Pennsylvania's HB 474 was sent on to the State Government committee in March. It would authorize " the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to join the Interstate Compact on Birth Certificates Issued to Aliens Not Subject to United States Jurisdiction; providing for the form of the compact; and imposing additional powers and duties on the Governor, the Secretary of the Commonwealth and the Compact."
The Interstate Compact seeks to deny privileges of U.S. citizenship to the U.S.‐born children of unauthorized immigrants. Because citizenship is within the purview of the federal government, and not the states, the proponents hope that doing so will ultimately trigger a Supreme Court review of the 14th Amendment.
The U. S. conference of Catholic Bishops opposes the repeal of birthright citizenship.
They state, through theirJustice for Immigrants campaign, that: "were birthright citizenship repealed, unauthorized immigration would not be significantly deterred. Instead, the numbers of unauthorized immigrants in the United States would increase dramatically – from the current 11 million to anywhere from 16 to 24 million or more – and there would be thousands of U.S.‐born children who would be rendered stateless – without citizenship – and unauthorized in the United States. These children – who have done nothing wrong by being born in the United States to unauthorized immigrant parents – would be punished by relegating them to second or third‐class members of U.S. society.And, it would place anundue burden onall Americans, eliminating easy proof of citizenship status through birth certificates, and replacing it with an onerous process of having to trace one’s family heritage and produce documentation of blood relations." (Emphasis is mine.)
Sponsors of HB 474 are: Reps. Scott Boyd, Paul Clymer, Jim Cox, Tom Creighton, Matt Gabler, Richard Geist, Adam Harris, Rob Kauffman, Jerry Knowles, Daryl Metcalfe, Ron Miller, Thomas Murt, Bernie O'Neill, Jeffrey Pyle, Kathy Rapp, Todd Rock, Curt Schroder and RoseMarie Swanger. (Cox, Gabler, Kauffman, Knowles and Metcalfe are all members of the State Government committee.)
Please contact them and oppose the Compact or any other measures to repeal birthright citizenship. ----- I've been thinking a lot about the way we will accept a person's labor without valuing or accepting the person doing the work. It seems to me that this really the heart of the desire to repeal birthright citizenship -- now, and back when the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment reversed Dred Scott v. Sandford (the 1857 decision in which the Supreme Court held that U.S.‐born persons of African descent were not citizens, thereby denying citizenship to slaves and freemen).
And because I've been thinking about this, I've been running into all manner of art that speaks to some aspect of "you can till my fields (wash my laundry, tend my lawn, cook my food) but you can't be born here or think to belong."
So, here is one, "Moving On Song: Go, Move, Shift," performed by Chris Wood, Karine Polwart and the MacColl brothers (my thanks to Terri Windling's the Drawing Board blog for introducing me to it). Written to reflect the treatment of Roma (Gypsies) and Travellers in Great Britain and Europe, it's words are distressingly apt to our discussions of birthright citizenship: "The work’s all done, it’s time that you were moving on … now you better get born someplace else."
Send me your links to poems, stories, music, visual art, etc. that speak in a special way to the efforts to repeal birthright citizenship or other issues surrounding the current immigration debate -- if I like them, I'll post them.
It is increasingly hard to tell the difference between the two.... Below is a list of all the bills that have been introduced to the PA legislature this session relating to immigration: HB 41: Requires applicants for a wide variety of public benefits to show government-issued ID to prove their legal status HB 355: An omnibus bill including provisions prohibiting human trafficking, requiring local law enforcement and agencies distributing public benefits to confirm legal immigration status, and mandating participation in E-Verify for public employers HB 361: Makes English the official language of Pennsylvania HB 379: Mandates E-Verify for public works contractors HB 380: Mandates E-Verify for construction industry employers HB 439: Imposes sanctions on employers that employ unauthorized immigrants HB 474: Creates a compact between states to issue a different birth certificate to children born here to undocumented immigrants, denying them birthright citizenship HB 526: Imposes mandatory sentences for offenses committed by undocumented immigrants HB 659:Amends the Public School Code to confirm that English is the sole language of Pennsylvania HB 738: Requires local law enforcement to check immigration status and communicate its findings to ICE, requires agencies distributing public benefits to verify immigration status HB 798: Requires law enforcement to check immigration status HB 799: Provides for a memorandum of understanding between the Commonwealth and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to enforce immigration law HB 801: Supports law enforcement authorities who detain people they believe to have questionable immigration status HB 857: Defines citizens of Pennsylvania to exclude children born here to undocumented parents HB 858: Mandates E-Verify for public contractors HB 888: Makes English the official language of the Commonwealth SB 9: Requires applicants for a wide variety of public benefits to show government-issued ID to prove their legal status SB 515: Allows law enforcement officials to verify citizenship of arrestees SB 637: Mandates E-Verify for public contractors Opportunities for advocacy to block punitive and harmful anti-immigrant measures in our commonwealth: http://www.paimmigrant.org/programs/state-leg-advocacy-campaign
Listen to this report through the end. Isn't two kinds of citizenship - one with rights, one without - exactly what the 14th Amendment was put in place to prevent?
