Americans Overwhelmingly Support Birthright Citizenship

The chart above is from the Reuters / Ipsos Poll -- done between April 15th and 20th of a nationwide sample of 4,557 adults, with a 2 point margin of error.

 

Some Interesting Charts On Births And Deaths In The United States

 

From The Washington Post

Republicans Want U.S. Women To Have More (White) Children

Last year the average number of births to women in the United States was about 1.62. That was a slight increase of about 1%. But no one expects the rate to continue increasing, and that rate is still far below the number needed just to maintain the current population (2.1 per woman). And it has been many years since the U.S. had a 2.1 or better rate.

So, how has the U.S. population kept increasing? Immigration! 

But Republicans don't want immigrants entering this country. Most immigrants are non-white, and Republicans want to keep the country with a white majority. That's why they are allowing Trump to conduct his war on (mainly non-white) immigrants.

Republicans think if they cut off immigration and convince American women to have more children, they can delay (or eliminate) the time when the U.S. becomes a majority non-white population. And they are trying to come up with ideas to induce American women to have more babies.

One of the ideas is to give women a $5,000 check for each baby born. Evidently, they think American women are stupid. That $5,000 is only a tiny fraction of what it takes to raise a child in the United States - around $200,000.

Another idea is to give women who have at least six children a medal. Does anyone (except a brain dead Republican) really think any woman would have six children just to get a medal?

These ludicrous ideas wouldn't work anyway. Note the chart above. White women have a lower child birth rate than any other racial group (about 50 per 1,000 women). Even if immigration was completely eliminated, the white population would continue to diminish with each passing year.

If they were smart, Republicans would alter their policies to help all races flourish in this country - and help all families to meet societal needs. I doubt that will happen - too many Republicans cling to the racist dream of a continuing white majority.

Whether Republicans want to admit it or not, we need immigration. Immigrants keep our population stable, do jobs Americans don't want, pay billions in taxes, and contribute to this country in many other ways.

We are a nation built on immigration - and cutting off new immigrant arrivals is a stupid idea that will never work!

Are Rural People More "Traditional" Than Urban People?

 

Rural voters tend to favor Republicans, while urban voters tend to favor Democrats. Some think this makes rural people more "traditional" than urban people. But the facts don't bear that out. Consider this article by Shelley Clark and Matthew M. Brooks in The Washington Post.

The Trump administration recently issued new guidelines for the Transportation Department, surprisingly prioritizing spending and infrastructure for “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” In other words, communities with large traditional families. We know what you’re probably thinking: That means rural and small-town America — presumably President Donald Trump’s core constituency — will disproportionately benefit from these funds.

But you could very well be wrong.

Many Americans still imagine rural communities as bastions of tradition, where marriage is widespread and families with lots of children abound. A quarter-century ago, these perceptions would have been largely correct. They no longer are.

Our research shows that over the past three decades, among women ages 15 to 44, marriage rates have fallen much faster for rural women and girls than for their urban counterparts. Between 1988 and 2018, the proportion of rural women who were married fell from 55 percent to 33 percent. Marriage among urban women also declined but to a lesser degree.

At the same time, cohabitation has risen more sharply and divorce has declined more slowly in rural America. By 2018, rural women were more likely than urban women to be in an unmarried, cohabiting partnership (19 percent vs. 14 percent). The proportion of women who have never married has also increased steadily for both rural and urban women. And although the proportion of urban women who have never married remains slightly higher, this is mainly because urban women marry at older ages.

Childbearing in the United States has fallen overall, but the “baby bust” has been larger among rural women. Although they still have slightly more children than urban women, a substantially higher share of rural children (54 percent) than urban children (45 percent) are born outside marriage. This is a significant change from years past. In 2002, the reverse was true. These rapid transformations in both marriage and nonmarital childbearing help explain why many rural residents and politicians are inclined to think the traditional family is under threat.

These changes in marriage and childbearing shape the family structures children are raised in, which has implications for their well-being. In a forthcoming study, we show that between 2005 and 2022, the proportion of rural children living with two married parents declined at more than twice the rate of urban children. White, Black and Hispanic children in rural areas were all affected by this decline, while at the same time the proportion of urban White children living with married parents remained stable, and the proportion of urban Black children living with married parents rose. There are now sizable rural-urban gaps in the percentage of White children living with married parents across all regions, ranging from 5.7 percentage points in the Midwest to 12.3 percentage points in the Northeast.

These findings suggest that using marriage and family size as the criteria for transportation funding is likely to disadvantage rural regions. There are more straightforward reasons, based on equity and common sense, to support rural transportation. Those who live in rural America have to travel greater distances to access necessities: school, health care, child care, work, even groceries. Effective infrastructure can reduce these costly geographic barriers.

