Comment & Debate
Timothy Lee. “Birthright Citizenship and Symbolism.” Bottom-up Blog of Timothy Lee. August 10th, 2010: “There’s nothing symbolic about birthright citizenship. Each year, thousands of Americans are born to undocumented immigrants. Birthright citizenship guarantees that when they grow up, they’ll enjoy the same freedoms that the children of American citizens do. Ending birthright citizenship means that, instead, they’ll be forced to live underground in the country they call home. This isn’t an ‘act of symbolic violence against hard-won American ideals of equality.’ It’s a sacrifice of the actual freedom and equality of actual human beings who will be born on American soil over the coming decade.”
“Go back where you didn’t come from.” Economist.com. Aug 12th 2010: “we have some pretty good evidence of what happens with immigrant minorities in countries that don’t grant birthright citizenship. The Turkish minority in Germany (until the legal reforms of 1999) and the Korean zainichi minority in Japan are two good examples. You end up with a lot of resentful, displaced young people who are permanently differentiated through the education system and feel they have no stake in their countries of birth, but have never known anyplace else and have nowhere to “return” to. Essentially, you get a permanent underclass displaying tenuous allegiance to the country they live in (see Chikako Kashiwazaki’s chapter here on fourth-generation ethnic Koreans still preferring to identify as “foreigners” in Japan), with predictable consequences for law and order and, in some cases, violent extremism.”