Reply #8: What gets me about the GOP proposal is the enforcement issue

[starroute]

In the case of an unmarried immigrant mother, how do you prove whether the father was a citizen or not? Do you resort to Jerry Springer-style antics where the woman names possible fathers and you haul them in for DNA testing? And at whose expense?

Or what if a woman claims she cheated on her non-citizen husband and the real father of her baby is a US citizen? Do you test for that, too?

Or that she got drunk at a party and has no idea who the father is but he could be a citizen.

For that matter, if there really are women trying to have an "anchor baby" to stay in the US, I could theoretically see sperm banks selling "US citizen sperm."

In other words, they're proposing to replace a simple, easily proven standard -- where the baby was born -- with one that is convoluted, expensive, and at times almost impossible to enforce.

And that in itself suggests to me that either they're not really serious but are just looking for an election issue -- or else that they have ambitions of imposing the most draconian "guilty unless proven innocent" standard possible.