By Steve Byas

Unless Congress acts to eliminate the present government policy that allows citizenship for the children of illegal aliens, all efforts to lessen the bad effects of illegal immigration are doomed to failure.

Present U.S. law asserts that any person born inside the borders of the United States is a citizen of the United States. But, that can be changed at any time by an act of Congress, which has plenary power in this area. It is an unfortunate myth that the 14th Amendment stipulates that all persons born in the U.S.A. are automatically citizens.

This misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment allows individuals to enter the country illegally, and have a child, who is then declared a U.S. citizen. A pregnant woman could literally drive across the border from Mexico, enter a hospital in San Diego, Laredo, or any other city near the border, and have a child, who is then considered a natural-born citizen of the United States.

Once an illegal alien has a child born on American soil, that child becomes an "anchor baby." This anchor baby is then the parents' ticket to legal status. The babies, considered U.S. citizens, are then entitled under U.S. law to a cornucopia of welfare benefits. So, while the law bars illegal aliens from most government assistance, drawn from the pocketbooks of American taxpayers, the illegal's child has full legal status to draw all such benefits.

A proper understanding of the 14th Amendment requires an examination of the clear wording of the amendment, the historical context in which the amendment was drafted, and the intent of the framers, as expressed during the legislative debate and discussion on the amendment in 1866. It is also helpful to examine how the amendment was interpreted in the first few years after its adoption, before modern liberalism warped that interpretation, like it has so much of the rest of the Constitution.

The amendment states, "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." The phrase "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof," has, of course, been ignored by those promoting the concept of Open Borders. Clearly, the framers of the 14th Amendment intended that only children born "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," that is, of the United States, are considered natural-born citizens. This would, by the clear wording of the amendment, not include the children of illegal aliens (or legal aliens, for that matter), because they are under the jurisdiction of foreign governments.

Before the War Between the States, there was no national definition of citizenship apart from citizenship of one of the states of the United States. When some in the victorious Union government wanted to prosecute Confederate President Jefferson Davis for treason, they had a problem. Only a citizen can commit treason, and Davis contended that he ceased to be a U.S. citizen when his state of Mississippi seceded from the Union. Not willing to place the issue over which the war was fought before federal judges who might actually read the Constitution as it was written, they eventually just released Davis.

The more pressing issue, requiring a national definition of citizenship, was the presence of millions of freed Blacks. What was their legal status? Many northern members of Congress expressed concern that southern state governments would never regard the former slaves as citizens. The Dred Scott v. Sanford decision of 1857 had flatly decreed that slaves, and their descendants, were not citizens of the United States. To address these two issues, the Congress opted to amend the Constitution with the 14th Amendment, conferring citizenship on millions of former slaves on the basis that they had been born in the United States. Without the Civil War and the resulting collapse of slavery, the 14th Amendment would have never been adopted. The purpose was clearly to grant citizenship to former slaves, not the children of foreign citizens, legal or illegal.

Senator Jacob Merritt Howard of Michigan, an author of the 14th Amendment, said during the discussions over the effects of the amendment, "This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners."

Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin expressed concern as to how the amendment would affect the citizenship status of American Indians, because he did not want the amendment's wording to include them. Howard assured Doolittle that the 14th Amendment did not make all American Indians citizens of the United States. His response is instructive as to the real meaning of the words, "under the jurisdiction of the United States," because the members of Indian tribes born in America were certainly born inside the borders of the United States.

"Indians born within the limits of the United States, and who maintain their tribal relations, are not, in the sense of this amendment, born subject to the jurisdiction of the United States," Howard responded. "They are regarded, and always have been in our legislation and jurisprudence, as being quasi-foreign nations."

While some American Indians did become American citizens prior to the 20th century, it was not until 1924 that an act of Congress granted citizenship to all remaining non-citizen Indians. It strains credulity to believe that American Indians, whose ancestors had lived within the borders of the United States for centuries before the first English settlements and the founding of the American republic, were not considered citizens under the terms of the 14th Amendment, but children of illegal aliens are considered natural born citizens!

If the Indians were considered part of "quasi-foreign nations,"and thus not included in the wording of the 14th Amendment, it is reasonable to conclude that the children of illegal aliens are likewise excluded.

Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland assured Senator Doolittle that the amendment was only achieving the same result as the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which stated, "That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens."

For years, the clear intent of the 14th Amendment to exclude certain individuals born inside the borders of the United States from citizenship, was little questioned. In 1872, the California Supreme Court indicated that it clearly understood the intent of the 14th Amendment through its ruling in the case, Van Valkenburg v. Brown. It declared that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was "to confer the status of citizenship upon a numerous class of persons domiciled within the limits of the United States who could not be brought within operation of the naturalization laws . . . whose birth, though native, at the same time left them without citizenship. Such persons were not white persons but in the main were of African blood, who had been held in slavery in this country."

The California High Court said that, while the 13th Amendment had freed these persons of "African blood," it had nonetheless "left them under an insuperable bar as to citizenship; and it was mainly to remedy this condition that the 14th Amendment was adopted."

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled similarly in an 1884 case involving an Indian named John Elk. Elk desired U.S. citizenship, basing his claim upon his having been born within the borders of the United States. They denied Elk's claim, stating that, although Indians were in a "geographic sense born in the United States," they are "no more born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof," within the meaning of the citizenship clause, "than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government."

Clearly, no constitutional basis exists for granting citizenship to the children of foreigners born on U.S. soil. It is additionally obvious that giving citizenship to the offspring of persons whose first act in the country was to disobey our laws is not good public policy. It is, in the words of conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan, a "path to national suicide."

Congress should fulfill its constitutional duty to defend the nation against this invasion of illegal aliens and pass a law which clearly declares that no person is a citizen of the United States, unless that person is the child of a U.S. citizen. Until that is done, the problem will remain chronic, systemic, unsolvable, and ultimately fatal to the survival of the United States as a constitutional republic.