citizenship to impede their own removal.’

“The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause ‘was adopted to grant citizenship to freed slaves and their children—not to children of temporarily present aliens or illegal aliens,’ Sauer says in the brief. ‘The clause’s text, its original meaning and history, and this court’s cases confirm that the clause extends citizenship only to those who are completely subject to the United States’ political jurisdiction—in other words, to people who owe ‘direct and immediate allegiance’ to the nation and may claim its protection.’… Advocates for the class of young challengers say the Trump order would have severe consequences for any child born after Feb. 19, 2025, the order’s effective date that has, for now, been forestalled by litigation.” Walsh also presents the opposing view:

“Advocates for the class of young challengers say the Trump order would have severe consequences for any child born after Feb. 19, 2025, the order’s effective date that has, for now, been forestalled by litigation… ‘For them, what it means is being stripped of the right of U.S. citizenship, being exposed to the terror of—for their families—arrest, detention and deportation,’ says Cody Wofsy, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project, which represents the plaintiffs. ‘It means potentially rendering them stateless. … And then as they grow up, it’s going to mean excluding them from the only country that they’ve ever known.’

“The challengers say the language of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause—'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’—reaffirmed a centuries-old, common-law tradition of citizenship by virtue of birth, rather than parentage.” Indeed, the litany of Supreme Court cases has affirmed this view with no sign of limiting or reversing this constitutional mandate.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am tired of a minority of ultra-rightwing zealots continuing to engage in self-inflicting degradations to our economy and our core American values.