The 14th Amendment and why we should care

There are those who wish to argue for arguments sake and find a scapegoat for all that they find wrong in their own little corner of the world. Frequently that scapegoat tends to be what we would call the "other" or someone who isn't like us. Since our nation's founding certain groups found themselves excluded from the political process and thus the scapegoat other.

At the founding our nation refused, at least until the 1920s, to recognize Native American Peoples as citizens in any real and mean sense. The early Americans began to break and modify treaties with the Natives at will as they pushed the tribes out of their way as we began our westward migration to fulfill what would become to be termed our manifest destiny.

African slaves found themselves counted as 3/5ths of a person until our nation began to undo the institution of slavery and set about incorporating the former slaves into the brotherhood of Americans, which they set out to do with the 13th-15th amendments to our constitution.

Following that the other label fell upon, the Chinese, Italian, Irish and Haitian immigrants in their turn. Americans found themselves in tough times and many blamed their problems or the ills of society on these groups and create a scapegoat so that they may try to find themselves blameless for their current troubles.

Today Mexicans find themselves labeled as the other. Though the U.S. has a sizable Latino population, with people from all over the Latin American world integrating themselves into our society, Mexicans are often blamed for anything someone might find wrong with society. Even though as recent as 40 years ago Mexican laborers were welcomed into the country under programs such as the Bracero program and allowed to pursue their own version of the American dream, Latinos in general find themselves under greater scrutiny as our political discourse trends toward divisive and ofttimes hurtful directions.

Many people point to the 14th Amendment as the root of the problem, specifically the portion which defines citizenship as persons born in the United States or subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Their argument is that this encourages people to come into our nation to have their children and use them to try gaining their own citizenship. The so called Anchor Babies. This is a bit of a fallacy, since the process to gain citizenship in this manner is slow and time consuming, there is still a great risk of a family being deported or separated as the undocumented parents are deported while the child who is a citizen moves in with the relatives. One reason the idea of Anchor baby syndrome is a fallacy is that if it were true then the hospitals who operate in the border communities on the US side would have account to almost all births when compared to their counterparts in Mexico. Since those families who already live on the border would have the least to travel to avail themselves of opportunity to give birth their children in the US. I can't find one hospital in San Diego, or Laredo, El Peso that could produce any data to support the anchor baby claim.

There many great why we should not do anything to alter the meaning of the 14th Amendment. First is to honor the spirit of the Amendment. The writers of the Amendment sought to undo Dred Scott and ensure that the several states and their legislatures would not have the opportunity come up with their own definitions on who it would or would not consider a citizen. Many states in the Deep South passed the so-called Black Codes which reduced the freedmen into a status little better than the slavery from which they were emancipated. Congress along with the States amended the Constitution in such a way where citizenship was defined and could be no longer something nebulous and subject to interpretation. The 14th Amendment made it clear that Citizenship was a right of birth and not something open to interpretation.

Detractors point out that few other countries consider citizenship a birthright as evidence to support their own arguments as to why the 14th Amendment should be changed. America has her own history precisely because we didn't do what everyone else does. We are the first nation to truly make a pact with each other to pursue self governance and not have ones government organs foisted upon her like the rest of the world It is this reason above all why we should defiend the 14th Amendment from attack.