Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 681 posts

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#101

Post by AnimalMuppet »

greggoB wrote: post #64
returningfory2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the US is one of the most (the most?) successful countries in recent human history, shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the 95% be looking at the US and seeing what to copy?

Define successful? (You'll probably want to avoid metrics like happiness indices and life expectancy though)

At a minimum, it's been a place that people wanted to come to, more than they wanted to come to anywhere else in the world. That's successful as measured by people.

(Or at least, people wanted to come until the last couple of years...)

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#102

Post by tancop »

nonethewiser wrote: post #30
newaccount670 wrote: post #9

[flagged]

Agreed, especially when the “vacation” is actually birth tourism and the mother lied at the border.

the fact that birth tourism is a thing means the demand for us citizenship is way higher than supply, to the point people are willing to put their whole life savings and break the law just to have a shot at getting it through a complicated family route.

its easy to fix by making legal immigration cheap and reliable. its also great for the economy, a lot of undocumented immigrants work illegally dont pay taxes because they cant work normal jobs without getting deported.

legalizing their stay means more tax revenue, less crime and labor violations, lower costs for business and i would also say its kind of morally wrong for a rich country to buy cheap stuff made by workers in mexico or china and give none of the profits back. closed borders are glboal injustice.

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#103

Post by graemep »

Supermancho wrote: post #14
jjallen wrote: post #7

You can be pro/fine with legal immigration (and moderate/non-partisan) and still not think birthright citizenship is a good idea (like I do). Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship. It creates perverse incentives. Reminds me of legal abortion: practically everywhere in the world has it. If you are not in that vast majority you should be taking a very close look at yourself/things. So y…

Note: There are ~30ish countries that provide citizenship to anyone born within their national borders (many with restrictions, for whatever that may mean). Largely, this covers a spotting of countries across the globe, but is almost universally true within the Americas.

As far as I can see it is almost entirely countries in the Americas plus Pakistan that have real birthright citizenship. Everywhere else has some restriction such as stateless parents, or multiple generations born in the country, or a minimum period of residence or similar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#104

Post by [deleted] »

arpinum wrote: post #75
qalmakka wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of crazy. The text of the amendment is as literal as it gets. If this had failed it would have basically meant emptying Congress of all of its powers, because now the executive can just pick whatever interpretation they deem fit to their goals and run with it. The rule of courts of law is to interpret the law, not to pick new creative meanings out of them. That's the role of the legislative power - other…

"subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is not a clear statement.

[deleted]

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#105

Post by graemep »

greggoB wrote: post #55
jjallen wrote: post #7

You can be pro/fine with legal immigration (and moderate/non-partisan) and still not think birthright citizenship is a good idea (like I do). Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship. It creates perverse incentives. Reminds me of legal abortion: practically everywhere in the world has it. If you are not in that vast majority you should be taking a very close look at yourself/things. So y…

As a non-US citizen, birthright citizenship has always struck me as strangely unique to America - in my mind it comes from a time when it was actively trying to populate the continent (something not a lot of countries have wanted to do, I guess). Roll forward a few hundred years and the context has changed, so it seems reasonable that the law should too? But I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this is no bueno fo…

Most of the Americas for just that reason - and because the countries immigrants came from did not want their kids to have citizen ship and the right to come back.

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#106

Post by toast0 »

Chu4eeno wrote: post #27
root_axis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it insane?

I'm not him, but it creates some perverse incentives (like chinese billionaires who pay american surrogates to get implanted with dozens of their kids who get american citizenship). https://fortune.com/article/chinese-billionaire-xu-bo-father... might be an outlier, but it's still weird, especially since the US is the only country that has this.

Chinese billionaires are bound to do weird shit. I don't think we should amend our constitution to try to prevent that.

If the problem is 'birth tourism' and subsequent immigration visas for relatives of the US national child, changing the immigration policies seems like a better fix. Something like requiring a sponsoring citizen to reside in the US for a period before sponsorship. A citizen sponsoring a visa for a parent already has to be 21.

I'm not sure I can be that upset by people who want to immigrate, so they put a plan in motion that takes 21+ years to reach fruition. Although that does jump the line if you were eligible for F3 or F4 and your country of origin is Mexico... the priority date on those is currently 2001. [1]

I want more people in the US who can do long term planning, not less. :p

[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#107

Post by rayiner »

999900000999 wrote: post #4

Thank God. If only because this would open up people born here to having their citizenship retroactively revoked. The constitution is pretty clear. If you don't like it amend it. If anything we need to expand it to include anyone who gives birth in this country. If you're willing to deal with our horrible maternity care system and help keep up our declining population, you deserve a blue passport.

[flagged]

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#108

Post by returningfory2 »

qalmakka wrote: post #42
returningfory2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the US is one of the most (the most?) successful countries in recent human history, shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the 95% be looking at the US and seeing what to copy?

To be fair a lot of it had also to do with the sheer immense amount of vast, mostly unused ,fertile land available in north America. I sincerely doubt the American experiment would have worked this well if they had rowdy neighbours and infighting due to resource constraints. For almost 200 years the solution to most things in the USA was to get a chunk of either their people or immigrant to move to the neck of the wo…

But the success hasn't ended since the unused land became taken; in fact, the US became a superpower after the westward expansion era. My point is that looking at conditions today, the US still continues to succeed (by some definition of success) and other countries should try to emulate the aspects of the country that leads to that success. IMO one of the big factors is how well immigrants assimilate in the country, and birthright citizenship is a part of that.

I do agree with you that US success in the 19th century was due to many factors that are not relevant today.

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#109

Post by Windchaser »

consensus1 wrote: post #85
ryandrake wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Root cause it. The USA does not have an illegal immigration problem. It has a "huge, slow immigration bureaucracy" problem that makes the legal path so slow and difficult that people are incentivized to gamble on illegal paths.

Having a difficult and selective immigration process that rejects the vast majority of applicants is not a problem. It is exactly how an immigration system should work. We want the best.

I'm personally happy to welcome anyone who's willing to come, work hard, pay taxes, and support democratic ideals. This is how most of our ancestors got here, and it seems fair to me that we continue to extend that offer to other would-be immigrants.

Worth noting that the economic literature also shows that this is firmly in our best interests, and immigrants and their children more than pay their way in future taxes and future entrepreneurship.

The US didn't even have a particularly selective immigration process for the first century. It was only after a big influx of Chinese immigrants (and a corresponding backlash) that we enacted our first immigration controls, limiting how many immigrants could come from a given country each year. The aptly-named "Chinese Exclusion Act" of 1882.

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#110

Post by Windchaser »

greggoB wrote: post #55
jjallen wrote: post #7

You can be pro/fine with legal immigration (and moderate/non-partisan) and still not think birthright citizenship is a good idea (like I do). Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship. It creates perverse incentives. Reminds me of legal abortion: practically everywhere in the world has it. If you are not in that vast majority you should be taking a very close look at yourself/things. So y…

As a non-US citizen, birthright citizenship has always struck me as strangely unique to America - in my mind it comes from a time when it was actively trying to populate the continent (something not a lot of countries have wanted to do, I guess). Roll forward a few hundred years and the context has changed, so it seems reasonable that the law should too? But I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this is no bueno fo…

I mean, it tracks with "no taxation without representation". Getting rid of birthright citizenship has the chance to create a separate *multi-generational* class of people that aren't given the same rights in society.
Post reply on HN