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I'm honestly a bit frightened by this one. I don't find most of Trump's stuff all that worrisome but this seems potentially pretty society altering.
My parents were illegal immigrants. They had me here in the late 70s so I had citizenship by birth. My parents have since received amnesty and even applied for citizenship and received it as well. But I think if the EO holds I don't see why they could not apply this retroactively. If it makes sense to do it for the future it makes sense to do it for the past too.
My parents would have more standing to stay in the US than I would.
Would be kind of funny to have to pack up and start a new life in the old country though in middle age.
Birth right citizenship is a bizarre American (meaning the Americas) custom. Why on earth would you reward illegal immigrants by making their children citizens? It's a planet-sized moral hazard. Just because you benefitted from it doesn't mean it's good. Crimes should have negative consequences, not positive ones.
I'm not defending it as an inalienable right.
We did seem to feel a little differently about it decades ago, though, when we had labor shortages, low public entitlements, and loved rubbing it in the faces of communists that people were desperate to leave their nations for ours.
Who is we? Decades ago, we were fighting over it still. There's always been a category of Americans who want to dissolve states and borders and peoples, but it's not all of us.
Congress and the President are as "we" as it gets when it comes to law. Unless you want to bring guns into a discussion about SCOTUS rulings.
Immigration is probably the single starkest and most consistent example of something where the native population and the government continually operate in opposition. The government is aggressively anti-we in this regard. People continually, across the west, say they want less, and their governments bring in more.
You may find from time to time a simple majority that says we should stop illegal immigration but you won't find a majority that believes that means we should pull people out of homes they've made in the US to deport them.
Yes, I understand the strategy of letting them all in and then trusting the next admin won't be able to remove them. This is why I'm on Team Fuck The Law, Do What's Right, They All Gotta Go, and will accept any violation of law in pursuit of this.
IMO it sounds like you only like law when it supports your POV.
EDIT: I also find the nExT admiNiStrAtIoN / white genocide argument a bit funny because it was Reagan that granted my extended family amnesty and they're all white and hardcore Trump voters.
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