Let's leave the 14th Amendment alone. Regardless whether their parents were papered allowing them to be in the U.S., still the millions who are growing up or have grown up in the U.S. are as good and deserving as the rest of us.
Let's not disenfranchise them. Let's not, as State Senator Luz Rubles warned, relegate them to second-class citizens.
Someone would argue that if they are not citizens, they cannot be "second-class citizens," but the point is we should not be making them second-class members of our society.
Nor, for that matter, do I like us relegating their parents to second class. Do I favor amnesty, then? I favor citizenship for those who would immigrate to the U.S.
By making it so hard for them to come live in the U.S., forcing them to wait years, we are saying immigration to this country is to some extent illegal.
I suppose that is evident in the term "Illegal immigrant."
Rather than amending the Constitution to make yet more people "illegal," I believe we should change our border policies to allow more people to immigrate. There is nothing inherently wrong with an immigrant. Let's screen out the criminals, but let's not screen out the immigrants just for being an immigrants.
Consider the 72 migrants in Mexico massacred 100 miles from the U.S. border a week or so ago. Coming from Central and South American countries, they were forced to come through the drug-gang invested territory of Mexico in order to reach the U.S. The drug runners, laying in wait to "assist" people across the U.S. border, found them, and tried to press them into their service. They declined to join the gangsters, and were shot.
Our policies against immigration force the innocent into the hands of the lawless. Although this time, the migrants refused to bend, many times the migrants join in with the drug cartels.
Our immigration policies are swelling the ranks of the gangsters.
Legalize more immigration, legalize more people . . . and leave the 14th Amendment alone.
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