HispanicVista Columnists
Throwing babies out with the bath water takes on new meaning
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By
Patrick Osio, Jr./HispanicVista.com - January 7, 2006
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“Breathes there the man, whose soul so dead, never to himself hath said – This is my own, my native land.” If Congressmen Tancredo, Sensenbrenner, Hunter and the other members of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus have their way, Walter Scott’s rhetorical question from his “Lay of the Last Minstrel” will prophetically create untold thousands of “dead souls” unable to call the US “my native land.” How can any American, indeed any human being, do such a thing to the yet unborn?
Under the guise of “immigration control” but contrary to the 14th Amendment, the Congressman Tancredo founded Congressional group proposes to deny birth right citizenship to the children of illegal immigrant mothers contending this can be accomplished through Congressional legislation. They claim that the 14th Amendment’s language, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States…” was meant to give citizenship to former slaves after their emancipation and did not include birth right citizenship to those born to mothers not legally in the United States.
The proposed legislation is one of the worst cases of discrimination against women and unborn children and Latino US citizens as has ever been proposed during the worst periods of racial conflict in the United States.
The proposed legislation reads that if the baby is born to an illegal immigrant woman the child is not a citizen even when the father may be a US citizen. In order for the child to be considered a US citizen the citizen father and illegal immigrant mother must be married. Suppose they get divorced? Suppose the man refuses to marry her? Suppose the woman is raped by a US citizen? On the other hand if the woman is a US citizen and the baby’s father is an illegal immigrant, the child would be a US citizen. What atrocious discrimination. What blatant human rights crime against the unborn.
And the worst draconian aspect of the proposed law – the new born baby automatically becomes an illegal immigrant subject to apprehension and deportation and if HR 4437 recently passed by Congress makes it through the Senate and President Bush signs it into law, illegal immigration will be considered a felony. So the babies would automatically be born felons. .
Present laws against discrimination would with the enactment of such law, mandate that all to be mothers prove their US citizenship/residency status, but in reality brown-skinned women, guilty of giving birth while brown, would be overwhelmingly singled out to provide proof. And who would be the judge at the hospital rendering which baby is and which baby is not a US citizen?
Unfortunately far too many Americans still believe the Tancredo led Congressional nationalists extremists are carrying on the good fight to stop illegal immigration. Depriving babies from their birth right citizenship is nothing more than a mean spirited thinly disguised attack on the real target – the growing political and social importance of the US Latino population.
In his 1997 treatise, Race, the Immigration Laws, and Domestic Race Relations: A "Magic Mirror" into the Heart of Darkness, professor of law at the University of California Davis, Kevin Johnson, documented an argument that in essence Mexican-Americans are though of as a “foreign minority” contrary for instance to African-Americans being thought of as a “domestic minority.” He notes that harsh treatment of noncitizens (vis a vis draconian laws such as birth right exclusion) represent a transference because “direct attack on minorities on account of their race is nowadays taboo, frustration with domestic minorities is displaced to foreign minorities. A war on noncitizens of color focusing on their immigration status, not race, as conscious or unconscious cover, serves to vent social frustration and hatred.”
According to this argument, and its truth visible with ensuing events, Latinos in general are being attacked through illegal immigrants as their proxies such attacks being more publicly acceptable. This explains such draconian laws that do nothing to stop illegal immigration, but much to stroke the fires of discontent and apathy towards the Hispanic community.
- Before Congressional representatives present any legislation purported to aid stopping illegal immigration, they should be mandated to present creditable evidence as to how their proposal will actually do so, not just populist arguments that feed and fuel hatred towards any human being not just babies.
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- Patrick Osio, Jr is editor of HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com). Contact at Posiojr@hispanicvista.com
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(The opinions expressed by Patrick Osio, Jr. are solely his and do not necessarily reflect those of HispanicVista.com, editorial board of advisors or it’s contributing writers.)
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