Birthright Citizenship Essay

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Senator Ted Cruz has stated if he were to be elected President of the United States of America his first courses of action would include working on a new immigration reform plan. The immigration reform plan he stated in his platform comprises of having birthright citizenship revoked (Cruz). Birthright citizenship is the legal right for all children born in a country 's territory, regardless of the legal status of the child 's parents, to have citizenship. This has been a subject undergoing intense evaluation this election year. Ted Cruz has stated that he is against birthright citizenship because “it makes no sense … to be providing the tremendous incentive of automatic citizenship to the children of those who enter illegally” (Cruz). Senator …show more content…

The removal of birthright citizenship means the United States will be full of people who are stateless (not recognized as a citizen of any country). At the moment, there are more than ten thousand stateless people living in the United States of America (Gonzalez). These people have no rights here and if they were to leave for another country they would still have no rights due to the fact that the only country they have lived in is the United States. If the U.S. were to have a larger amount of stateless people the country will be compared to countries like Myanmar or Thailand who have hundreds of thousands of stateless people (see chart to the left for more information)(Shatz). The U.S. must realize that if saving people in other countries is important, but saving people who live in this nation should be a priority. Stateless people legally have no options as to what they can do. If they are rejected by one country who is to say that other countries will not reject them also. Stateless people are unprotected and vulnerable and if the United States ended birthright citizenship the nation would be adding to a culture of cultureless …show more content…

Politicians and high profile people have been referring to these children as “anchor babies”. That phrase is offensive and insinuates that the child’s only purpose in life is to fix the papers of their illegal parents to allow them to stay in the U.S. It must be acknowledged that the children had no choice in how or where they were born and blaming/incriminating them will do nothing but create a dividing line within in United State citizens. This could create a larger issue. Citizens feeling as though they are more significant than others simply because their parents are legal citizens is silly. This situation has the potential have a similar reaction to the difficulties in ethnicities in the U.S. It should not matter how a person gains citizenship as long as they have it. To say one way of gaining citizenship is better than another is hypocritical because the only reason the majority of this nation’s citizens have citizenship is because their grandparents or parents migrated here. In actuality, their parents would be considered “anchor babies”. Alienating and dehumanizing a certain group is not what America stands for. There have been many movements to ensure equality for everyone. America welcomes all types of people with all different types of backgrounds because that is what this nation was built

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