Last month, Right Wing Watch looked at the historical revisionism, lack of legal logic, and indifference to practical results endemic in the movement to change the Constitution’s definition of citizenship. Following last week’s defeat of a law challenging constitutional citizenship in the Arizona senate, the Arizona Republic took takes an extensive look at the arguments for and against Constitutional citizenship. Their analysis of the pragmatic pros and cons is telling. While denying citizenship to American-born children of undocumented immigrants might save some money on social programs in the short term, the paper reports, the long-term costs of creating a huge American-born undocumented underclass—with up to 400,000 new children each year—could be huge. In addition, implementing a system to discriminate against children based on the citizenship status of their parents would be burdensome:
Limiting birthright citizenship could create costs and challenges for the government at various levels while potentially saving money in other areas.
At some level – local, state, federal or even at the hospital – someone would have to determine whether a newborn’s parents were legally in the United States before the infant could be processed for a Social Security number.
Regardless of how the process worked, it would require governments to spend money creating and running an agency to verify the citizenship of parents at a time when the public is calling for less government spending and bureaucracy, said Margaret Stock, a retired Army Reserves lieutenant colonel and immigration attorney specializing in military cases.
She is concerned too that limiting birthright citizenship could hurt the nation’s armed services because immigrants, and the children of immigrants, have a higher propensity to join the military than other citizens, she said.
Denying citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants could save taxpayers some money.
According to the Pew Hispanic Center, the children of undocumented immigrants are more likely to live in poverty and lack health insurance than children of U.S. citizens. As citizens, many of those children qualify for public benefits.
By denying them citizenship, those children would not be eligible for most public-assistance programs, so some of the costs to taxpayers would be less, Van Hook said.
In the long run, however, without citizenship, those children would not be able to work legally and would probably earn less money, pay less in taxes and cost the public in other ways such as emergency medical care, she said.