Washington Post (Editorial)
October 5, 2015
THE
14TH Amendment, ratified in 1868, states plainly that citizenship is
automatically conferred on anyone born in the United States. Lately the
state of Texas, blinded
to the law by its antipathy to illegal immigrants, has determined that
it is somehow exempt from that provision of the Constitution.
In
an act of stunning official arrogance, the state has been refusing to
issue birth certificates to increasing numbers of Texas-born children
whose parents are undocumented
immigrants. Without birth certificates, the children face barriers to
being enrolled in day care and school, receiving Medicaid benefits —
even being baptized.
The
children, who so far number in the hundreds and possibly the thousands,
are U.S. citizens. Yet by refusing to issue them birth certificates, on
the pretext that their
parents’ documents — including passports and photo IDs issued by
Mexican consulates — do not meet the state’s standards, Texas is in
effect making them stateless non-persons, devoid of rights and
privileges.
No
other state has pursued such a pernicious campaign against the
blameless American-born children of immigrants in this country
illegally. While half a dozen Republican
candidates have said they favor overturning the 14th Amendment’s
guarantee of birthright citizenship, only Texas has adopted policies
whose effect is to overturn it unilaterally.
The
state’s position is that it is enforcing long-standing rules governing
the documents it will accept from parents seeking to obtain birth
certificates from local registrars.
Acceptable documents include driver’s licenses, U.S. visas and
unexpired voter ID cards issued by Mexico and other countries.
Lacking
those documents, many undocumented immigrants in the past presented
local officials with photo IDs issued by the dozen or so Mexican
consulates in Texas. But in
the past couple of years, as Republicans took exception to President
Obama’s moves to temporarily protect some unauthorized immigrants from
deportation, Texas cracked down, declaring that registrars would no
longer accept consular cards from parents seeking
birth certificates for their children. Groups representing undocumented
immigrants and their children are suing the state in federal court.
Texas
officials say their interest is to fight fraud and identity theft,
insisting that Mexican consulates issue the photo IDs without
authenticating documents presented
by immigrants — an allegation Mexican officials strongly deny. Many
other states accept the consular cards as valid IDs.
In
any event, if Texas will not accept the consular cards, it is obliged
to find some other means of issuing birth certificates to children born
in the state; their parents’
immigration status is irrelevant. On Friday, lawyers representing some
60 undocumented parents and their children asked a federal judge to
compel the state to issue the birth certificates.
Texas’s
position subjects children and their parents to a Kafkaesque hall of
mirrors. Officially, the state acknowledges that the children are U.S.
citizens. It says their
birth certificates are in the state’s database. But without issuing
those certificates, it leaves certain immigrants unable to prove that
they are their children’s parents and children unable to prove that they
exist in any official capacity. That’s not governance;
it’s harassment and oppression.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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