Derb: Well, yes, except that we’re not even deporting the 400,000-plus
people who’ve run away after being ordered deported, or alien murderers who
finish their sentences and are released into the community, or Arabs caught
by the Border Patrol on the Mexican border, or … well, you get the idea.
Changing the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment is to my fellow
restrictionists what arms control is (was?) to many on the Left — when the
issues are hot (a massive illegal population or a Cold War) the policies
are inadvisable, and when the policies would make sense, they’d no longer
matter. I’d be happy to go along with ending automatic citizenship at birth
(though that would necessarily mean federalizing the birth-registry process
now run by the states), so long as we control illegal immigration
first. Otherwise, to use another analogy, it will become like the
debate over immigrant welfare in 1996: the libertarians agreed with
immigration critics that welfare use by legal immigrants was bad, but they
jiu jitsued us by offering a different solution — instead of just not
importing a new underclass, the libertarians persuaded Congress to keep the
underclass coming, just to cut them off welfare (which, of course, didn’t
really happen, because of carve-outs in the law and because the states
picked up most of the slack). If the citizenship debate were to heat up,
the same thing would happen — the open-borders crowd (at least those on
the Right) would agree to the change in order to divert political energy
away from the real problem, which is uncontrolled immigration. Fix that,
and citizenship will fix itself.