Abolishing Birthright Citizenship a Mistake

Donald Trump advocates abolishing birthright citizenship, the US policy enshrined in the constitution that all people born in the US have American citizenship. Presumably, the reason for this proposal is to discourage pregnant women from crossing the border to give birth and to make it easier to deport undocumented persons from other countries even if they have immediate family members born here. I believe that ending birthright citizenship is a mistake because it may create a permanent underclass of people who are born in America but who do not fully belong to Amerca. 

 In the mid-1980s, I spent six months backpacking around Europe and spent a considerable amount of time in Germany. Germany at the time had a guestworker program because it needed laborers. Germany does not have birthright citizenship and had, at the time, only a very cumbersome and difficult procedure for acquring citizenship although the laws have been liberalized since then. What that meant in practice in the 1980s is that ethnic Turks born in Germany did not have German citizenship even though they had lived in Germany their entire lives, spoke fluent German, and spoke little Turkish. . When these young people I met had children, even their children would not have German citizenship even though they were born in Germany to parents who were also born in Germany. 

I returned home to America convinced that birthright citizenship is one of America's best policies and felt grateful to America for allowing the children of immigrants to be fully American.

 Having generations of people living in a society and contributing to the economy while not enjoying full rights is a problem waiting to happen. Short of humanitarian catastrophes, no country has an obligation to accept immigrants but if they make the decision to admit them, then there should be provisions to make them citizens. 

Although I am critical of that aspect of Germany's guest worker program that existed in the 1980s, other parts could be profitably adopted by the US. Suppose the US allowed potential workers to apply for a work visa. In order to get the visa, persons would be vetted, thoroughly, to weed out criminals, addicts, and others. Workers could pay a fee to cover the cost of the application and the background investigation. If an employer registers and claims that he needs workers and can't find American ones, he could register with this service and be matched with a worker. Once a worker is matched with an employer, that worker could get a work permit card that could double as a type of passport, allowing the worker to, for example, visit relatives in his home country and then reenter the US at will for the duration of the work permit. 

 Even if the potential worker pays the processing fee, it is surely cheaper than paying a coyote to smuggle him or her across the border. In this way, America could get the labor it needs, potential criminals could be weeded out, and the abuses of the people-smuggling business like the sexual assault of women would be reduced. 

 At the same time, these guest workers should be given a pathway to citizenship contingent upon regular employment, the ability to speak the language of the country, and the lack of a criminal record. (Incidentally, in 21st Century Germany, guest workers can obtain German citizenship by meeting these same qualifications.) 

 The take-home message: we can control our borders in a humane, reasonable way. We do not have to do it the Trumpian way.