Reforming Anchor Baby Citizenship

"Any serious immigration reform considered in the next Congress should revisit the concept of birthright citizenship (namely that all children born on U.S. soil are citizens, regardless of their parents' status), or what is sometimes referred to as the 'anchor baby' issue," writes Heritage Foundation's Genevieve Wood. She gives the following rationale:

• Birthright citizenship incentivizes illegal immigrants to have children on U.S. soil in hopes it will allow them, the parents, to gain legal status;
• It fuels "chain migration," the process whereby one legal family member, once 21 years of age, is able to apply to bring in parents, siblings and in-laws. According to one study, 747,413 (or 66.1%) of the 1,130,818 immigrants granted legal permanent residency in 2009 were family-sponsored immigrants.
• It is costly to the U.S. taxpayer. While illegal immigrants themselves do not qualify for welfare, they can obtain Medicaid and food stamps on behalf of their U.S.-born children. (One study found that "nationwide, 40% of illegal alien-headed households receive some type of welfare.")
• And last but not least, birthright citizenship, as currently understood, is arguably unconstitutional.

Wood explains the constitutional issue this way:

For America’s first 100-plus years, the idea that just because someone was born on U.S. soil made them a U.S. citizen was disavowed. But a Supreme Court decision in 1898 (yes, there was judicial activism back then, too) that broadly and wrongly interpreted the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause changed all that.

The original intent of the Citizenship Clause was to ensure former slaves were given citizenship status.  It was never intended to give such status to children born here because their parents were living here as foreign ambassadors, diplomats or consuls, or simply because their non-citizen parent(s) had a baby while visiting or residing, legal or otherwise, in the U.S.

Heritage Foundation legal scholar Hans von Spakovsky puts it this way:

It is just plain wrong to claim that the children born of parents temporarily in the country as students or tourists are automatically U.S. citizens. They do not meet the 14th Amendment’s jurisdictional allegiance obligations. They are, in fact, subject to the political jurisdiction (and allegiance) of the country of their parents. The same applies to the children of illegal aliens because children born in the United States to foreign citizens are citizens of their parents’ home country.

Source: Not All Kids Born in the US Should Be Made Citizens, Genevieve Wood, The Daily Signal, The Heritage Foundation

Malkin: ObamaCare for All Illegals

"ObamaCare promoters relented to GOP pressure to include an illegal-alien ban on eligibility and vowed endlessly that no benefits would go to the 'undocumented'," writes Michelle Malkin. "But denial is the Obama way."

In Oregon last week, officials revealed that nearly 4,000 illegal immigrants have been “accidentally” steered from the state's low-income Medicaid program and enrolled in [federal] ObamaCare in violation of the law.

Because Oregon's health insurance exchange website has been offline and its software architects under investigation for possible fraud, the Oregon ObamaCare drones have been processing each and every application manually. That means nearly 4,000 illegal-alien applications with “inaccurate” data somehow passed through government hands and somehow ended up getting routed through.

What a slap in the face to millions of law-abiding Americans, who have lost their health care coverage and work hours thanks to Democrat-sponsored federal health care regulatory burdens and mandate costs...

Read the rest of the story here.

$46 Million in Refunds to 23,994 Illegals at 1 Atlanta Address

"The Internal Revenue Service sent 23,994 tax refunds worth a combined $46,378,040 to 'unauthorized' alien workers who all used the same address in Atlanta, Ga., in 2011, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA)," reports CNSNews. "That was not the only Atlanta address theoretically used by thousands of 'unauthorized' alien workers receiving millions in federal tax refunds in 2011. In fact, according to a TIGTA audit report published last year, four of the top ten addresses to which the IRS sent thousands of tax refunds to 'unauthorized' aliens were in Atlanta."

Here's the list of the top ten 'singular' tax refund addresses identified by the IG:

• $46,378,040 in 23,994 tax refunds to a single Atlanta GA address
• $10,395,874 in 2,507 refunds to a single Oxnard CA address
• $7,284,212 in 2,408 refunds to a Raleigh NC address
• $5,558,608 in 2,047 refunds to a Phoenix AZ address
• $5,091,027 in 1,942 refunds to a San Jose CA address
• $3,298,877 in 1,846 refunds to an Arvin CA address
• $2,691,448 in 3,608 refunds to a second Atlanta address
• $2,256,302 in 1,972 refunds to a Palm Beach Gardens FL address
• $2,164,976 in 11,284 refunds to a third Atlanta address
• $1,231,943 in 2,386 refunds to a fourth Atlanta address

Grand total: $86,352,307 in tax refunds sent to 10 addresses. It gets worse.