In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

166 As I complete this book, the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is under attack. Legislators and activists at the state and federal levels are organizing to strategize ways to legislatively mandate a reinterpretation or revision of its guarantees of birth-right citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in the wake of the Civil War, in 1868, guaranteed equal protection under the law as well as birthright citizenship, a constitutional amendment deemed necessary because previously slaves and their descendants had been denied citizenship, a practice upheld by Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Advocates for revocation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees cite some other nations’ granting of citizenship based on jus sanguinis, citizenship by right of blood, or on lineage to citizens, versus jus solis, citizenship based on place of birth (see Knight 2005). They argue that citizenship should be granted only to the children of citizens, not on the basis of birth within the nation’s borders. Jus sanguinis has been deeply criticized in some of the European states where it is law for allowing generations of people born in a country to never achieve the full rights of citizenship and also as a discriminatory process that reproduces ethnic homogeneity and defies contemporary pluralism. Anxieties in the United States about porous borders and porous bodies have reached new heights. Immediately following the midterm elections in 2010, Republicans vowed to step up enforcement on the border and to introduce immigration-reform legislation, promising to use their House majority to reshuffle membership in the subcommittee on immigration (Martin 2010). The sum total of federal legislative efforts since the 2008 elections were a speech by President Barack Obama saying he looked forward to seeing immigration-reform Epilogue Epilogue 167 legislation on his desk (with little reference to how that might occur) and a plan by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to bundle the defenseauthorization bill with the DREAM Act, which would have allowed certain foreign-born, undocumented graduates of U.S. high schools to earn conditional permanent residency by meeting educational or military-service requirements, a plan that died before even coming up for debate. In the meantime, fueled by economic anxieties, Tea Party activism, and a rise in xenophobic popular discourse, state legislatures have been busily debating proposals to “fix” immigration law amid a purported federal unwillingness or inability to address immigration issues. The most renowned example of such legislation is SB 1070, the “Papers Please” law in Arizona, a punitive act allowing law-enforcement officials to proactively question the immigration status of individuals. Receiving less of an uproar than SB1070 have been the multiple efforts by some of the same legislators, and others, to amend the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. Russell Pearce, Republican state senator in Arizona, who proposed SB 1070 and also a bill to ban ethnic studies in the state, introduced in Arizona legislation that would deny state citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants. Pearce belongs to a coalition of lawmakers, the Fourteenth Amendment Citizens Model Committee, who plan to introduce similar legislation in other states and also, were they to have the numbers of votes needed in the U.S. Congress, to call for a constitutional convention to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment at the federal level. This effort has been supported by, among others, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who said on cable television, “People come here to have babies, they come here to drop a child, it’s called ‘drop and leave’” (Fox News, July 29, 2010). The Fourteenth Amendment, arguably, established national citizenship. Rather than “citizens,” the Constitution refers to the “people” of the United States, and it has historically been interpreted to apply to all those living within the borders of the nation. Supreme Court precedent in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) established that a child of foreign nationals (excluding diplomats stationed in the United States) enjoys birthright status as granted in the Fourteenth Amendment, irrespective of the citizenship of his or her parents, and Plyler v. Doe (1982) held that the children of undocumented immigrants are “persons” in “all ordinary senses of the term” and thus eligible for all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. It is unlikely that Pearce and his allies will be able to marshal the majority they need in both chambers of congress to consider a change to the Constitution, much less convoke the 75 percent of states they would need [18.191...

Share