Repeal the 14th amendment? Careful what you ask for!

"Jon Kyl Backs Republican 14th-Amendment Repeal Effort To Deny Citizenship To Immigrants' Children", Huffington Post, 2010-08-02.

Before anybody repeals the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, they should read it carefully in its entirety.

Those who are upset about "illegal" immigrants are upset about the part of the 14th Amendment that states, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

Those who want to repeal this Amendment should also consider that it states, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive a person of life, liberty, and property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Does this mean if the 14th Amendment is repealed that the citizens of a state that did not ratify the repeal then have the right to deprive repeal supporters of life, liberty, and property without even a hearing?

Supporters of repeal should also be careful that nobody slips into their amendment a repeal of the statement in Article I, Section 7, that "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."  "Ex post facto" means "after the fact"; that is, if somebody does something Congress doesn't like but is not illegal, then Congress cannot pass a law that makes that past action illegal and punishable now.

If the "ex post facto" provision were removed, then somebody might slip in a rider on some bill that to be a citizen a person had to prove that all of their ancestors were legal immigrants, right back to the Mayflower.  Gosh! Was there even agreement among the pre-Mayflower residents as to who was a legal immigrant and who was most unwelcome?

You think that's impossible.  Would all Senators and Representatives who read every word of every bill please raise their hands?  Hm?  Would somebody check the cloak room to see if any have raised their hands?

An important afterthought: has anybody considered that the 14th Amendment was proposed by a Republican Congress?

Let's solve illegal immigration for once and for all!!

Illegal immigration has been a problem in America (and many other countries) for centuries.  In what is now called the United States let's solve it by sending the children of illegal immigrants and the children's children, yea unto to the sixteenth generation, back where they came from.  Let's start with sending all the Mayflower descendants back to England!

Did they really get permission from all the governments of the people already living here to stay put and to take resources from the then current occupants?  Did they learn the customs and the languages of the people already living here?  No, they insisted on following their Old World customs and speaking their Old World language.  Even that language was a mishmash of the language of illegal immigrants from another part of the Old World.

Then let's send back all the children of the Southern planters and the children of their children.  They grabbed great swaths of land from those already reaping the bounty of the land, they cleared the land of those pesky forests that produced an abundance of food, and they pushed those who already lived on the land farther and farther from the coasts.

And on and on it went, decade after decade, farther and farther west.  Now the true illegal immigrants want to push out the descendants of the Anasazi, the Aztecs, the Toltecs, and the Mayans from land they had occupied for millennia until the real illegal immigrants arrived.

And we should send the Ojibwe out of the territory they took from the Dakota.  And we should send the Lenni Lenape out of the territory they took from others as they pushed east to the Great Salt Sea (see James Fenimore Cooper).

If we all stayed put in the land of our fathers and their fathers, just think of how we could reduce the problem of illegal immigration!!  Of course, if we all did that, we would still be peasants working from dawn to dusk, suffering cold and heat according to the season, and wondering when a drought or the foreign overlords would wipe us out.

We really should follow the advice of Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?"  That means we have to absorb people moving in and we have to be sensitive when we move into others' territory.  And next year we will have world peace.

If "they" are supposed to learn English...

shouldn't "we" learn the languages of countries we visit, work in, or invade?

I think requiring immigrants to learn English is an idea that ignores history and ignores too many Americans' cultural ignorance.

The U.S. has had many communities throughout its history where languages other than English were spoken. First, there were many Indian communities with a rich linguistic tradition. Second, there were many Spanish communities which were absorbed into the United States by various means. Finally, there were many communities founded by immigrants where they spoke their native language for a generation or more. This was especially true of German immigrants back to the Revolution and Swedish immigrants in the nineteenth century.

Americans have been tourists to many areas of the world without even knowing how to say, "Thank you." After all, "they" all speak English. Many a business deal has been lost because many of the ex-pats haven't or even refuse to learn the local language. Unless an invader has "overwhelming force", an invasion and subsequent occupation will be very difficult without a large number of the invaders knowing the local language and the local culture.

If we want immigrants to "learn English", we should do far better than treating foreign languages in school as a "frill".

The original illegal immigrants

There have been many waves of illegal immigrants to this continent, but one of the most notorious arrived

Not speaking the language,
Carrying many contagious diseases,
Having few of the skills needed for the existing society, and
Quickly established a criminal record.

Who were these invaders who would not score many points as proposed in the current immigration bill? Why, the Pilgrims.

They did not speak Algonquian, the language of the Nauset whose land they occupied.
Over half of them had died from various diseases,
They knew very little about farming,
They stole grain stores from the local people, and
Eventually they murdered many of the locals.

I guess I can't complain too much about them; both my wife and son-in-law are descended from them.