You've stood with me through a lot of posts that outline the difficulties, the heartbreak, the stories of deportation and detention and immigrant lives shrouded in shadow. You've hung in there as I've railed and cried about the legislative failures surrounding the revision of existing, broken immigration laws and visa quotas. You've read about the DREAM Act and Arizona's anti-immigrant/anti-Hispanic law and efforts to repeal the 14th Amendment (more about that later). You've commented and sent me personal messages ranging from "now that's a downer - LOL - good post" to "Amen."
You deserve a happy post from me. So here it is -- my first in 2011 (and I hope that bodes well for the year).
If you're a regular reader of this blog you know that occasionally -- more occasionally than I'd like, anyway -- I ask you to follow a sort of Ariadne's thread of links, to sites deep in the labyrinth of web that have published my poetry or my speculative fiction. Tonight I'm sending you to a site that reviews just such work. If you click here, you'll get to read a review of the anthology that includes my story "Flying with the Dead."
Writers like me don't get a lot of chance to hear what readers think of their work. Not everyone who reads this blog comments on it, for example. It's tough sometimes to believe -- despite what Blogger and Lijit stats tell me -- that anyone's reading at all. Same thing with the poetry and fiction.
Except then somebody will comment on a post.
Or, in this case, someone will write a lovely review of my story and I'll sit at the computer reading -- with gratitude, and some wonder too, in my heart. Because just like all the immigration advocacy and stories I subject you to here -- the fiction too is really a conversation with whomever reads the story. And I love when it is reciprocal.
And, yes, even in fiction you don't get away from my focus on the lives of immigrants: "Flying with the Dead" has its fantastical elements, but its bones are real.
I'd love it if this blog post and the review I've linked would provide the impetus for you to purchase the Crossed Genres Year Two anthology (it's for sale at Createspace and Amazon) or to support online magazines like Crossed Genres and The Portal. Small, indie magazines like these are a lot like immigration advocates -- they work very hard to widen the variety of voices we get to hear -- and they deserve support.
Plus, they make me dance a jig.
Next post: Did you know 7 states are targeting birthright citizenship? (Click here to read.)
By the way, the great photo at the top of this post has nothing, whatever, to do with fiction or immigration. I just like it because it is so evocative. It comes straight out of CS&T photographer Sarah Webb's portfolio of images. Lovely, isn't it? Check out her photos at cst-phl.com.
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), likely chair of a House subcommittee on immigration in the next Congress, has vowed to take on the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship by jussoli ("right of the soil") for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. In an interview with a columnist for Iowa's Cityview (http://dmcityview.com/2010/11/18/columns/mercury.html) King is quoted as saying:
“The framers did not consider the babies of illegals when they framed the 14th amendment because we didn’t have immigration law at the time so they could not have wanted to confer automatic citizenship on the babies of people who were unlawfully in the United States,” King said.
