ABSTRACT
The Fourteenth Amendment was passed after the Civil War in an attempt to stop Southern states denying their newly freed slaves the full rights of citizens. A whole minor industry seems to have been created by those twenty-eight words added to the US Constitution. One survey of new Hispanic mothers in California border hospitals found that 15 percent had crossed the border specifically to give birth, of whom a quarter said that their motive was to ensure US citizenship for their child. A series of institutional accidents, of which birthright citizenship is just one, has essentially robbed Americans of the power to determine who, and how many, can enter their national family, make claims on it … and exert power over it. “Immigrants are revitalizing American cities,” say the immigration enthusiasts—genuinely unaware, it seems, that they are in effect expressing coded horror at the earlier effects of the great black migration from the rural South to the industrial urban North.
