Court Opinion

ID: 9496649
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:31:39.714988+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:42.325932
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I join Judge Manion’s opinion in the main, though we interpret some of the facts in this confusing record differently. I write separately not to quibble over these differences but to invite congressional attention to a pair of anomalies in the immigration laws.
Doris Oforji was turned down for asylum. One of her grounds for seeking it was that she has two young daughters (Nina, 6 years old, and Ingozi, 4) who if they go to Nigeria with her will be subject to a very high risk of undergoing when they reach puberty the procedure that has come to be called “female genital mutilation,” although I prefer the older terms “female circumcision” and (in the alternative) “clitoridectomy and infibulation,” because they are slightly less loaded and remind us that a related practice, male circumcision, is widespread in this country without being described as mutilation. I do not mean to suggest that I approve of female circumcision, but we should recognize that the cultures that do approve of it don’t think that what they are doing is aptly describéd as “mutilation.” But that is an aside; ' the risk of being forced to undergo the procedure is a recognized ground for asylum in this' country. Abankwah v. INS, 185 F.3d 18, 20, 25-26 (2d Cir.1999); In re Kasinga, 21 I. & N. Dec. 357 (BIA 1996). And in the case of a child, especially a small one, the parent will ordinarily be the child’s proper representative and therefore authorized to file the asylum claim on the child’s behalf. See Gonzalez v. Reno, 212 F.3d 1338 (11th Cir.2000); Guidelines for Children’s Asylum Claims INS Policy and Procedural Memorandum from Jack Weiss, Acting Director, Office of International Affairs, to Asylum Officers, Immigration Officers, and Headquarters Coordinators (Asylum and Refugees), Dec. 10, 1998, 1998 WL 3403256KINS).
But because Oforji’s daughters were born in the United States, they are U.S. citizens, and since U.S. citizens cannot be deported they are ineligible for asylum. And because Oforji does not argue that the children will be circumcised as a way of persecuting her, the risk of their being subjected to that procedure, great as that risk is conceded to be, does not strengthen her claim, and so they will be separated from their , mother unless they return to Nigeria with her. Apparently the children have no relatives in the United States with whom they might live (they are also very young to be separated from their mother), for when asked at the immigration hear*620ing, “Well, couldn’t you leave your children here if you wanted to return?” she answered: “Who would I leave it for? Who is going to take care of it? Only I survive because when I was little my mother passed on so I know what I went through so how, how can — when in my life my children start going into the 15th year.” This is obscure, but the implication is that the children have no relatives living in the United States, at least relatives capable of taking care of two young girls. We know that the father of the older girl is either dead or in Nigeria, where she was conceived. There is nothing in the record about the father of the younger girl. Probably, then, the only condition in which the girls could remain in the United States after their mother returned to Nigeria would be as foster children. That is the same unlovely status they would occupy were they aliens granted asylum while their mother was deported. So although they are citizens they are treated as badly as aliens.
Had their mother lived in the United States for at least seven years before deportation proceedings were instituted, however, she could plead hardship to the children as a basis for suspension of deportation. The period has been lengthened to ten years for deportation proceedings— now called “removal” proceedings — begun after April 1, 1997, see Romero-Torres v. Ashcroft, 327 F.3d 887, 888-89 and nn. 3-4 (9th Cir.2003); Jimenez-Angeles v. Ashcroft, 291 F.3d 594, 597 (9th Cir.2002), but it seems that deportation proceedings were begun against Oforji in 1996. However, she hadn’t been here for seven years, so she can’t obtain a suspension of deportation even under the earlier rule. And so the U.S. citizen children are to suffer severe hardship, either by being returned to Nigeria to face a procedure that we regard as torture or by being separated from them mother and consigned to a foster home, because the mother didn’t have the wit to elude the Immigration Service for seven years.
The seven-year (now ten-year) rule has only a tenuous relation to the hardship of children whose parent is ordered deported. What is true is that the longer the children have lived in the United States, the greater the hardship to them of being sent back to their parent’s native country- — -one of the unappetizing choices facing these children and a choice made more excruciating the longer they remain here and become acclimated to American ways. But the length of time a child has lived in the United States depends on when she was born as well as on when her parent came to the United States. The parent may have been here for ten years but the child have been born six months ago; or the parent may have been here for nine years but the child have been born eight years ago. The seven-year (or ten-year) rule is irrational viewed as a device for identifying those cases in which the hardship to an alien’s children should weigh against forcing her to leave the country.
That is one rule that Congress should rethink and another is awarding citizenship to everyone born in the United States (with a few very minor exceptions, such as the children of accredited foreign diplomats and of foreign heads of state on official visits to the U.S., United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 693, 18 S.Ct. 456, 42 L.Ed. 890 (1898); United States Citizenship, United States Department of Justice Immigration & Naturalization Service Interpretation Letter, Interpretation 301.1(a)(4)(i), 2001 WL 1333852(INS); 8 C.F.R. §§ 101.3(a)(1), 1101.3(a)(1)), including the children of illegal immigrants whose sole motive in immigrating was to confer U.S. citizenship on their as yet unborn children. This rule, though thought by some compelled by section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides *621that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” and in any event codified in 8 U.S.C. § 1401(a), which provides that “the following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth: (a) a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” makes no sense. “The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that 165,000 babies are born each year in the United States to illegal immigrants and others who come here to give birth so their children will be American citizens.” Kelley Bouchard, “An Open-Door Refugee Policy Has Its Critics,” Maine Sunday Telegram, June 30, 2002, p. 11A. “Captured fighter Yaser Esam Hamdi is not a U.S. citizen, despite his Louisiana birth, argues the Friends of Immigration Law Enforcement. The group says the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment doesn’t mandate the practice of granting ‘birthright citizenship’ to children born on U.S. soil to temporary workers, illegal immigrants and tourists. ... ‘The situation we have today is absurd,’ says the group’s director.... ’ For example, there is a huge and growing industry in Asia that arranges tourist visas for pregnant women so they can fly to the United States and give birth to an American. Obviously, this was not the intent of the 14th Amendment; it makes a mockery of citizenship.’ ” John McCaslin, “Inside the Beltway: Rotund Tourists,” Wash. Times, Aug. 27, 2002, p. A7.
We should not be encouraging foreigners to come to the United States solely to enable them to confer U.S. citizenship on their future children. But the way to stop that abuse of hospitality is to remove the incentive by changing the rule on citizenship, rather than to subject U.S. citizens to the ugly choice to which the Immigration Service is (legally) subjecting these two girls. A constitutional amendment may be required to change the rule whereby birth in this country automatically confers U.S. citizenship, but I doubt it. Peter H. Schuck & Rogers M. Smith, Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity 116-17 (1985); Dan Stein & John Bauer, “Interpreting the 14th Amendment: Automatic Citizenship for Children of Illegal Immigrants,” 7 Stanford L. & Policy Rev. 127, 130 (1996). The purpose of the rule was to grant citizenship to the recently freed slaves, and the exception for children of foreign diplomats and heads of state shows that Congress does not read the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment literally. Congress would not be flouting the Constitution if it amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to put an end to the nonsense. On May 5, 2003, H.R. 1567, a bill “To amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to deny citizenship at birth to children born in the United States of parents who are not citizens or permanent resident aliens,” was referred to the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims. I hope it passes.
Our hands,, however, are tied. We cannot amend the statutory provisions on citizenship and asylum.