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JUSTICE
BRENNAN'S FOOTNOTE GAVE US ANCHOR BABIES
By Ann Coulter
AnnCoulter.com
Democrats act as if the right to run across the border when
you're 8 1/2 months pregnant, give birth in a U.S. hospital and then immediately
start collecting welfare was exactly what our forebears had in mind, a sacred
constitutional right, as old as the 14th Amendment itself.
The louder
liberals talk about some ancient constitutional right, the surer you should be
that it was invented in the last few decades.
In fact, this alleged
right derives only from a footnote slyly slipped into a Supreme Court opinion by
Justice Brennan in 1982. You might say it snuck in when no one was looking, and
now we have to let it stay.
The 14th Amendment was added after the Civil
War in order to overrule the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, which had held
that black slaves were not citizens of the United States. The precise purpose of
the amendment was to stop sleazy Southern states from denying citizenship rights
to newly freed slaves -- many of whom had roots in this country longer than a
lot of white people.
The amendment guaranteed that freed slaves would
have all the privileges of citizenship by providing: "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
drafters of the 14th amendment had no intention of conferring citizenship on the
children of aliens who happened to be born in the U.S. (For my younger readers,
back in those days, people cleaned their own houses and raised their own kids.)
Inasmuch as America was not the massive welfare state operating as a
magnet for malingerers, frauds and cheats that it is today, it's amazing the
drafters even considered the amendment's effect on the children of aliens.
But they did.
The very author of the citizenship clause, Sen. Jacob
Howard of Michigan, expressly said: "This will not, of course, include persons
born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families
of ambassadors or foreign ministers."
In the 1884 case Elk v. Wilkins,
the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not even confer citizenship
on Indians -- because they were subject to tribal jurisdiction, not U.S.
jurisdiction.
For a hundred years, that was how it stood, with only one
case adding the caveat that children born to legal permanent residents of
the U.S., gainfully employed, and who were not employed by a foreign government
would also be deemed citizens under the 14th Amendment. (United States v. Wong
Kim Ark, 1898.)
And then, out of the blue in 1982, Justice Brennan
slipped a footnote into his 5-4 opinion in Plyler v. Doe, asserting that "no
plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment 'jurisdiction' can be
drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and
resident aliens whose entry was unlawful." (Other than the part about one being
lawful and the other not.)
Brennan's authority for this lunatic
statement was that it appeared in a 1912 book written by Clement L. Bouve. (Yes,
the Clement L. Bouve -- the one you've heard so much about over the
years.) Bouve was not a senator, not an elected official, certainly not a judge
-- just some guy who wrote a book.
So on one hand we have the history,
the objective, the author's intent and 100 years of history of the 14th
Amendment, which says that the 14th Amendment does not confer citizenship on
children born to illegal immigrants.
On the other hand, we have a random
outburst by some guy named Clement -- who, I'm guessing, was too cheap to hire
an American housekeeper.
Any half-wit, including Clement L. Bouve, could
conjure up a raft of such "plausible distinction(s)" before breakfast. Among
them: Legal immigrants have been checked for subversive ties, contagious
diseases, and have some qualification to be here other than "lives within
walking distance."
But most important, Americans have a right to decide,
as the people of other countries do, who becomes a citizen.
Combine
Justice Brennan's footnote with America's ludicrously generous welfare policies,
and you end up with a bankrupt country.
Consider the story of one family
of illegal immigrants described in the Spring 2005 Journal of American
Physicians and Surgeons:
"Cristobal Silverio came illegally from
Oxtotilan, Mexico, in 1997 and brought his wife Felipa, plus three children aged
19, 12 and 8. Felipa ... gave birth to a new daughter, her anchor baby, named
Flor. Flor was premature, spent three months in the neonatal incubator, and cost
San Joaquin Hospital more than $300,000. Meanwhile, (Felipa's 19-year-old
daughter) Lourdes plus her illegal alien husband produced their own anchor baby,
Esmeralda. Grandma Felipa created a second anchor baby, Cristian. ... The two
Silverio anchor babies generate $1,000 per month in public welfare funding. Flor
gets $600 per month for asthma. Healthy Cristian gets $400. Cristobal and Felipa
last year earned $18,000 picking fruit. Flor and Cristian were paid $12,000 for
being anchor babies."
In the Silverios' munificent new hometown of
Stockton, Calif., 70 percent of the 2,300 babies born in 2003 in the San Joaquin
General Hospital were anchor babies. As of this month, Stockton is $23 million
in the hole.
It's bad enough to be governed by 5-4 decisions written by
liberal judicial activists. In the case of "anchor babies," America is being
governed by Brennan's 1982 footnote.
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