Colorlines

    A coalition of conservative state legislators made shocking headlines Wednesday as they unveiled a coordinated effort to deny citizenship rights to the children of undocumented immigrants and force a reconsideration of the 14th Amendment. The bracing new campaign follows the shifting geography of the fight over immigration policy. With Congress having failed to pass any immigration reform bill, the debate’s center has moved to the state and local level, where anti-immigration laws and ordinances have flourished in the past decade and will likely intensify in the next two years.

    Conservative local lawmakers have consistently pointed to Washington’s inaction on immigration enforcement when passing new anti-immigrant laws. But ironically, the shift is driven largely by Washington’s active devolution of immigration enforcement to state and local law enforcement over the past several years. The Obama administration has continued that trend. The result is that the country is now covered in a lattice work of increasingly hostile localized laws and practices that are fueling an intensifying confrontation between immigrant rights advocates and anti-immigrant policy makers in state and local governments. 

A New Line of Attack

    Yesterday’s coordinated announcement by state legislators, many of whom are affiliated with the group State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), an arm of the anti-immigrant group FAIR, opens up a new point of conflict at the state level. Legislators in 14 states said they intended to challenge the 14th amendment’s guarantee of immediate citizenship for anyone born in the United States. Ultimately, the group hopes that state laws, which would refuse to recognize children of undocumented immigrant as citizens, will push the birthright citizenship issue to the courts.

    “All we’re asking for is for these bills to prompt the Supreme Court to re-evaluate what we believe is an erroneous interpretation of the 14th Amendment,” said Arizona state Rep. John Kavanagh.

    The lawmakers and their backers also believe that the law will remove an incentive for immigration, arguing that people come to the United States to birth they’re children. The laws, if passed, would create a two tiered system in which the children of undocumented immigrants would be granted different birth certificates.

    It’s unclear how many states will adopt the birthright citizenship proposals but the announcement has now pushed the once outlandish question of reconsidering the 14th Amendment into the policy arena. And on the same day as the state legislators’ declaration, Iowa Rep. Steve King dropped his own federal bill to revoke birthright citizenship through statute. He told Politico, “We need to address anchor babies. This isn’t what our founding fathers intended.”

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