Get your Government hands off of my Constitution!

So it seems that this notion of repealing the 14th Amendment from the United States Constitution is simply not going away anytime soon. Just a few weeks ago, this whole idea was coming from the obcure fringe ultra right wingnuts. I thought that this idea was so ridiculous I discounted it at first. Now we are hearing from this almost daily on the news, in the blogosphere and at town halls across the country.

Even more troubling, is that according to a recent poll, 49% of Americans support repealing birthright citizenship which is the cornerstone of the 14th Amendment.

I don't think people realize the ramifications of what that could mean to the nation if such a plot were ever to come to fruition. I don't think people understand that when the Republican Party of the 19th century first enacted the 14th Amendment, it was considered vital for equality, and it is the mechanism that allows the Federal Government to enforce the Bill of Rights.
As I stated in my previous post, the framers of the 14th Amendment were wise to incorporate Birthright citizenship into the constitution. It was and still imperative that all people born in this country enjoy the life,liberty and pursuit of hapiness guarenteed under the constitution regardless of any type of discrimination of lack of political popularity. Sometimes things in our Constitution are not politically popular - like Miranda Rights, Freedom of Religion (in the New York mosque incident.) and now Birthright Citizenship. However, politically popular or not, they are still right and just and have navigated our country for decades. That is part of our "American Exceptionalism" that the right always accuses the left of not believing in. And it's even more interesting that it is the "right" that always claims to be strict constitutionalists, but in this political environment, they seem to be going after Amendment after Amendent they wish to repeal.

I know that the arguement right now isn't over black people with regards to the 14th Amendment discussion. But this was the Amendments main intent and it has implications that could affect all of us. It was important and still is important that politicts and popular opinion are kept out of citizenship issues. Just 10 years before the 14th Amendment was enacted, it was declared that black people could never be citizens. And that was socially and politically popular then and maybe one day for another group of minorities. Granting automatic citizenship at birth keeps the politics out of the equation. This is smart policy.

What would happen, if Birthright Citizenship was no longer your Birthright?
We don't know what the political landscape will look like in the future. And without Birthright Citizenship, who will decide who is a citizen and who is not?
What beaurocracy or litmus test might be required to become a citizen?
What happens if we stop granting citizenship to people simply because they are Muslim, or have Middle-Eastern heritage? What would happen if children of gay parents were no longer citizens? Don't think that's possible? Well who knows, like I said we don't know what popular opinion will look like in the future and this is why we have a Constitution, to ensure that America stays America.

And how retroactive would this new policy be? Eventually almost all of us have immigration in the family. What if your Grandmother was never naturalized? All of a sudden you citizenship is revoked. Can you imagine? Your family has been here for a century and you've lived your entire life as an American until boom - your 40 and livingg in the country ileagally.

How, "to the letter" would we follow this vague policy? What happens if the mother was legal and father was not legal? You really going to snatch a kid from a mother and ship it off to Mexico? This is madness!

Furthermore, children of "ilegals" can't even begin helping their parents become citizens until they're 21 and even at that point it would still take a few years.

How bout we leave the children out of this one? Why don't we go after the EMPLOYERS. That is why they're here after all. Why not come up with a National ID Card, mandate e-Verify or some other type of mechanism toward ilegal employment?

I think that the last thing that this country needs to do is just create more ilegals in this country, which is precisly what would happen if Birthright Citizenship were enacted. Consider this; a study just released is that 8% of all babies born in the US have undocumented parents. That's an added 300,000 ilegal citizens every year, including the 5 million childredn here already that were born by undocumented parents. We already have an ilegal immigration problem, adding millions more to our broken system isn't going to help anybody.
Leave the kids out of it.

The 14th Amendment has served this country well for over a century and stripping it down is simply not the answer to ilegal immigration in any sense of the word. This would do far much more harm than good.