Report: 5% of kids in U.S. born to illegal immigrants

[Elmore Furth]

Source: USA Today

Four million children in the U.S. were born of illegal immigrant parents but were granted U.S. citizenship because they were born on American soil, according to a report released today.

Those children represented about 5% of all the children in the U.S. under the age of 18 in 2009, according to the report from the Pew Hispanic Center. That percentage will increase in the future, however, as an estimated 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the U.S. in 2008 — about 8% — came from illegal immigrant parents, the report says.

The study comes as some legislators, including U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., are calling for a revision of the 14th Amendment that grants automatic citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which wants lower levels of legal and illegal immigration, said automatic citizenship for children born in the U.S. is one of the two main magnets for illegal immigration.



Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-08-11-illegal-...

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. Half a %.

[anigbrowl]

9. ? If 4m = 0.5%, then 800m = 100%. The numbers are about right, tho' repealing the 14th is wron

[dkf]

31. 5% not .5%

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Lightning Count]

3. I sure hope there are no children over 18

"Those children represented about 5% of all the children in the U.S. under the age of 18 in 2009"

[FiveGoodMen]

6. You've got to be kidding!

Children over 18 make up nearly 100% of the US population.

[Whoa_Nelly]

4. Have to wonder how many people at large will read this article

(not necessarily DU folks) and will think all of those babies are Hispanic.

[Blue_Tires]

17. I didn't...

Here locally there has been an immense influx of teen/early 20s Eastern Europeans (Russians, Poles, Czechs) and Asians over the past decade working in the resorts, hotels and other businesses...Companies bring them in, and they are supposed to only be here for the summer, but many vanish after the visa expires, or the girls just find some local navy kid to marry (or at least get them pregnant)... But of course these people "blend in" with the crowd, so there isn't the same rabid outcry that there is for the brown-skinned set...

This is a local story which only illustrates a piece of the issue -- One ring got caught, but the pipeline remains wide open:

http://hamptonroads.com/2009/01/feds-ring-supplied-ille...


Ironically years before, one of the oceanfront hotel managers (or maybe it was one of the people running the insourcing service) was lauded on the business pages for finding such a unique and cost-effective solution to staff the hotels...My loose paraphrase of the story:

"How did you EVER find such cute, polite, energetic teens willing to fly halfway around the world to scrub toilets for $6.75/hour?"

--"Because the local teens who have been working at the oceanfront for decades with no problem all of a sudden got lazy and disaffected and the job applications dropped off...These kids to the work American teens are NOT willing to do"

Sound familiar?

[Whoa_Nelly]

26. I didn't either

But am in Tucson, AZ, and am sure there will be many who will think that way should they read the article, or hear about it through the MSM, national or local.

[superconnected]

33. I did. Didn't think they were non-Hispanic until you posted this.

[EFerrari]

39. FAIR is designated as a hate group by the SPLC. n/t

[laureloak]

5. For the first time ever, I'm with the Republicans on this.

Sorry to have to say that.

[Lightning Count]

7. In what way?

?

[onpatrol98]

10. comes with a bitter aftertaste, doesn't it...

oh well...

[a la izquierda]

21. well, if it helps you sleep at night.

[pampango]

27. Wedge issues work sometimes. That's why repubs like to use them. n/t

[lynne]

38. You're not alone -

- I just doubt many will admit it. I have to agree on this, as well.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

40. Somehting tells me it's not the first time ever. nt

[EFerrari]

41. And with the SPLC designated nativist group, FAIR, too!

Good job.

SPLC: The Nativist Lobby: Three Faces of Intolerance
Posted on July 21, 2010 admin
No Comment BOOKMARK

Three Washington, D.C.-based immigration-restriction organizations stand at the nexus of the American nativist movement: the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and NumbersUSA. Although on the surface they appear quite different — the first, the country’s best-known anti-immigrant lobbying group; the second, an “independent” think tank; and the third, a powerful grassroots organizer — they are fruits of the same poisonous tree.

FAIR, CIS and NumbersUSA are all part of a network of restrictionist organizations conceived and created by John Tanton, the “puppeteer” of the nativist movement and a man with deep racist roots. As the first article in this report shows, Tanton has for decades been at the heart of the white nationalist scene. He has met with leading white supremacists, promoted anti-Semitic ideas, and associated closely with the leaders of a eugenicist foundation once described by a leading newspaper as a “neo-Nazi organization.” He has made a series of racist statements about Latinos and worried that they were outbreeding whites. At one point, he wrote candidly that to maintain American culture, “a European-American majority” is required.

FAIR, which Tanton founded and where he remains on the board, has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Among the reasons are its acceptance of $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, a group founded to promote the genes of white colonials that funds studies of race, intelligence and genetics. FAIR has also hired as key officials men who also joined white supremacist groups. It has board members who regularly write for hate publications. It promotes racist conspiracy theories about Latinos. And it has produced television programming featuring white nationalists.

CIS was conceived by Tanton and began life as a program of FAIR. CIS presents itself as a scholarly think tank that produces serious immigration studies meant to serve “the broad national interest.” But the reality is that CIS has never found any aspect of immigration that it liked, and it has frequently manipulated data to achieve the results it seeks. Its executive director last fall posted an item on the conservative National Review Online website about Washington Mutual, a bank that had earlier issued a press release about its inclusion on a list of “Business Diversity Elites” compiled by Hispanic Business magazine. Over a copy of the bank’s press release, the CIS leader posted a headline — “Cause and Effect?” — that suggested a link between the bank’s opening its ranks to Latinos and its subsequent collapse.

http://immigrantsandiego.org/?p=931

Here's a little bit about their white supremicist leader, John Tanton.

http://www.splcenter.org/publications/the-nativist-lobb...

