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I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

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Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Men under the age of 26, documented or not, are required to sign up after being in the US for 30 days, unless they are on a valid visa. https://www.sss.gov/register/immigrants/

That's murky and it's not enforced. In practice, immigrants aren't conscripted during a draft. If you want some more examples: Voting, Jury Service, Employment Authorization, and Driver's licenses.

It's not murky, I just picked the most official source. There's no real enforcement of selective service, except that if you don't sign up for it likely bars from subsequent employment by the Federal government unless you can get a waiver.

In practice, immigrants aren't conscripted during a draft.

We haven't had a draft since the 1970s. It's unclear how many draftees were immigrants back then (and the legal definitions around immigration have changed in the meantime) but historically conscription of immigrants has been the norm, not the exception.

Voting, Jury Service, Employment Authorization, and Driver's licenses.

These seem like things from which undocumented immigrants are excluded (by law!), not immunized. Why you think this is an argument in favor of your legal theory is beyond me.

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll confess error in my wording above (and it's too late to edit it): The judgment (outcome) was arguably correct, as you say — state governments should indeed be able to do reasonable public-safety regulation. (Whether Louisiana's action in granting a private monopoly on meat processing was a reasonable way to promote public safety was another question: The Court's opinion focused on the 14th Amendment and federal…

Here’s an article addressing what the framers of the amendment meant: https://static.heritage.org/legal-and-judicial/birthright-ci... Haven’t had a chance to dig into it in detail, but it addresses evidence from the drafting process that isn’t addressed in Wong Kim Ark .

It's just the same old bullshit in a new wrapper. Cherry-picked quotes from Congressional debates, a bunch of cases in between the passage of teh amendment and Wong Kim Ark, and then it launches into handwaving with arguments like

The American Revolution was, by its inherent nature and through its express principles, an effective throwing off of the common law’s yoke of jus soli and its perpetual allegiance in favor of a consent-based compact theory of government.

and a page later it's special pleading for Grotius, Emer Vattel, and compact theory. I gave up at that point. Perhaps there's some brilliant new theory buried in the last 1/3 of the article, but if you didn't think it worth reading in detail I'm not inclined to mine it for you!

To be honest, the fact that it's from the Heritage foundation and published in a very conservative journal of law and politics give it a double flavor of polemic rather than scholarship. One can construct eloquent arguments for anything, from reinstating dred Scott to invalidating the Declaration of Independence and the subsequent formation of the USA - and indeed in this age of LLMs I expect legal polemics further proliferate. But when you get down to the actual substantive arguments, this paper strikes me as just another of the 'we wish things were different' type, wishing that the US had built its jurisprudential edifice on a continental rather than a common law substrate. Perhaps if the proponents of this idea invested their efforts in amending the Constitution (or going the Conventional route) they might have more success in building the required consensus.

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course they are. Just one example is conscription.

Men under the age of 26, documented or not, are required to sign up after being in the US for 30 days, unless they are on a valid visa. https://www.sss.gov/register/immigrants/

That hardly means anything about birthright citizenship and says a lot more about the draft

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course they are. Just one example is conscription.

They are required to pay taxes worldwide income [1] and register for selective service as the peer comment stated. [1] https://calawyers.org/publications/taxation/ca-tax-lawyer-ma...

The state wanting the blood and money of illegals isn’t proof of anything more than the state wanting ever more blood and money

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#415

Hi Peter, a European (Hungary) colleague of us visited Iran once and does not receive any Visa (tourist,...) because of that. He does not even receive answers to his renewed applications. Is there anything he can do?

It's very difficult to get past this issue. We have Iranian citizen clients and non-Iranian citizen clients who have visited Iran whose visitor and work visa applications have been pending for more than a year. One option is for your colleague to ask his federal representative to reach out to the Consulate. This is done all the time but to be clear, it usually doesn't help but there's really nothing else to do. In th…

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Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's murky and it's not enforced. In practice, immigrants aren't conscripted during a draft. If you want some more examples: Voting, Jury Service, Employment Authorization, and Driver's licenses.

It's not murky, I just picked the most official source. There's no real enforcement of selective service, except that if you don't sign up for it likely bars from subsequent employment by the Federal government unless you can get a waiver. In practice, immigrants aren't conscripted during a draft. We haven't had a draft since the 1970s. It's unclear how many draftees were immigrants back then (and the legal definitio…

The correct legal term is "illegal aliens" not "undocumented immigrants".

My argument is that the phrase "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" may be interpreted to mean that individuals must be under the complete, allegiance-owing jurisdiction of the United States, and because they may not be for a host of reasons, the SCOTUS may reevaluate US v Wong Kim Ark and reinterpret the 14th amendment.

There's also this 1866 Congressional document discussing the 14th after it was passed detailing "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof". It reads "This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of embassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but it will include every other class of persons." https://x.com/pepesgrandma/status/1057514062899277824/photo/...

There's a very strong case here.

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#417
post #373

I know someone who has got a O1 visa to do freelance work, via an employer that has turned out to be dodgy. This employer is giving her mixed messages, on the one hand claiming to have cancelled her visa because she wasn't available for work exactly when the employer needed, on the other saying they haven't really cancelled the visa and she can carry on working for them. She now wonders whether her O-1 entry was duri…

IANAL, but that sounds like a situation where you need hire an actual immigration attorney.

Agreed :) In case this helps anyone else, she's now talked to a lawyer. Sounds like a spouse of an American can get forgiven for everything anyway especially if they have a kid because otherwise the American would suffer e:g by being a single parent (strangely, being separated from their spouse isn't considered hardship...) I think the employer is playing games to control her and probably hasn't actually cancelled the visa. If she wasn't getting married of course, with the chance of being forgiven, that'd be more of a stress. So, anyone contemplating an O-1 visa, make sure your sponsor is decent!

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s an article addressing what the framers of the amendment meant: https://static.heritage.org/legal-and-judicial/birthright-ci... Haven’t had a chance to dig into it in detail, but it addresses evidence from the drafting process that isn’t addressed in Wong Kim Ark .

It's just the same old bullshit in a new wrapper. Cherry-picked quotes from Congressional debates, a bunch of cases in between the passage of teh amendment and Wong Kim Ark, and then it launches into handwaving with arguments like The American Revolution was, by its inherent nature and through its express principles, an effective throwing off of the common law’s yoke of jus soli and its perpetual allegiance in favor…

> To be honest, the fact that it's from the Heritage foundation and published in a very conservative journal of law and politics give it a double flavor of polemic rather than scholarship

I’ll respond to your other point, but 90% of legal academia thinks “emanations from penumbras” is constitutional law. They’re wingnuts and kooks too. Nobody has the color of authority here. We gotta reconstruct the correct answer from first principles.

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