Center For Immigration Studies Report on Immigrant Births

A new analysis of birth records by the Center for Immigration Studies shows that, in 2002, almost one in four births in the United States was to an immigrant mother (legal or illegal), the highest level in American history. In addition, nearly ten percent of all births in the country were to “illegal alien” mothers. The Center uses this report (1) to challenge birth-right citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment, with the citizenship language in question designed to overrule the Dred Scott decision; and (2) to claim (like Samuel Huntington) that birth-right citizenship is undermining immigrant assimilation. http://www.cis.org/articles/2005/back805.html

One might have thought, as Dan Kowalski pointed out to me, that Lucy Salyer’s great chapter in Immigration Stories (2005) on the Supreme Court’s decision in Wong Kim Ark v. United States (1898) would have put this issue to rest.