[valerief]

8. Article doesn't say where they come from (unless I missed it). nt

[anigbrowl]

12. Does it matter?

The national origin of illegal aliens in general is on page 4 of the most recent DHS estimates: http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publicati...

tl;dr about 61% from Mexico, 5% from El Salvador, 4% from Guatemala, 3% each from Philippines and Honduras, 2% each from China, Korea, Brazil, 1% each from Ecuador and India (total of 23%), 17% from all other countries.

This is pretty much what you'd expect given the geography. http://www.dhs.gov/files/statistics/immigration.shtm has tons more statistics about legal and illegal immigration, though for some reason very few commentators on either side of the issue refer people to it.

If you bring up the issue to suggest that opposition to birthright citizenship is possibly motivated by racism because a %age of illegals are non-white, then I'm inclined to agree.

[valerief]

30. Thanks for the info. Yes, I brought up the question because of your

well-phrased last sentence.

[sofa king]

11. Secretly, it's the 13th Amendment, not the 14th, that they wish to repeal.

You know it's true.

[Blue_Tires]

13. Why do none of the "reformers" want to actually put REAL punishment

on businesses/industries who thrive on cheap, undocumented labor?? These jerkoffs are seriously talking about changing the consitution which may as well be drinking the ocean with a straw...

Oh yeah, I forgot -- It's anti-capatalist to ever suggest factories and commercial developers pay American workers real wages...

[awnobles]

15. You are right

Make it illegal to employ illegals, enforce it. Game over. Not even a public service message to discourage it among the populace. They won't use messaging to address this at all, much less law enforcement.

[Lightning Count]

18. And if they have a valid form of ID?

Employers are not ICE. A federal agency needs to be setup that every new employee must be submitted to in order to before they are able to be hired. It should require name, age, and ssn. If that ssn is in use or is there is some other discrepancy, then you do not get hired. This won't prevent off the books workers, but it will go a long way toward fixing the problem.

[anigbrowl]

20. That already exists, it's called the e-verify program

You absolutely must screen all your employees if your company sells to the federal government. Completely private employers are not required to use it because there is no law mandating they should do so, and private employers are forbidden by law from asking prospective employees about their immigration status as long as they show the required paperwork.

One obvious approach would be a hard-to-fake national ID card, but every time that is proposed a large volume of people object to the idea on the grounds that it puts too much power in the hands of the government and undermines privacy.

[Lightning Count]

22. Even the federal government does not use E-verify when hiring

"Social Security Administration failed to perform required verifications of the Social Security numbers of 19 percent of its own new hires during a 18-month period, according to a January 2010 report from the agency’s inspector general.<10>"

And it will not alert you if a ssn is a duplicate. Only if it is fake. The program has a lot of potential, but still needs work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-verify

Another option is to require a driver's license(or issued ID) and a ss card to even be considered a job. The DMV would then have to make sure that each ssn is not a duplicate and is valid. Also if you brought in an infants birth certificate, I would hope the they would realize it.

[anigbrowl]

24. This is why the rules have been tightened up

Workplace auditing and enforcement has increased considerably over the last year, as have deportations. The Bush administration did not push very hard for wider use; although they talked about it there few follow-up checks. To be honest, a majority of people didn't care all that much when the economy was booming. More info here: http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2...

[Lightning Count]

25. Good stuff.

Thanks for the updated info.

[pezDispenser]

23. here's the problem I see with that

Baring a national identity card (which I'm all for) how do business truly verify immigration status? eVerify is faulty and fake SS cards are easy to come by. So now on top of making all businesses government tax collectors, we add the additional burden of requiring them to do the work of the INS - again at their own cost.

Its a tough problem all the way around.

[Ian David]

14. See also: Birthright Lunacy: Separating Fact from Fiction in the 14th Amendment Debate

Birthright Lunacy: Separating Fact from Fiction in the 14th Amendment Debate
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

[truthisfreedom]

16. Hey-ooh! We need those kids, dammit! Who's going to pay for my medicare?

[anigbrowl]

19. You win a prize

This is why comprehensive immigration will go through in the end, and legal immigration will become somewhat easier. The combination of a baby boom, falling birthrates in the following generation, and the imminent pension obligations to a generation that is living longer after having fewer children means that there will simply not be enough money going into the treasury to meet the government's obligations over the long term with a large increase in immigration.

[struggle4progress]

28. I still sez yain't a real merkin unless yer whole family wuz already here in 1450, befor

the fuggin ignurt immigrunts ruint everthing

[dkf]

32. Or your family could have been in Hawaii before it was

declared property of the US.

[superconnected]

34. I think the 1620 folks - Mayflower - may actually feel that way.

My family came in 1632 but other than impressing a few legal immigrants I met once, it doesn't seem to mean much. The nice thing is my family doesn't get traced to salem in the late 1600's, so we didn't kill witches.

[Zorra]

29. How are these children being provided for? n/t

[Posteritatis]

35. Seeing as there's four million of them, I'd wager a large variety of methods both good and bad

No group that large is going to be anything close to a monolith.

[underpants]

36. Am I supposed to be scared or just angry?

Well, I am neither.

[nalnn]

37. Way back machine

Wow. I just found this. It appears that this fracas re: the 14th Amendment of the Constitution has been in planning for a long long time.

S.1351