The 14th Amendment was adopted on July 9, 1868 (one of the "Reconstruction Amendments" adopted immediately after the Civil War) guaranteeing (male) former slaves and their descendants the same rights to birthright citizenship as white American men. Setting aside for a moment any other objections to King's comment, let's just consider that a percentage of the population of the undocumented in the U.S. are the victims (and children of the victims) of modern day slavery - human trafficking - and precisely the contemporary equivalent of who the framers of the 14th sought to guarantee citizenship for. The U.S. Department of State reports:
"The United States is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced labor, debt bondage, and forced prostitution ... Trafficking occurs primarily for labor and most commonly in domestic servitude, agriculture, manufacturing, janitorial services, hotel services, construction, health and elder care, hair and nail salons, and strip club dancing. Vulnerabilities remain even for legally documented temporary workers who typically fill labor needs in the hospitality, landscaping, construction, food service, and agricultural industries. In some human trafficking cases, workers are victims of fraudulent recruitment practices and have incurred large debts for promised employment in the United States, which makes them susceptible to debt bondage and involuntary servitude ... combined federal and state human trafficking information indicates that more investigations and prosecutions have taken place for sex trafficking offenses than for labor trafficking offenses, but law enforcement identified a comparatively higher number of labor trafficking victims as such cases often involve more victims." (http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2010/142761.htm)
Moreover, the report states that the primary countries of origin for victims of human trafficking are virtually indistinguishable from the primary countries of origin for non-trafficked undocumented immigrants who have crossed borders or overstayed visas:
"Primary countries of origin for foreign victims certified by the U.S. government were Thailand, Mexico, Philippines, Haiti, India, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. Eighty-two percent of these foreign adult victims and 56 percent of foreign child trafficking victims were labor trafficking victims. " (http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2010/142761.htm)
Humantrafficking.org estimates that 17,000+ people are trafficked to the U.S. annually, but all sources of statistics agree trafficking is vastly under reported - and sometimes impossible to distinguish from non-trafficked undocumented immigration. Even in King's implied narrow interpretation of 14th Amendment, a determination of trafficked vs. non-trafficked immigration would have to be made before birthright citizenship was denied to a U.S.-born child of an undocumented person - a logistical and financial (and ethical) nightmare.
Also according to Cityview:
"King wants Congress to pass a ban on 'anchor babies,' place it in statute, and wait for the other side to challenge the prohibition in the courts. If King and his forces lose, they’ll move for a constitutional amendment to change the practice, he said."
I'm moved to think about this as the nation is about to celebrate Thanksgiving - a holiday that commemorates our nation's history of uninvited and undocumented immigration. I have no idea of King's heritage (nor do I care) but unless he is a registered member of one of the Native American/American Indian nations, he doesn't get to use the term "anchor baby" without acknowledging the irony and sheer hubris of it. The vast majority of us are the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren of "anchor babies." Yes, even charter members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and those who trace antecedents to the Mayflower, the Nina, Pinta and Santa MarÃa or any of the European sailing vessels that landed on the shores of the "New World." Jussoli is the only reason many Americans can claim citizenship.
The photo at the top of this post is from one my family's Thanksgiving dinner prep several years ago. I wrote back then how significant it was to me that at that dinner, the family who sat around the table included Britons and Americans born in Mexico, Guatemala, Thailand and New York; the children of Bengali and Guatemalan immigrants; the grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of Greek, German, Welsh and Spanish immigrants.
My own father was what King so disrespectfully calls an anchor baby. My grandparents were in transition from Greece to Cuba to Colombia when my father was born. Who knows what my grandparents' documentation status was - things were done differently then and what I've seen of the official correspondence between my grandfather and consulates leaves much in the dark. But my father was born in Chicago, Ill. - as we say in Spanish, a mucha honra - to his great pride. An American citizen. A veteran of World War II and the Korean War. A Northwestern U. graduate. The CEO of a multinational corporation. A lifelong Chicago Cubs fan. A man who contributed to building up the nation in countless ways.
I'd put my father's bonafides up there against King's any day. And yet, were my father to be born after King takes up the chairmanship of the House's immigration committee, the Iowa representative would propose to deny my father his right to citizenship.
I'm no constitutional scholar (nor even much of a historian) but it seems to me that King's desire to rescind birthright citizenship for a certain "kind" of person born on this soil directly contradicts the intent of Abraham Lincoln and others who sought, through the 14th Amendment, to prevent two types of existence in our nation - one free, the other enslaved.
This Thanksgiving when my immediate family gathers around the long, scarred farm table that holds our board, I will pray in memory of my forebears and in hope for my daughter and her children, that in years to come we come to recognize that not all gifts come wrapped in familiar paper.
"State Legislators for Legal Immigration has been formed to serve as a unifying force to bring all levels of government together to terminate America’s illegal alien invasion from the Keystone State of Pennsylvania ...."
According to USA today, GOP lawmakers have signed on to Metcalfe's efforts (http://ht.ly/2WwBB).
Rep. Metcalfe needs a history lesson - unless his forebears were in the New World before "invasion" by Europeans, he's an American thanks to an "anchor baby" ancestor.
Pennsylvania's HB 474 was sent on to the State Government committee in March. It would authorize " the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to join the Interstate Compact on Birth Certificates Issued to Aliens Not Subject to United States Jurisdiction; providing for the form of the compact; and imposing additional powers and duties on the Governor, the Secretary of the Commonwealth and the Compact." 
