Citizenship by Birth Seen as Inalienable Right

Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills) has again introduced a bill to amend the Constitution to say that those children who willfully or negligently choose illegal aliens for parents will not be citizens of this country, even though they were born on this side of the border. This is one seriously bad idea.

One cannot be a foreigner if one has not moved! It is a factual impossibility. You are a native of whatever country you were born in, however your parents got there. A child’s mother is the mother, no matter how irregular the circumstances of conception or how elusive the father, and a child’s country is that child’s country, no matter what laws the parents may have broken.

If some other government also chooses to acknowledge the child, on account of parentage, that’s good too. Everybody in the world is in fact a citizen of the country of his or her birth, unless they have voluntarily renounced it, and any law in any country that says otherwise is not a law but a lie.

The 14th Amendment merely acknowledged what was always true. Your citizenship in the country of your birth is part of your package of God-given inalienable rights. A constitutional amendment saying otherwise would be like a constitutional amendment saying that two plus two is five--abominable and unnatural, null and void.

If, God forbid, such a thing is ever passed by two-thirds of both houses and ratified by three-quarters of the states, it will mean that America has taken leave of its senses. Creating a population of outlaws from birth, many of whom would be stateless, is one of the more reliable ways to breed terrorists--ask any natural-born Kuwaiti of Palestinian descent, whose dishonorable government insists on calling him a stateless foreigner.

If it happens, honest people will ignore, evade, defy and resist, and the heroes will be those who can create whatever documents need to be created to defeat an evil law.

JAMES K. MATTIS

Sunland