Today’s read

Before linking to today’s recommended reading, let me pass along something I saw online yesterday:

“Ironic that Democrats are screaming about #BirthrightCitizenship when they obviously believe no one has a #RightToBirth.”

Indeed.  On to today’s thoughts, courtesy of The American Mind:

The compassion directed towards illegal border crossers is often understandable, but confused. Compassion is used as a lever for advocacy of open borders and the elimination of citizenship. Instead of citizenship, many of those who are protesting the treatment of children at the border support “universal personhood”—the idea that universal persons rather than citizens should inhabit a borderless, homogeneous world state…

No nation is sovereign if it cannot control its borders and have full authority to determine who can become citizens. More than a century ago, the Supreme Court announced what was considered the commonsense understanding of the matter when it remarked that “it is an accepted maxim of international sovereignty, and essential to self-preservation, to forbid the entrance of foreigners within its dominions, or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe.” Today’s progressive liberals, however, no longer consider self-preservation a rational goal. To them, in fact, it is now an act of injustice. Self-preservation and safety must give way to openness and diversity, even if it exposes the nation to danger and undermines its sovereignty.

If illegal borders crossers can confer the boon of American citizenship upon children born to them while they are illegally in the country, they can create citizens without the consent of the nation in violation of its sovereignty.

Citizenship without consent erases borders; it is a step toward a borderless world. But this will be a world where citizenship is superfluous; “universal persons” will inevitably be subjects (or clients) of the administrative state that will govern the world order. The world homogeneous state, however, will dispense with the inconvenience of having to rest its powers on the consent of the governed, because it will not be a constitutional government but an administrative tyranny. In this future world state there will be no citizens, only subjects.

The world is rapidly lapsing into chaos and tyranny, where only a few stable constitutional governments hold out prospects for survival. These governments cannot be the last refuge for those fleeing violence, terror, poverty and the host of other ills that afflict the world. If they insist on doing so—if they insist on erasing borders in the pursuit of that goal, they too will dissolve into dysfunction. The nation-state is the last refuge of freedom and constitutional government. It requires not only wise choices, but difficult ones.

Read the entire piece at the link.  Humanist globalism is an effort to drown traditional Christianity and Biblically-inspired forms of government in the mass of world cultures that throughout history have rejected both.

Another step in the right direction

Yesterday I made note of President Trump’s decision to deploy 5,000 military personnel to support the Border Patrol as an increasing number of crowds of migrants head toward our frontier.  It’s worth noting the latest group to storm across the Guatemala-Mexico border, headed north, appears to be armed:

The second migrant caravan, believed to be armed with bombs and guns, crossed into Mexico on Monday despite a huge police presence.

Hundreds of migrants following in the footsteps of the first caravan heading to the U.S. border crossed a river from Guatemala.

The second group back at the Guatemalan frontier has been more unruly than the first that crossed. Guatemala’s Interior Ministry said Guatemalan police officers were injured when the migrant group broke through border barriers on Guatemala’s side of the bridge.

Mexico authorities said migrants attacked its agents with rocks, glass bottles and fireworks when they broke through a gate on the Mexican end but were pushed back, and some allegedly carried guns and firebombs.

More Americans need to be asking how these groups of hundreds and thousands are making a trek of more than 1,000 miles to “El Norte.”  Anyone familiar with military movement knows such a mass of humanity requires considerable logistics support.  Who is paying for all of this?  Why aren’t they being identified and pressured to stop?

Here’s what’s going to happen: when this wave of people reaches the U.S. border, they will be abandoned by their enablers.  Whoever is behind this is not going to fund returning these people to their countries of origin.  They will expect the situation to cause migrants to try desperately to get across the border by force, or else form huge squalid camps of squatters.  Either way, they expect video that will play on heartstrings to get their way.  Again.  The question is whether our nation has the will to say “no means no.”

It appears at least the President may.  Word is that he plans to attack one of the main motivations for these groups: “birthright citizenship:”

President Trump plans to sign an executive order that would remove the right to citizenship for babies of non-citizens and unauthorized immigrants born on U.S. soil, he said yesterday…

John Eastman, a constitutional scholar and director of Chapman University’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, told “Axios on HBO” that the Constitution has been misapplied over the past 40 or so years. He says the line “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” originally referred to people with full, political allegiance to the U.S. — green card holders and citizens.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that children born to immigrants who are legal permanent residents have citizenship. But those who claim the 14th Amendment should not apply to everyone point to the fact that there has been no ruling on a case specifically involving undocumented immigrants or those with temporary legal status.

If Trump follows through on the executive order, “the courts would have to weigh in in a way they haven’t,” Eastman said.

And that is a legal fight well worth picking.  I fully agree with Eastman that the 14th Amendment has been misapplied — abused, really — to twist our legal system into knots over a number of issues.  Historical context clearly shows the citizenship clause was designed to clarify the status of former slaves after the Civil War.  Virtually no other country in the world has a system where a pregnant woman can illegally enter the country, have a baby that’s automatically a citizen, then use that “anchor” baby’s status to sponsor scores of relatives into said country.  That’s demographic invasion by stealth, which is precisely what’s been going on the last half century.

I’ve said before that we give away citizenship and the privileges of voting far too cheaply.  Our current system provides huge incentive for people to make the hazardous journey to enter our country illegally.  If birthright citizenship were properly abolished, it’s likely few people would continue to pay large sums to shady “coyotes” to be smuggled across the border, often to be abandoned to die in the desert on the other side.

Leftists will accuse our country of heartlessness if we both secure the border and dismantle birthright citizenship.  In fact, we’ll be removing incentives that have led innumerable people to risk their lives — often losing — to cross our border.

These steps are long overdue.  The time is also right to ask the Supreme Court to finally rule on the issue, as there are two new members (Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) who respect the Constitution in its original context.  If Trump is successful in repelling the current invasion and getting a Supreme Court ruling abolishing the misguided concept of birthright citizenship for illegal aliens, he will have earned a spot in the pantheon of our greatest presidents.

Who’d have imagined it?