United States Citizenship

Citizenship in the United States has been a sought-after dream by many people in the World. It is the reason we are the “great melting pot”, and the reason for the many mass immigrations that have taken place to the United States. Over the course of two centuries, there has been much turmoil in United States politics about giving citizenship status to immigrants. Most of the latter reasoning for not wanting to grant citizenship has been blamed justly on the prejudice of American Society. The Supreme Court has decided in the latest decisions that birth is a right to citizenship, under the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (Lowi, Ginsberg, Shepsle &Ansolabehere, 2012). However, the American Dream
The debate today is mostly centered around whether Latino children (specifically those of Mexican heritage), whose parents are not citizens of the United States, should in fact be given citizenship at birth (Lowi et al., 2012). This new on birthright citizenship is only a recent one in the ongoing onslaught to keep the United States secular in ethnicity. In 1884, the case of Elk v. Wilkins, John Elk was deemed to be not a citizen when registering to vote, under the citation that “his immediate allegiance was to his tribe, within the United States. (Kettner, 1978., pp.287-333). Unfortunately, this case did not lead to a striking down, and overruling by our government. In the end, it was not until 1924 that all Native Americans tribes residing in the United States were given full citizenship rights. The Indian Citizenship Act, granted full citizenship to Native Americans stating that, “All non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States.” (Kettner, 1978., pp.287-333). Although the Native Americans were born solely on United States soil, and tribes deemed to be a part of the United States, they faced an unprecedented amount of extreme vetting, and discrimination in gaining the right to citizenship. In most cases of this act of discriminating against emigrants, it is
662-731). Politicians claim that there needs to be a new precedence for understanding of birthright citizenship. These discriminations happen today due to the birthrates at which 8% of all births in the United States are to illegal immigrants (Passel, & Cohn, 2015). Many Conservatives argue that giving birthright citizenship gives too much humanitarian need to not separate illegal alien parents from children, and puts burden on American Taxpayers to supplement healthcare and welfare needs to illegal immigrants (Lowi et al., 2012). The latter side argues that there should be less of a vetting process to guarantee ultimate citizenship for the children of those parents, and that those children are indeed future tax payers themselves, who should be given the same rights as other American children. (Neuman, 1996., pp.165-187). In conclusion though, both sides agree that there should be new legislation to reform our current immigration