Despite the talk of repealing the 14th Amendment that has been proliferating at Tea Party rallies, in the media and even in our statehouses and Congress, such a repeal is a most inadequate idea.
While it’s true that this would end our terrible “anchor baby” problem, and would make certain that the children of our illegal workforce grow up as bound by fear and lack of opportunity as their parents, to accomplish this by abolishing the 14th Amendment would also have the undesirable consequences of removing the “personhood” of our corporations.
The “equal justice” section of the 14th Amendment has been used by recent Supreme Court decisions to ensure that corporations enjoy all the same constitutional rights that we human persons do. And if corporations (as well as Mexican babies) lost their status as “people,” they would no longer be able to write our legislation and fund our political system which, obviously, would soon cause our free democracy to collapse.
No, a much better solution to the problem of illegal workers and their anchor-baby children would be to repeal the 13th Amendment and reinstitute slavery. This would replace anchor babies with ball-and-chain babies and, better yet, reduce their parents from underpaid status to no-pay status.
An additional benefit would be that desperate foreigners would quickly stop illegal entry into the “land of the free,” and would only come in as needed, when they were bought and paid for.
Steve Coffman
Dundee
