Posts Tagged ‘14th Amendment’

Back when “W” was first running for office, he used to talk a lot about “compassionate conservatism.” None of us ever saw much of it on display during his eight years of power but at least he thought bringing up compassion was a smart move. Today’s right wing zealots don’t even pretend to care about compassion.

Take this summer’s emergence of the “anchor baby”.

Apparently, there’s a movement afoot to edit our nation’s Constitution by deleting the 14^th Amendment. Yes, that would be the one that makes sacred our nation’s due process and equal protection clauses, on which most basic civil rights decisions were based.

Today’s fired-up right-wingers seem to think those legal linchpins pale in comparison to the citizenship guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment to anyone born in the US. Thus, the derisive term “anchor baby.”

The right-wing-no-compassion party is now trying to convince us that the only reason immigrants have babies is to gain legal standing. It goes something like this. Babies born in the US are automatically citizens even if their parents (one or both) are not citizens. Think Collin Powell, Walt Disney, Fred Astaire and the list goes on.

Of course, the vivid imagination of the right has led them to conclude that illegal immigrants are intentionally having these babies to gain a foothold in this country. Just knowing that 50% of pregnancies in the US are unintended makes me doubt this fantasy a little.

But let’s just say they do. Let’s say undocumented immigrants are having babies left and right just to be anchored in our country. Turns out that’s not such a bad thing. The birthrate in the US is at its lowest in a century.

But we don’t have to worry. The birthrate of immigrants makes our overall rate higher than most wealthy nations and this means there will be plenty of working young people to take care of today’s aging population. I can just see it now. A ward of aging right-wing xenophobes taken care of by compassionate anchor babies.