Hacker News Reader

Comment by _9za9 | Hacker News Reader

So you’re arguing that birthright citizenship isn’t a loophole because lawmakers in the 1800s discussed it? Great, but we’re in 2025, not 1868. A lot of U.S. citizens today don’t agree with handing out citizenship to 250,000–400,000 kids of undocumented immigrants every year, and pretending this debate was settled forever ignores reality. The Constitution is a living document, not a museum piece. If you’re looking for “agitation,” maybe start with the side clinging to 19th-century logic to justify modern mass migration.

View on HN

VOIPThrowaway's comment was all about the intent behind the amendment. Part of the intent may have been to "make sure Democrats couldn't say that former slaves weren't citizens" but the legislative history clearly shows that wasn't the only reason.

How else would you demonstrate what their intent was, if citing primary evidence is off-limits?

I'm arguing it's not a loophole because that's how US law works, and has worked for not just the last 250 years, but in the common law that we inherited from England. I provided citation to show that legal history, so you can double-check me.

If you don't like the way the law works, well, use the 18th-century logic embedded in the Constitution to repeal the amendment, like how the 21st repealed the 18th. Make new state and federal laws to invalidate the relevant common law, which would still exist after the repeal.

Don't just make up interpretations because you don't like reality.

Sounds like a few hundred thousand children of undocumented immigrants becoming US Citizens every year is perfectly okay with you. Reality would say though that it has become an extreme loophole that current non-citizens are using to get their children into America as US Citizens. Times have changed!

Calling it a loophole doesn't make it a loophole, no matter how many time your repeat it.

If you don't like the US Constitution, either change it or move to a country without jus soli citizenship.

"Anchor baby" xenophobia is so 20 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchor_baby

> Statistics show that a significant, and rising, number of undocumented immigrants are having children in the United States, but there is mixed evidence that acquiring citizenship for the parents is their goal.[29] According to PolitiFact, the immigration benefits of having a child born in the United States are limited. Citizen children cannot sponsor parents for entry into the country until they are 21 years of age, and if the parent had ever been in the country illegally, they would have to show they had left and not returned for at least ten years ...

> Parents of citizen children who have been in the country for ten years or more can also apply for relief from deportation, though only 4,000 persons a year can receive relief status; as such, according to PolitFact, having a child in order to gain citizenship for the parents is "an extremely long-term, and uncertain, process."

So I imagine you think these people are all coming to the US to have babies, then, what, leaving them here? As orphans? Can you point to the orphan numbers?

Or going home to raise the kid so that 18 years later the now-adult kid will move to the US - a country that's mostly foreign to them, with little support network?

Where are your numbers that this is an actual problem?

How does it compare to the devastating failures of the US health care system and parasite that is the insurance industry?

How does it compare the destruction of the social safety network caused by decades of tax cuts for the wealthy?

Tell me why anyone should care all that much?

You failed in the past election and Trump became president because millions of people disagree with your narrative, no matter how long of a report on hacker news that you write!

Thus fulfilling the old adage, “... If you have neither the law nor the facts, hammer the table.”

No long report this time? You never changed my mind so all your words failed. You might want to work on increasing your argument ability or you waste your own time. Nothing you said convinces anyone that there is not a loophole in 2025.

Trump got a little less than half of the vote, which means millions of people also agreed with it.

I mean... Trump won in 2016 despite millions more people voting for Hillary Clinton.

When Republicans win, they claim a sweeping mandate from the masses and declare themselves harbingers of a widespread cultural repudiation of progressivism and leftism (even when they lose the popular vote) and when they lose they just claim the other side cheated and everyone agrees with them anyway.

It's all pantomime.

But I wonder who is president right now? What party controls both the House and the Senate?

You can certainly argue that the Democrats failed to inspire and move the left whereas Trump succeeded with the right, although Trumpists seem to be regretting it more each day. This isn't a political conflict between rural and urban, left and right (there is no actual left in the US outside of social media) or even proles vs elites, but between establishment elites and outsider elites - and Trump represents the former, and Elon the latter.

But you can't rationally argue that Trump's success is due to an overwhelming repudiation of leftism from the masses. You will regardless, ad nauseum, because you're a Trump and Elon stooge. But the math just doesn't math.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com