Due to recent events in the USA, there has been discussion against becoming a citizen by being born in that country.
Generally, is the a problem with jus soli and what is the alternative?
Jus soli citizenship is mostly an issue because it allows people who have no ties to the country they’re in to have a child who is a citizen of that country on the basis of having been born in that country. 33 countries have jus soli citizenship, and of those, 31 are located in the Americas. Much of the rest of the world employs the alternative to jus soli, jus sanguinis, or birthright by descent.
America has both, actually. If your parents are American citizens, then no matter where in the world you’re born, you’re an American citizen. This was the original system, with our jus soli system coming into play after our Civil War. Before, we excluded the Africans we brought over as slaves from citizenship. When the government said enough of that, the southeastern part of the current nation (and the entire southern part of the country at that time) fought a war to preserve slavery, and tore the country apart for 4 years. In the end, the Southerners were defeated on the battlefield, but it wasn’t clear they would submit completely (and frankly, it is still not clear they will submit to this day!) so the northern victors amended our constitution with a new set of guidelines on what being an American meant and specific instructions on how an American is made: “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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This was designed to keep the slave states from dicking over their new free Blacks by trying to declare they weren’t citizens. This amendment makes clear that not only are they citizens, everyone is entitled to the same rights. This was a major bone of contention, and Southerners have had long-standing beef with it, but weren’t in a position to do anything about it considering they lost a war over it.
If you haven’t noticed, America has an awful lot of very awful people, who have managed to get one of their own elected. They want to relitigate the Civil War and have been playing the long game in regards to that war and the relitigation. They want to renounce jus soli citizenship so they can ‘deport’ the American citizens born from non-citizen parents. While there is some justification in discussing birth tourism, the goal isn’t to prevent non-Americans from having American babies. The goal is to oppress and re-enslave ‘inferior’ races. These are the kind of people who will gladly try to strip citizenship from Blacks, because it has been their goal since 1865, when they lost the Civil War.
Plenty of other countries have it and almost all of them are in the “New World”. Jus soli was just another way of motivating people to migrate and integrate to the “New World”.
New World?
The Americas. Europe, Africa and Asia are the “Old World”.
So, I’m gathering the issue with jus soli is basically racism, correct? And the goal is to reintroduce jus sanguinis then strip the right of those who “weren’t supposed to have been citizens in the first place”?
That’s my take, at least. Jus Soli was implemented in the USA because Jus Sanguinis was going to be the racists’ next tool to shit on Blacks, who were seen as animals to be used up and then discarded. We did a shit job of stopping this with Reconstruction, so here we are. We’ll need to take the gloves off for these people, and punch them in the face (figuratively at least) until they get the idea that it’s not cool to treat other people like shit.
I suppose people just dislike the idea of ‘anchor babies’. That is, if you’re going to illegally enter a country, you should be pregnant (or take a pregnant wife with you) so that when they’re born the state has to decide if it wants to deport the parents of an American citizen. That probably the emotional resistance to it. At least I’ve not heard people have problems with it in the context of legal migrants who start life in America, marry and have kids who are then citizens…
What would be the solution? Because illegal immigration is going to continue happening anyway. Jus soli would have to be replaced by something else.
A callous proposal would be deportation of parents and baby after birth if both parents are illegal immigrants. But that would only drive illegal immigrants to give birth outside of hospitals and without proper care and probably send mortality up.
I don’t think there’s an easy solution. There are a lot of people who don’t regard tolerating illegal entry in any form to be a workable solution. I should think they disagree with you over whether illegal crossing can be stopped. They just regard the punishment to not be high enough. Callous as you say. But I should think they’d regard the toleration of undocumented crossings that a tiny minority of are criminals evading detection is also callous on the people that suffer as a result.
I personally think more liberal but documented movement in tiers is a solution. But I don’t think the status quo of what America had been doing - tolerating illegal crossings and toying with the idea of naturalising undocumented people - was a solution because the writing was on the wall for a long time that America was democratically moving against it. The catastrophe that’s currently happening is the result.
Some people just don’t regard illegally entering a country to be a misdemeanor, rather they regard it as a serious offence. Such stances are usually as emotional as they are reasonable. But so is most politics…
The alternative is fucking chaos for a lot of people. If we dropped jus soli and every country had inheritance of citizenship that’d be fine but that isn’t the case.