> Likewise, in 1868 the writers of the fourteenth amendment probably couldn’t conceive of rapid international travel and the possibility that pregnant women could just show up weeks before their due date and their newborn child should “obviously” be an American citizen.
This is a better point than you realize, and in the opposite direction you intend.
Immigration in the 1800s was a… cursory process. Not only would those kids be citizens, but their parents would have had little trouble staying around.
> It imposed a head tax on non-citizens of the United States who came to American ports and restricted certain classes of people from immigrating to America, including criminals, the insane, or "any person unable to take care of him or herself." The act created what is recognized as the first federal immigration bureaucracy and laid the foundation for more regulations on immigration, such as the Immigration Act of 1891.
The quotas you describe didn’t come until the 1920s. Well after the amendment.
> “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
So, I assume that you know that's a poem by someone who was engaged in pro-immigrant propaganda? And the entire reason that Lazarus was engaged in pro-immigrant propaganda was because she was advocating for Jewish refugees from Russia...who weren't exactly welcomed.
Basically, your proposition that it was era of free immigration is historical revisionism. There's a whole island out in front of the Statue of Liberty where the primary purpose was finding reasons to turn immigrants away.
(Castle Garden was established in the 1850s, and the history extends way before the nativist laws you're referring to in sibling comments [1])
Yes, and? I'm not debating the legality of whatever the current administration is doing. I'm just telling you that you have the history wrong, and that there's a deep irony in quoting Lazarus as some kind of "good old days", when she wrote the poem as a form of advocacy for immigrants.
> Nope. Wrong. That's the new facility. Castle Garden started in the 1850s
That's not "a whole island out in front of the Statue of Liberty" (it's in Battery Park, Manhattan), and performed a significantly different role.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1882 "restricted certain classes of people from immigrating to America, including criminals, the insane, or 'any person unable to take care of him or herself.'… [creating] what is recognized as the first federal immigration bureaucracy and laid the foundation for more regulations on immigration"
The 14th Amendment, having been approved decades before we had that first of immigration laws on the books, was approved in a historical context where "illegal immigration" was essentially not a thing.
> I'm not debating the legality of whatever the current administration is doing.
Perhaps don't jump into a thread about the legal basis of it, then. This particular bit is discussing the claim made at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44400640, where another user claims the drafters of the Amendment would've opposed "anchor babies".
This is a better point than you realize, and in the opposite direction you intend.
Immigration in the 1800s was a… cursory process. Not only would those kids be citizens, but their parents would have had little trouble staying around.
We had very few rules beyond “don’t be Chinese” until 1891. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1891?wprov=...