Birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants

I would like to reiterate my thanks to my opponent for the opportunity to debate this topic. I hope the audience will be pleased. ==== REFUTATIONS ==== "I have presented arguments for why the 14th amendment should be repealed and I'm sure my opponent knows that." I completely disagree. My opponent has consistently not shown a cause and effect for the first 2 rounds of debate. I trust the reader's judgment will clearly see that no causality has been offered. For instance, he mentions a disproportionate amount of illegal immigrant children, which is not even remotely accurate (See Round 2 argument for statistics) and furthermore he does not explain WHY a disproportionate amount of births would have deleterious effects. "They don't need citizenship at that age." That's an absurd notion. If children of illegal immigrants would not need citizenship at that age, then no one of that age would need citizenship. CON further alleges that granting citizenship to their children is an incentive to come to the United States. My opponent forgets that the greatest incentive is the United States itself. People risk life and limb to come to the United States, with or without children. Their incentive is better their lives, period. Secondly, repealing the 14th Amendment ensures that none of us, including you, would have citizenship of the United States. My opponent is on record stating that wants to repeal the 14th Amendement, rather than add an addendum. This would result in there being no citizens of the United States whatsoever, which would therefore would create no legal way to exclude anyone, let alone the children of illegal immigrants. In other words, my opponent did not actually think the proposition all the way through. For that reason alone, I would think that sensible voters would recognize this as grounds for a forfeiture. My opponent then states that an illegal immigrant is a "bad person," even though, curiously, he clarified in Round 2 that we are exclusively discussing the children of illegal immigrants. He then goes on to repeat the Argumentum ad Populum argument ( a straw man) which bears no relevance to the fact that my opponent wants to repeal the 14th Amendement. "How does this have any relevance in any way?" CON postulates that the Alien and Seditions Act has nothing to do with the "children" of illegal immigrants. CON's entire argument, however, is that giving the children of illegal immigrants legal status, as it is clearly stated in the Constitution of the United States, then this helps give legal status to illegal immigrants. Even though my opponent states that the argument is about their children, reading between the lines we can clearly see that his argument is in fact geared towards illegal immigrants themselves. Secondly, there is no evidence to support the notion that children born in the US will do anything to favor illegal immigration. In fact, all it does is point INS in the direction of the illegal parents. In other words, this "drop and leave" phenomenon that CON is a complete fabrication, as there is no evidence to substantiate the claim. [1] "Population of the United States has risen in the past years. This percent could be and most likely is a larger number of people than the 13% my opponent claimed. I also find it peculiar why my opponent mentioned a 90 year and 70 year spread and compared it to 1 year, 20 years ago. In 2005, just the Hispanic race made up 14.4% of the US population or about 43 million people" The US population rises every year, not to mention the entire world, always increases. You cannot look at the statistics as a whole, but rather per capita, in order for it to yield any results worth looking at. CON alluded to a point that an exorbitant amount of illegal alien babies were being born. This is simply not true, as CON selects only one city along the Southwest border. He does not compare the figures with the rest of the United States, nor does he distinguish hispanic children with children born of illegal immigrants. This questions the motive behind the argument, as it may in fact be more about racism and xenophobia than it does actual tangible results. Because, once again, CON has described any cause and effect status, only subjective claims about how it would make legal immigrants upset that the children of illegal immigrants are citizens. "How is it unfair to child, who gets free citizenship? His parents were the ones who illegally and secretly smuggled into the US and had a child! Again, it's unfair to the people who actually worked for their citizenship because they waited, learned, and passed a test." This goes without saying... The child didn't smuggle themselves acorss the border, nor is there any provision in the Constitution that would distinguish legal status of the parents, as it is immaterial. You could be a French stewardess and give birth in the United States. Should the child be entitled to a dual citizenship? Under the Constitution, absolutely. And one wonders whether or not CON would make it illegal for people to marry in to citizenship. The point is, his idea of fairness is skewed, in my opinion. "isn't this a democratic republic?" The United States is a Constitutional Republic, not a Direct Democracy -- which means that we can't vote away personal freedoms granted by the Constitution. A Direct Democracy is mob justice. "If everyone is subject to the laws of the United States, as you say, then why do we have illegal immigrants, drug smugglers, robbers, troublemakers, and scams?" Just because laws exist doesn't mean that people don't break them. That's why the laws exist, after all. ==== CONCLUSIONS ==== 1. My opponent was unable to find any legitimate basis for repealing the 14th Amendment. Remember: Repealing the Amendment would mean doing away with the entirety of it, which would not give anyone in the US a legal status, nor did he offer a provision of the 14th Amendment. 2. CON could not establish a link for why birthright citizenship should be ceased. Instead, my opponent opted to a cause without an effect. No causal relationship juxtaposed with an effect is useless proposition. 3. CON stated that citizenship should be earned, but his was not earned. He was granted citizenship based on the fact that he is subject to the United States by virtue of being in the United States. Laws work for us and against us, depending upon the circumstances. Resolution: Negated For these reasons, fair and sensible people vote PRO. ==== SOURCE ==== [1] http://www.politifact.com...