The Birther movements in America, first challenging President Barak Obama’s birthright to be president, and now challenging Senator Ted Cruz’s right to sit in the oval office in the White House, will hopefully be resolved once and for all by the U.S. Supreme Court. It is a subject I first addressed and discuss at length in my latest book Custom Maid Revolution.
The lawsuit Schwartz v. Senator Ted Cruz, filed by a Texas lawyer to address the question before the November 2016 presidential election, does raise a legitimate question about what the intent of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution was when it became the law of the land.
Birthright citizenship, the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, was a hot button campaign issue in 2008, when Obama ran for president, brought to the forefront by the Tea Party movement, questioning his “American” credentials because of his Kenyan father even though he was born in Hawaii to an American citizen mother. The Tea Party, that got Senator Ted Cruz elected to the U.S. Senate, wants the 14th Amendment renounced and made it a major campaign issue during the 2010 midterm elections. In other words, U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants would no longer automatically qualify for citizenship.
Senator Ted Cruz was born in Canada to an American citizen parent and was a dual citizen, American and Canadian, until he renounced his Canadian citizenship to run for political office in America.
The 14th Amendment declares: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
Congress inserted the citizenship clause in the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, to overrule the Dred Scott decision in 1857, in which the Supreme Court held that even free blacks were not citizens. Those who want to change the law argue that the purpose of the amendment was solely to ensure that newly freed black slaves received all the rights of other Americans.
America is one of only 30 countries that grants automatic citizenship to practically anyone who happens to be born there. The overwhelming majority of nations follow the Latin concept of jus sanguinis – right of blood – in which the citizenship of the parent governs the citizenship of their children. The concept, like Latin, has no place or relevance in the 21st-century.
What does citizenship and belonging mean today? Children born, raised, educated and living in America, or any country for that matter, willing to serve in its military are citizens of America because that is their country of origin and home. They are citizens. The fact that their non-citizen parents entered America legally or illegally, to make a better life for their children, does not take that constitutional birthright away. To do so serves no constructive purpose. It is destructive and disruptive for the individuals, their families and the country.
What benefit is there to America to dispose of people it bore, bred and educated who are upstanding taxpayers – and citizens? These are the kind of people who helped make America the great nation it is. Why self-destruct by discarding one of America’s greatest ingredients?
Whether a person born to an American parent in a foreign country is a citizen qualified to seek the presidency is another question the Supreme Court will hopefully answer for all American voting citizens.