There are those who claim that the 14^th amendment to the Constitution grants automatic American citizenship to anyone who happens to be born in the United States – even if the mother illegally crossed the border just an hour before, and takes her baby back to Mexico to live the rest of his life there; or the mother is a tourist who just happened to go into labor on her last day in the country.  One has to wonder about those who say such a thing, for I find it hard to believe that even today’s liberals, dullards though they are, and devious as they are, would think that such an amendment would pass muster.  And anyone who actually reads the amendment knows better (reading – what a concept!).  I know that y’all, being conservatives, can and probably will look it up for yourselves (for those of you in Rio Linda, Palm Beach County, and Port St. Lucie, that’s what we call research), but let me quote the relevant portion here:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. (Sec. 1)

Now, I defy anyone to show me where those words open American citizenship up to anyone who happens to be born within the borders of the United States.  I’ll wait a bit…still waiting…I’m prepared to wait until ---- freezes over…well, I hear the demons shivering, but no one’s popped up to show me that the 14^th amendment automatically makes every person born in the United States a citizen, so I’ll quit waiting, before my great-grandchildren have great-grandchildren.

Now, let’s see what the amendment does say.  It says that everyone born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, is a citizen of the United States.  Now, is the child of a tourist, who’s just visiting for pleasure and will soon return to her native country, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States of America?  If a woman wades across the Rio Grande and has her baby in the doctor’s office in some small Texas border town, and then returns to Mexico and raises her child there, where he lives till he dies of old age at 95, is that child subject to the jurisdiction of the United States?  Of course not!

And therefore those children are not, and cannot be under the 14^th amendment’s definition, citizens of the United States.  Therefore, the amendment does not say what so many claim it says.

So who is a citizen of the United States?  Well, as the amendment points out, all those who have been naturalized (the Constitution grants Congress the power to enact the law regarding how to become a naturalized citizen – and one of the requirements, barring an amnesty bill, is that one enter the country legally and reside here legally for a certain span of years).  And then there are those whom the law defines as natural born citizens.  The amendment doesn’t go further than permitting the designation to apply to those who are born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction, but clearly if those were the only people to qualify, it would be unfair to any number of people – for instance, children born to members of the military serving overseas, or children born to embassy staff in foreign countries.  Surely no one would wish to deny natural born citizenship to the child of a GI and his wife, who are stationed in Turkey or South Korea or Germany, or to the child of someone whom the State Department has assigned to the US embassy in Moscow or Warsaw or London or Tokyo or Cairo.

Therefore Congress has enacted legislation to address the question of exactly who is a natural born citizen of the United States.  The law is in Title 8 US Code, Chapter 12, Subchapter III, Part 1, Section 1401.  I won’t quote the language here, because it’s a hefty bit of text, but I have read it, and it does not grant natural born citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, or to the children of tourists.

Yet the federal government regards and treats such children as natural born US citizens – and is currently working to spew forth yet another amnesty for illegal aliens, thus making not only their children citizens (even though under the 14^th amendment and the US Code they aren’t), but those who have deliberately and knowingly violated the law in coming here, and under the law regarding naturalization have no legal right to be citizens.  That tells us something about the federal government (and the fact that this is not the first such amnesty to proceed from the cesspool that we call the District of Columbia merely illustrates the ignorance of, or the contempt for the Constitution – or both – that both major political parties possess).  It tells us that the people who infest DC have little if any regard for reason, for the law, for the interests of the United States, or for the Constitution without which they wouldn’t even have jobs.

It’s time, and past time, for Americans to stand up on our hind legs and make it clear to those who profess to represent us, that we’re mortally tired of people receiving citizenship who have no legal right to it.  We’re sick unto death of children gaining recognition as natural born citizens who aren’t any kind of citizens at all, natural born or naturalized either one.  We’re sick of the federal government making US citizenship a cheap thing, something to give away casually to anyone whose mother waded a shallow river and then went back home.  American citizenship is precious, important – it cost the lives and the fortunes of many people, famous and unknown, over the past 235 years (but not their sacred honor – those who defended this country and preserved it gained honor in so doing), and it is not a thing to treat like penny candy.

