Tales from the Trail

Fresh from a bitter row over Arizona’s tough crackdown on illegal immigrants, top Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are pushing to review a constitutional amendment that grants automatic birthright citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

In the past week several Republicans have called for or supported hearings on Capitol Hill reviewing the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was enacted in 1868 following the Civil War and granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” 

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and erstwhile supporter of comprehensive immigration reform granting a path to legal status for the nearly 11 million illegal immigrants living stateside, kicked off the row with an interview on the Fox network a week ago in which he said automatic citizenship attracted illegal immigrants, and that a review was needed.

“People come here to have babies. They come here to drop a child, it’s called drop and leave,” Graham said. “To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, they have a child, and that child’s automatically an American citizen. That shouldn’t be the case. That attracts people for all the wrong reasons,” he added.

Graham said he was considering introducing a constitutional amendment to change the rules on automatic citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. A study last year by the Pew Hispanic Center estimated at 4 million the number of U.S. citizen children of families where at least one parent was an illegal immigrant.
   
Challenging birthright citizenship has until now been an issue pushed by conservatives on the right of the Republican party. That stand has also gained backing in the past week of Senators Jon Kyl, the second ranking Republican in the Senate, and Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the Judiciary Administrative Oversight and the Courts Subcommittee.
   
The latest drive by Republicans follows hot on the heels of Arizona’s tough immigration law — a measure crafted by Republican state lawmakers that sought to drive illegal immigrants out of the Mexico border state, but was blocked by a federal judge last week, arguing that immigration matters are the federal government’s responsibility.
   
Tensions over that law have inflamed a decades-old national debate over immigration, which promises to play into the elections in November, when President Barack Obama’s Democrats are fighting to retain control of Congress.
   
While taking a tough stance on illegal immigrants may play well with the Republican’s conservative base, it runs the risk of alienating U.S. Hispanics, an increasingly weighty voter bloc that turned out for Obama in 2008 by a two-to-one margin.
   
Senator John McCain, who ran for president against Obama and faces a tough primary battle this month in Arizona for his party’s nomination to run for the Senate, also lent his support to the process of reviewing citizenship rights, although he sounded a note of caution about changing the Constitution.
   
“Our Founding Fathers intentionally made the process of amending our Constitution extremely difficult. I believe that the Constitution is a strong, complete and carefully crafted document that has successfully governed our nation for centuries and any proposal to amend the Constitution should receive extensive and thoughtful consideration,” he said in a statement released by his office.

When President Barack Obama’s administration sued Arizona over the state’s tough-as-nails immigration law this week, he piled pressure on House Democrats in the state facing a tough battle for reelection in November, analysts say.

The administration on Tuesday argued that the Arizona law, which requires state and local police to investigate the immigration status of anyone who they reasonably suspect is in the country illegally, is unconstitutional and would sap law enforcement resources.

Analysts say the move wrong footed several House Democrats locked in competitive reelection races in the desert border state, where the new immigration law consistently scores solid poll ratings among a broad spectrum of voters.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s suggestion that the U.S. government would sue to block Arizona’s tough new immigration law raised some eyebrows around town, not to mention in Arizona.

But at the State Department, Clinton’s press people have had little to say — except that “her words speak for themselves.”

And they have said that over and over again.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner was grilled about Clinton’s comments in an interview with an Ecuadoran television station on a trip to Latin America last week.

Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer’s campaign is using a singing frog to chide high-ranking Democratic cabinet officials for criticizing the desert state’s controversial new immigration law without actually reading it.

The campaign to elect Brewer – who stepped up when former Democrat Governor Janet Napolitano became President Barack Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary – uses a Muppet-like hand puppet to deliver a crooned reading lesson.

“Reading is really super swell … Reading helps you know what you’re talking about,” the Kermit-like frog raspingly intones, cut in with clips of senior administration officials including Attorney General Eric Holder and Napolitano admitting that they hadn’t read the law they have spoken out about.
 

Fresh from authoring a controversial crackdown on illegal immigrants, Arizona Republican state Senator Russell Pearce is now seeking to push a measure to invalidate the citizenship of U.S.-born children of unauthorized migrants he calls “jackpot” or “anchor” babies.

Pearce told Reuters he plans to introduce a new bill in the Republican-controlled state Senate that seeks to annul the citizenship of children born to illegal immigrants in Arizona, the desert state at the heart of a furor since it passed a law last month requiring police to check the immigration status of people they suspect are in the state illegally.

“It is difficult to imagine a more self defeating legal system than one that makes unauthorized entry into the U.S. a criminal offense, and simultaneously provides perhaps the greatest possible inducement to illegal entry,” Pearce said. The children of illegal immigrants “are not citizens. They are citizens of the country of their mother … That’s why they are called in some cases ‘jackpot babies’ or ‘anchor babies,’” he added.

The oil spill, immigration, racial profiling, President Obama’s policies, the Tea Party — you name it, Americans were asked about it in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal public opinion poll.

The pollsters surveyed 1,000 people from Thursday through Monday (when there was a lot of news happening) and came away with what NBC says were “striking results.”

Despite the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico threatening environmental disaster, 60 percent of Americans said they support more offshore drilling, according to the poll.

The swastika made of refried beans smeared onto the glass doors of the Arizona State Capitol this week captured the anger of Hispanics at the law authorizing local police to question anyone reasonably suspected of being in the United States illegally. The controvesial law, which critics say is a mandate for racial profiling, has galvanized the country’s largest minority that is expected to turn out in large numbers at planned rallies in more than 70 U.S. cities.

Hispanics were disappointed that President Barack Obama failed to deliver on his campaign promise to overhaul the immigration system in his first year in office. The Pew Research Center says 76 percent of the estimated 11.9 million illegal immigrants in the United States are Hispanics. The Latino community sees the undocumented immigrants as contributing with their labor to the growth of the U.S. economy and deserve the right to be legal residents.

The Arizona measure was criticized by other minorities. “This law is un-American as it unjustly targets communities of color, in particular immigrant communities, which have been critical to the economic growth of our country throughout its history,” said Michael Honda, chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.