Other policies could strengthen rural families themselves. Our study identifies two main reasons for lower rates of marriage and higher rates of childbearing outside marriage in rural areas: rural women’s lower educational levels (20.2 percent of rural women hold a bachelor’s degree vs. 33.2 percent of urban women) and lower rural household income (62.9 percent of rural vs. 50.5 percent of urban households earn less than $50,000). These results should not be surprising. It is well-established that there is a strong positive association between higher education and income and higher marriage rates and more children born within marriage.

Policies that expand access to higher education or create better-paying jobs, with family-friendly policies that include regular work schedules, parental leave and child care, would help alleviate the chronic strain rural families face. Rural communities and the scholars who study them have been clamoring for these types of programs and supports since at least the 1980s.

Moralistic prioritizing of traditional marriage over other types of families doesn’t produce sensible transportation policy. Nor does it generate effective rural development strategies. Instead of arbitrary decisions on infrastructure funding based on outdated stereotypes about small-town family life, we need policies based on sound social science data to support rural families’ real needs.

Trump Wants To Eliminate Birthright Citizenship - Can He Do It?

 The following is part of a post at PolitiFact.com by Louis Jacobson:

During his first major interview since winning the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump reiterated a promise he’s made multiple times: He will try to eliminate birthright citizenship, the longstanding practice of conferring citizenship on anyone born in the United States, even when the parents are noncitizens. 

Birthright citizenship’s legal underpinnings

The notion of birthright citizenship can be traced to 1608 with Calvin’s Case, a British decision that became part of the common law adopted in the U.S. legal system’s early days. Calvin’s Case granted subjectship — a British concept that has since evolved into citizenship — to all children born in Scotland except those of diplomats and enemy troops in hostile occupation.

Three key pieces of legal precedent underpin birthright citizenship, scholars say.

First, there’s the 14th Amendment, which says that "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."

This amendment, ratified in 1868, "was unquestionably intended to cover the children of unauthorized migrants, namely the children of enslaved persons brought here by criminals after the prohibition of the slave trade," said Gabriel (Jack) Chin, a University of California, Davis, law professor.

Second, there’s the 1898 Supreme Court decision known as the Wong Kim Ark case. Wong Kim Ark, a laborer, was born in 1873 in San Francisco. His parents were Chinese and lived legally in the United States. 

Around age 17, Wong left to visit China and returned to the United States without incident. Then, around age 21, he left again to visit China, but at the end of that trip, he was denied reentry to the United States because the collector of customs argued he was not a U.S. citizen. (This was no small distinction — it was the era of anti-Asian strictures known as the Chinese Exclusion Act.)

In its 6-2 majority decision, the Supreme Court’s justices ruled that Wong — and others born on United States soil, with a few clear exceptions — qualified for citizenship under the 14th Amendment.

"The Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens. … The Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States," the court’s majority wrote in its decision.

Third, there’s a 1952 statute (8 U.S. Code § 1401) that echoes the 14th Amendment’s language . "The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth: (a) a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof," the statute partly reads.

Peter J. Spiro, a Temple University Law School professor, said a strong argument for continuing birthright citizenship is that "that's how we've done it for more than a century now. The historical practice is well entrenched: The children of undocumented parents have always been extended birth citizenship. The practice has been uniform and, until recently, uncontested."

Birthright citizenship also includes people born abroad to U.S. citizens, but Trump has not indicated he would target that provision.

Could birthright citizenship be overturned by executive order?

The notion that an executive order could overturn birthright citizenship is dubious, legal experts said.

"If it's mandated by the Constitution, it can only be undone by a constitutional amendment," Spiro said. "If it's mandated by statute, it can only be undone by a subsequent statute. It's only if it's mandated by neither that (a president) could do it by executive order."

The most Trump could do on his own is sign an executive order with the expectation that opponents would sue to block its implementation, University of Pennsylvania law professor Kermit Roosevelt said. Then, birthright citizenship’s fate would be in the courts’ hands, potentially all the way up to the Supreme Court.

The president would effectively be "offering his interpretation" in an executive order, and this "tees up the lawsuit that will get the Supreme Court to rule, once and for all, what it means," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that generally supports tighter immigration.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a Cornell Law School professor specializing in immigration law, said that while the Supreme Court generally defers to presidents on immigration matters because they involve sovereignty and foreign affairs, "I don’t see how even this Supreme Court would allow a president to revoke a constitutional amendment through an executive order. Such a ruling would endanger all constitutional amendments."