I strongly recommend that every one of us contact our Representative, our two Senators, the president and the vice president (even if the very thought of being in the same universe with them turns our stomach), and let them know emphatically that we demand and expect the federal government to enforce the law of the land, to define citizenship by the actual language of the 14^th amendment and the US Code, and to forthwith cease and desist from handing out natural born American citizenship to people who do not deserve it and have not the slightest legal right to it.

I have nothing against people speaking languages other than English.  My wife’s native tongue is Korean, and to this day her English is not fluent though she’s lived in the United States since December of 1979.  I myself speak – as I like to say – a little Korean, a little Scots, a little Spanish, and a little English.  That is, of course, a joke – I speak and write English more fluently than many English teachers (though I can’t diagram a sentence and can’t list the rules of grammar) – but it’s got a grain of truth in it.

I do speak a few words and phrases in Korean.  I’m marginally better with Scots.  I can actually carry on simple conversations in Spanish, though my grammar and vocabulary are weak.  So I’m no linguistic Luddite.  I don’t insist that if you’re resident in the United States, you must speak only English.  In fact, I admire the tenacity with which Hispanics – who, here in New Mexico, often descend from families that have been here twice as long as the United States as been in existence – have maintained the language while being completely fluent in English and competent in American society.

But the fact is that our national language is English.  There’s no law to that effect, but it’s the fact nonetheless (there’s no law that says I have to be left-handed either, but the lack of a law doesn’t change the fact).  All our foundational documents are in English – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Patrick Henry’s “liberty or death” and “treason” speeches before the Virginia House of Burgesses, the letters and diaries of the founding fathers, the records of the proceedings of the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention…name a document without which there would be no United States, and you’ll find it’s in English.

Debates in the House and Senate are in English.  The oaths of office for Representatives, Senators, and the president and vice president are in English.  With very few exceptions political campaigns in are in English.

This isn’t to condemn other languages, nor to deny people the right to speak other languages.  It is, rather, to point out the painfully obvious – the de facto national language of the United States is English.

My wife, when she became a naturalized American citizen, had to be able to carry on a conversation in English – and she had to prove it to an examiner, and pass a test in English too, before she could proceed to the naturalization ceremony.  Yet there are people who come here illegally and refuse to learn English, and who insist that we should all learn their language even though this is our country and not theirs.

That’s utter hogwash.  If I immigrated to Brazil, they would expect me to learn Portuguese; Brazilians wouldn’t learn English just to accommodate me.  If I moved to Saudi Arabia the government would insist that I learn to speak Arabic, and would laugh if I demanded that Saudis learn English so that I could converse with them.  If I were to go live in South Africa, I probably could get along since there is a strong English influence there, but I really doubt that the Afrikaners would learn English just to suit me – they’d tell me that I was in their country and if I wanted to talk to them, I ought to learn Afrikaans.

So why is it that people come here from elsewhere, and instead of learning our language demand that we learn theirs?  It’s because decades of multiculturalism have convinced them that we will.  There’s nothing wrong with learning about other cultures – I find such things fascinating – but the fact is that we have our own American culture, and multiculturalism is an effort to demean, marginalize, and finally destroy that culture.  This effort comes from our own people – professors, politicians, education union administrators.  People who ought to know better, and who owe their power and position and money to the United States’ culture of freedom, want to undermine that culture and replace it with a mishmash of everyone else’s cultures.  And people from elsewhere, seeing that our own self-appointed “leaders” have nothing but contempt for American culture, think they have just cause for demanding that we do in practice what these characters are calling on us to do.

But we do have a national culture and a national language, and that language is English.  If you want to speak some other language, fine, whether it’s Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, Swahili, Nimipu, Lakota, Spanish, German, Gaelic, or whatever.  But if you want to be part of this American society, you need to speak the American language – which is English.