(10-31-2018, 12:45 AM)TJBender Wrote:

(10-30-2018, 09:41 PM)MalabarJag Wrote: Are you that crazy? A president writing an executive order is not committing a "high crime or misdemeanor" no matter how unconstitutional the executive order is. The courts will stop it, and Trump knows that. This is only a way of getting a dialog started.

As far as someone born in the US automatically being a US citizen, aren't the children of foreigners considered citizens of their home country?. Aren't those children subject to the jurisdiction of their parents' country? So what you are claiming is the Constitution grants automatic dual citizenship of foreigners' children.

I know that children of US citizens born abroad are considered US citizens. Are there nations that refuse to grant citizenship if the parents are in a foreign country when their child is born?

I believe that a President who willfully, knowingly uses their office to violate the Constitution should be impeached, yes. I think a President rewriting the Constitution to suit their whims should fall under the high crimes and misdemeanors category, as the Constitution is the law that supersedes all other laws in this country. Yes, children of foreigners born on US soil are granted dual citizenship if their home country allows it. They are subject to the laws and jurisdiction of the United States while here. Case in point: let's assume China grants dual citizenship to the child of a Chinese couple born elsewhere (not sure if they do). It's also illegal in China to have more than one child. If the mother gives birth to her child while over here from China on a student visa (example) and this is her second child, she might have committed a crime in China, but she hasn't here. She's not subject to the laws and jurisdiction of China while in the US; she's subject to ours. So is her child, and her child is therefore an American citizen.

Yes, there are nations that do not grant citizenship if a child is born to two citizens of that country in a foreign nation. On the flipside, despite what the diplomat in chief and White House Constitutional Scholar might have said earlier, the US is not the only country that grants birthright citizenship.

(10-30-2018, 10:41 PM)jj82284 Wrote: At current, they think that they need 5000 more judges to handle the backlog of amnesty cases (nearly 3/4 of a million) to even approach the turn around needed to comply with the Flores Declaration and billions of dollars in infrastructure to detain he physical people crossing the border.  When you factor in those costs a wall would actually pay for itself in less than a presidential term. 

As for birthright citizenship, historically there have been understood to be three prime common law exceptions to the jus soli doctrine, 1.) Foreign diplomats, 2.) Tourist ships incidentally in terrestrial waters, 3.) enemy invaders/combatants.

No, it really wouldn't. What would pay for itself is an overhaul of the immigration courts to streamline the process. They've been chronically underfunded and understaffed. Hire more judges, yes, but also hire arbitrators, administrative judges, whatever you want to call them to go through and get the easy cases out of the system, and there are many. The guy here claiming asylum for the fourteenth time, the group of single males who were observed cutting through a helicopter mat fence with an acetylene torch, the guys who called the Border Patrol a bunch of bad words, get that stuff cleared out. Let the cases that should actually go to judges, like people credibly requesting asylum or mothers with children, go in front of the judges, and let the obvious ones be rejected on paper before anyone's time is spent on them. Again, my objections are not entirely philosophical. They are largely economic and, to an extent, environmental.

Or we could just update the goddamned immigration laws to put some real teeth behind them for employers and landlords that knowingly deal with illegal immigrants.

As for jus soli, they're clearly not foreign diplomats, they're not tourists, and last time I checked we weren't at war with anyone, although I'd hardly hold it against the President for trying to withhold citizenship from a child named Jihad born to two Iranians who walked over from Mexico waving an ISIS flag. There is nothing in the common law exceptions which rules out immigrants, even illegal ones. In fact, it seems to me that if you end birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants, you'd have to end it for everyone here legally, maybe even creep on up the ladder to naturalized citizens. After all, many of them retain dual citizenship. And what about naturally-born Americans who have dual citizenship by birth or parentage in a foreign country? See the slope here and how slippery it is, and how impossible it is to draw lines on the issue?

Then again, if Paul Ryan is saying he can't do what he wants here, this is probably not something we need to worry about. It's just another bit of fluffing from Trump to make sure his base is fully agitated coming into the election. They're still losing the House.

Quite the contrary, the third exception fits perfectly for those who violated the countries laws to gain entry.  The concept of "under the jurisdiction thereof" represents a volitional pact between the person in the country and the country of origin for the person to reasonably submit to our jurisdiction and the country to allow them entry not just a random illegal playing red rover red rover with border patrol gents while his wife is 9 months pregnant in the back of a van somewhere that is ultimately subject to our laws and or deportation.  

As for "streamline the process" are you kidding me?  There are ALREADY 700k cases on backlog and we get tens of thousands more each year.  Not to mention that we don't have the room and the infrastructure to hold the people coming into the country to even make it to a hearing.  We are already talking about tent cities etc. etc. etc.  No one making the economic argument about 25 billion for the wall (a rounding error in the federal budget) actually takes into account the actual cost of truly processing everyone that we CATCH coming across the border, expanding border patrol to actually stop more people from crossing, the cost of drug treatment, internal law enforcement, and the 2.4 billion plus we already spend on social services for the roughly 300-400k children of illegal immigrants that are born in this country each year.  The Healthcare costs alone justify a physical barrier.

---