Vivek Ramaswamy closing the gate behind him.
I loathe Trump, but this always struck me as a strange law to still have this day and age.
When records were hard to maintain and uncertainty wasn’t justification for kicking people out of the country, it made perfect sense.
What good is it for these days besides for exploitation? I couldn’t imagine going to another country with my wife and then just because we had a baby there, that the baby is a citizen of that country.
What good is it for these days besides for exploitation?
I don’t know what type of exploitation you are referring to.
I couldn’t imagine going to another country with my wife and then just because we had a baby there, that the baby is a citizen of that country.
I think that the general idea would be that a lot of people doing that probably want their child to have the option to come to the USA, primarily to earn a massive wage on the world scale. You and your wife most like earn a lot more money than most people in the world, and that is the case even for minimum wage workers too. Not at all saying minimum wage workers have it good here, most states, you can’t afford a two bedroom apartment on minimum wage and have to work more than one job. But if you’re coming from some place very poor, that minimum wage salary can be a life changing amount of money for your family at home. Which is where the majority of children born in the US to non citizens come from, poor countries where their parents come to work. And those parents aren’t and shouldn’t be expected to delay starting a family and raising kids while they are working.
There is also the concept of birthplace tourism which would entail having a lot more money than crossing the border because you need to have a passport and to fly into the country and stay for long enough to give birth. People probably do this for a variety of reasons including political instability in their own countries. Although that child which is sometimes called an anchor baby pejoratively would have to at least file and possibly pay taxes to the US for the rest of their life depending on where and how they work, which would probably not be worth it to anyone, but rich people if they didn’t intend to live in the US.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/23/1159072741/russians-argentina-birth-tourism-passports
Here is a recent example in another country
Shortly after Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, Alla Prigolovkina and her husband, Andrei Ushakov, decided they had to flee their Sochi, Russia, home.
Ushakov had been detained for holding up a sign that read “Peace,” and Prigolovkina, a pregnant ski instructor, feared he would soon be drafted and potentially killed, leaving their baby fatherless.
The original plan was to stay in Europe, but anti-Russian sentiment discouraged them.
“We chose Argentina because it has everything we needed: Fantastic nature, a large country, beautiful mountains,” Prigolovkina, 34, told The Associated Press inside the home her family is renting in Argentina’s western Mendoza province. “We felt it would be ideal for us.”
“Effectively, what he’s saying is that even though there’s a guarantee of birthright citizenship,” explains Evan Bernick, an assistant professor of law at Northern Illinois University and co-author of The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit, “the president can kind of turn it off by declaring an invasion and try to remove whoever he says is invading…It’s not even a loophole, it swallows the entire guarantee.” The fact that Trump referred to a foreign invasion in his campaign video, he adds, suggests they might be anticipating litigation and trying to “boost as much as possible their very minimal odds.”
This is an extraordinarily dangerous approach. He’ll basically be declaring them to be enemy combatants. That means he can involve the military. That means he can declare protesters to be giving “aid and comfort” to enemies, and charge them with treason.
I mean if you declare people an enemy and set the army against them… thats how you get guerilla warfare. Many Americans genuinely would rather die than be the stepped on snek.
And that genie is so hard to put back in the bottle.
Gosh… an unfettered imperial presidency using a pretext to revoke a person’s citizenship…
So anyone who ever donated to … oh say… not him, could suddenly be stateless?
I’m sure I’m over reacting, and I don’t want to “slippery slope “ but isn’t that a reasonable reading of his statement?
Fascism loves slippery slopes. Why do you think conservatives pull that one out so much? It’s always projection. Because they would immediately do the worst thing possible, they assume everyone else would
And this is how it will start.
TLDR, fascists are gonna make shit up to do exactly what you think fascists do.
The details don’t really matter. Stop giving yourself reasons to say ‘but he can’t do that!’ and internalize that words aren’t what will stop him.
Sure would be funny if all the born here brown people who voted for trump found themselves in a train or a camp go leopard party! But honestly I can’t think of a more unAmerica idea.
