As is often the case when advocates want attention for their issues, Wilson reached for that ultimate remedy, a constitutional amendment. He proposed altering the terms for gaining U.S. citizenship so that the children of illegal aliens would no longer be eligible simply by virtue of birth in the United States. Proposing a constitutional amendment of any sort is more a political statement than an act of policymaking. The primary intent is usually to convey a sense of urgency rather than suggest a practical course of action. New crises do not generate calls for constitutional amendments.
Old ones do.
Wilson's proposal in the summer of 1993 captured the widespread feeling of frustration with all previous measures to combat illegal immigration and illustrates the context created by two decades of ambivalent and unsuccessful policymaking. When all else seems to have failed, the political impulse is to find a large and sweeping measure that will solve the problem all at once. This is the impulse that propelled Wilson and inspired the Proposition 187 campaign in 1994. The same desire for a coup de grace lay behind many of the proposals drafted in Congress in 1995. When the House Judiciary Committee voted to double the size of the Border Patrol in five years, it did not matter that this was a practical impossibility.