Governor Walker on Who Should Be Considered an American

From Washington Post:

GOP presidential hopeful Scott Walker said Monday that children of illegal immigrants who are born in the United States should not automatically receive U.S. citizenship.

Then some clarification, kind of.

… When asked whether he believes any person born on U.S. soil should be considered a U.S. citizen, Walker responded: “Well, again, I think before we start talking about anything else beyond securing the border, enforcing the laws and having a legal immigration system that gives priority to American working families. Americans aren’t going to trust politicians that talk about other things until they feel confident that they’re going to do those things.”

I can imagine implementation of laws to determine who is or is not a legal resident will be conducted in an equally nondiscriminatory and equitable fashion, paying no heed to race, religion, and creed, under a Walker administration…but I can do so only under the influence of the proper hallucinogenic drugs, of course.

The Governor is not necessarily advocating deportation of said children of undocumented immigrants:

Hunt then asked Walker whether the U.S. should deport the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, at which point Walker said: “I didn’t say that — I said you have to enforce the law, which to me is focusing on e-verify,” a system by which employers can check the citizenship status of potential employees.

Apparently, the children would be allowed to remain in the US, in a stateless and illegal status.

Update, 8/19 1PM Pacific: The irrepressible W.C. Varones who was worrying about hyperinflation before dollar debasement (still waitin’ for either) argues that citizenship on the basis of location of birth (essentially Jus Soli) is a minority approach in developed economies. In order to assess this assertion, I tallied population in OECD countries implementing unrestricted and restricted and mixed Jus Soli, and compared against total OECD population. The respective figures are 763.8 million population, out of OECD total 1274.7 million (60%).

Of course, this calculation is irrelevant to the main point of the post — whether one believes a Walker administration would tally up who is or is not a child of a “legitimate” US citizen, for assessing citizenship according to Jus Sanguinis (citizenship on the basis of parent’s or parents’ citizenship). It seems to me a literal interpretation would require one to track backwards in time to the founding of the Republic who was or was not a citizen at the time. In principle, if one’s parents were both “illegals”, or if one were descended from a long line of “illegals” perhaps broadly defined, one could be an “illegal” even if one’s parent, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-great-grandparents were born in the US. This seems unlikely, but a narrowly defined interpretation of how citizenship is conferred by Jus Sanguinis would seem to allow this possibility.

Heck, if we went to this approach, we could determine citizenship on the basis of language/ethnicity. Perhaps this is the subtext of the assault on Jus Soli implicit in various Republican presidential candidates’ calls for an end of what they call “anchor babies” — it’s just the thin edge of a broader based approach of stripping citizenship from a larger group of perceived undesirables.

For reference to similar approaches in the past, see “Exclusion Laws”, which retroactively de facto eliminated some individual’s citizenship.