Citizenship: jus sanguinis is the right way

[Lou Bricano]

/jus sanguinis/ means "right of blood," while /jus soli/ means "right of the
soil/. /jus sanguinis/ means a person acquires citizenship of a country at
birth if one of his parents is a citizen of that country. /jus soli/ means a
person acquires citizenship of a country merely by being born on the territory
(soil) of that country. *Both* are forms of birthright citizenship, i.e., the
person acquires citizenship at birth and does not need to go through a
naturalization process. People who believe that "birthright citizenship" means
only /jus soli/ are wrong.

/jus soli/ is bad policy, which is why nearly all developed civilized countries
that ever had it have abandoned it. The large majority of European countries
never had it. In recent memory, the UK, Ireland and France had it, and *all*
have abandoned it, starting with the UK in 1983. Today, the entirety of Europe
follows /jus sanguinis/, as do Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
New Zealand is the latest country in this list to switch from /jus soli/ to /jus
sanguinis/, starting in 2006; see
http://www.nzlii.org/nz/journals/VUWLawRw/2013/33.pdf

/jus soli/ is bad policy because it violates the sovereign right and power of
the people — the citizens — of a country to decide who gets to become a citizen
if not one already. Aliens, whether lawfully present or not, should not have
the ability to "create" a new citizen of country not their own. Citizenship for
aliens should be possible only by the consent of the sovereign people. This is
a proper and *just* power. /jus sanguinis/ does not violate this principle,
because the citizens of a country have a right to have children, and the
children have a right to inherit the citizenship of the parents (*every* country
in the world recognizes this).

There is only one other advanced, i.e. developed and civilized, country in the
world that has /jus soli/ birthright citizenship, and that's Canada. And it is
a mistake. However, at least Canada has it based on a legislative act of the
duly elected government of the people. The U.S. has it by judicial diktat, and
it is an egregiously bad and wrong decision. The justice who wrote the Wong Kim
Ark atrocity, Horace Gray, not only got the history and development of American
citizenship law *completely* wrong (more on this below), but he contradicted his
own prior *correct* understanding of the citizenship clause that he wrote 14
years earlier in Elk v. Wilkins. In Elk, Gray correctly noted the debate in the
Senate judiciary committee in 1866 over the citizenship clause, in which the
author of the clause and several other senators agreed that the U.S.-born
children of *all* aliens, not only diplomats, were not to be considered citizens.

They agreed on this based on long discussion of the meaning of "subject to the
jurisdiction." Contrary to what Holman and other open borders advocates here
say, it does *not* mean merely subject to our laws. It means that and a lot
more. The committee members all agreed that it means owing the country *direct*
and unconditional allegiance. Any tourist passing through has to obey our laws
while present, but he owes the country no allegiance of any kind.

The Elk decision was about a Native American who had been born on an Indian
reservation, but then as an adult moved off it and took up residence in Omaha,
NE. Elk attempted to register to vote, claiming he was a citizen of the U.S.
under the citizenship clause, and the registrar refused to register him to vote.
Elk sued, the case went to the Supreme Court, and Gray ruled that Elk was
*not* born subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S., because at birth he did not
owe allegiance to the U.S. The citizenship clause to *this day* does not apply
to Native Americans. They are citizens by virtue of the Indian Citizenship Act
of 1924. You could look it up; I have, and so can you.

This is a very long, but excellent, elaboration of just how and why Gray got the
citizenship clause wrong:
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_22_2/tsc_22_2_buchanan.shtml.
The essence of it is that the founding of the United States made a complete
break with English common law regarding subjecthood. Colonial Americans were
born as subjects of the monarch, and under English common law, a subject could
not renounce that status and become a citizen or subject of another country. The
U.S. Constitution *expressly* gives Congress the power to confer citizenship via
naturalization, and by implication gives American citizens the right and power
to renounce their citizenship and become citizens of another country. Gray's
wretchedly wrong analysis basically made us all subjects again rather than
citizens. He just got it completely wrong.

It is simply intolerable that our citizenship regime has been dictated to us by
one judge via a horribly wrongly decided case. A small part of me hopes that if
Trump is (disastrously) reelected, he follows through on his pledge to "repeal"
/jus soli/ birthright citizenship by executive order. It will force a court
fight, and some court might overturn Wong Kim Ark. It's too bad that such a
case could not have come about while Antonin Scalia was alive, because he tipped
his hand in an earlier case, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which concerned a terrorist,
Yaser Esam Hamdi, captured in Afghanistan. Hamdi claimed U.S. citizenship
because he was born to Saudi parents in Louisiana. The court had an excellent
opportunity to reconsider Wong, but they blew it — they never considered the
threshold question of whether or not Hamdi was, in fact, a U.S. citizen. Scalia
tipped his hand on how he would have voted on that threshold question when he
referred to Hamdi a "a *presumed* American citizen."

[Klaus Schadenfreude]

[Default] On Thu, 1 Jun 2023 10:15:24 -0700, "Cunt Flaps" Canoza
typed:

>/jus sanguinis/ means "right of blood," while /jus soli/ means "right of the
>soil/.

What does "mail" mean?

[chuckle]