NDN in the News - The Economist - Amending the Amendment: A Challenge to an American Birthright

NDN President Simon Rosenberg was featured recently in a piece in The Economist wrote on the GOP's assault on the 14th Amendment. The full story can be seen HERE:

The article does a great job of summarizing and providing hard facts on all of the recent developments in this ongoing story.

In July Lindsey Graham, a moderate Republican senator, suggested amending the amendment to fight the “drop and leave” tactic of visiting America to give birth. Louie Gohmert, a Texas congressman, had earlier warned of enemies sending mothers-to-be to America to have their babies who could then be “raised and coddled as future terrorists” before being sent back.

Only about a sixth of the world’s nations practice birthright citizenship. The United States originally adopted it to end slavery, by making a citizen anyone born in the country and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”—a clause then meant to exclude sovereign Native-American tribes, and still used to exempt children of foreign diplomats. In 1982 the Supreme Court ruled that people who had entered America illegally also met the “subject to the jurisdiction” standard. A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Centre found that 8% of births in America are to illegal immigrants.

Simon, provides some much needed historical context on exactly what the Republican party is attempting to do.

Yet their rivals counter that even tweaking the policy could create an underclass of stateless youths.

“They’re saying this is about narrow, small things, but this is revisiting the civil war,” says Simon Rosenberg, the director of NDN, an advocacy group. “This is settled law that righted the most egregious wrong in our constitution.”

We will continue to follow this story closely as it continues to develop.