For what it's worth, when Missouri passed its voter id law they included funding to provide people free id, if needed for voting.
I was working the MO secretary of state office at this time, and though I wasn't directly involved with it, I did see them help a lot of people get ids. Most of the time it was just helping people fill out forms or paying a fee for them but there were a few complicated situations. One woman had fled a domestic violence situation in another state with just the clothes on her back. She had no identifying documents of any kind. The SoS ending up coordinating with two other states to get documents and hiring a lawyer to get a judge to reestablish her identity in court.
So in the case of Missouri at least, real resources were committed to get ids for anyone who asked for it.
> you need to plan a decade or more in advance and actively help people get the IDs.
Voter registration is by itself a joke and voter suppression. In most of Europe every citizen gets a voting form send to their registered address together with the list of participants. They bring that with the government ID to the polling station with their government ID card, passport or driver license. Then they are allowed to vote, in confidence, and drop their voting form in the box - and that is the end of it.
No voter registration, definitely no registration which party you vote, and essentially everyone is included. But maybe that is thanks to Europes relatively organized governments.
By all accounts the cases of noncitizens voting is so vanishingly small that this just isn’t an issue despite any number of initiatives and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars spent trying to prove the opposite.
This waste of time and resources really puts paid to the lie that DOGE exists to reign in government spending. In terms of effectiveness, this one would be an easy thing to slash from spending.
Given that this administration has made it crystal clear that they want to invalidate birthright citizenship, every US citizen reading this should seriously ask themselves: How would you prove that you're a citizen?
It has nothing to do with US Citizens. According to estimates from the Pew Research Center and the Center for Migration Studies, roughly 250,000 to 400,000 children are born each year in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants, virtually all of whom receive citizenship at birth under the 14th Amendment. The underlying issue is the exploitation of a legal loophole that currently incentivizes unlawful entry and exploitation.
It's not a loophole, it's the plain text of a constitutional amendment. More or less all sources that provide context for what they might have meant support the plain reading.
> Passing by questions once earnestly controverted, but finally put at rest by the fourteenth amendment of the constitution, it is beyond doubt that, before the enactment of the civil rights act of 1866 or the adoption of the constitutional amendment, all white persons, at least, born within the sovereignty of the United States, whether children of citizens or of foreigners, excepting only children of ambassadors or public ministers of a foreign government, were native-born citizens of the United States.
Thus, even without the 14th Amendment at least some of those 250,000 to 400,000 children born each year in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants - the white ones - would still be US citizens, barring a law otherwise. And there has been no law otherwise, because of the 14th.
If you want to say the loophole is that non-white US-born children of foreign citizens mistakenly got a right that was only meant to apply to former slaves, then go ahead and say that.
But we can read the discussion in Congress at the time and see they were well aware that it applied to more than ex-slaves. From https://web.archive.org/web/20210114215253/https://memory.lo... and the following page we see Mr. Cowan ask for clarification about the text, as it applies to foreigners:
> Is the child of the Chinese immigrant in California a citizen? Is the child of a Gypsy born in Pennsylvania a citizen? If so, what rights have they? ... is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration of the Mongol race? Are they to be immigrated out of house and home by Chinese? I should think not.
> The proposition before us, I will say, Mr. President, relates simply in that respect to the children begotten of Chinese parents in California, and it is proposed to declare that they shall be citizens. We have declared that by law; now it is proposed to incorporate the same provision in the fundamental instrument of the nation. I am in favor of doing so. I voted for the proposition to declare that the children of all parentage whatever, born in California, should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens of the United States.
Oh man, he goes on to point out how all the recent talk about Gypsies, when they are so few in number, cannot be but to cause political agitation, then referring to actions of "our "southern brethren", who I will not say invaded California" were there as "road agents" (but actually highway robbers), and California hanged them as California did not recognize the commission of Jefferson Davis within their borders.
In any case, the evidence is quite clear that this "loophole" was fully discussed and understood as a goal of the amendment.
That is why Mr. Conness, an abolitionist and advocate for Chinese immigration, advocated for its passage.
Nope. This "loophole" nonsense is naught but political agitation.
So you’re arguing that birthright citizenship isn’t a loophole because lawmakers in the 1800s discussed it? Great, but we’re in 2025, not 1868. A lot of U.S. citizens today don’t agree with handing out citizenship to 250,000–400,000 kids of undocumented immigrants every year, and pretending this debate was settled forever ignores reality. The Constitution is a living document, not a museum piece. If you’re looking for “agitation,” maybe start with the side clinging to 19th-century logic to justify modern mass migration.
VOIPThrowaway's comment was all about the intent behind the amendment. Part of the intent may have been to "make sure Democrats couldn't say that former slaves weren't citizens" but the legislative history clearly shows that wasn't the only reason.
How else would you demonstrate what their intent was, if citing primary evidence is off-limits?
I'm arguing it's not a loophole because that's how US law works, and has worked for not just the last 250 years, but in the common law that we inherited from England. I provided citation to show that legal history, so you can double-check me.
If you don't like the way the law works, well, use the 18th-century logic embedded in the Constitution to repeal the amendment, like how the 21st repealed the 18th. Make new state and federal laws to invalidate the relevant common law, which would still exist after the repeal.
Don't just make up interpretations because you don't like reality.
Sounds like a few hundred thousand children of undocumented immigrants becoming US Citizens every year is perfectly okay with you. Reality would say though that it has become an extreme loophole that current non-citizens are using to get their children into America as US Citizens. Times have changed!
> Statistics show that a significant, and rising, number of undocumented immigrants are having children in the United States, but there is mixed evidence that acquiring citizenship for the parents is their goal.[29] According to PolitiFact, the immigration benefits of having a child born in the United States are limited. Citizen children cannot sponsor parents for entry into the country until they are 21 years of age, and if the parent had ever been in the country illegally, they would have to show they had left and not returned for at least ten years ...
> Parents of citizen children who have been in the country for ten years or more can also apply for relief from deportation, though only 4,000 persons a year can receive relief status; as such, according to PolitFact, having a child in order to gain citizenship for the parents is "an extremely long-term, and uncertain, process."
So I imagine you think these people are all coming to the US to have babies, then, what, leaving them here? As orphans? Can you point to the orphan numbers?
Or going home to raise the kid so that 18 years later the now-adult kid will move to the US - a country that's mostly foreign to them, with little support network?
Where are your numbers that this is an actual problem?
How does it compare to the devastating failures of the US health care system and parasite that is the insurance industry?
How does it compare the destruction of the social safety network caused by decades of tax cuts for the wealthy?
You failed in the past election and Trump became president because millions of people disagree with your narrative, no matter how long of a report on hacker news that you write!
Trump got a little less than half of the vote, which means millions of people also agreed with it.
I mean... Trump won in 2016 despite millions more people voting for Hillary Clinton.
When Republicans win, they claim a sweeping mandate from the masses and declare themselves harbingers of a widespread cultural repudiation of progressivism and leftism (even when they lose the popular vote) and when they lose they just claim the other side cheated and everyone agrees with them anyway.
Can you quote the text that supports your claim from the linked 'source'?
What I did find there was:
This report’s estimates and projections of foreign-born residents in the U.S. comprise both legal and unauthorized immigrants. However, the numbers for each status group are not broken out separately except where stated.
( ~ 4 million per annum, now fallen to 3.5 million per annum )
Births were to foreign-born mothers (2000 - 2022)
In 2000, 21 percent of births were to foreign-born mothers, according to data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. This number has fluctuated slightly throughout the years, peaking at 25 percent in 2006. It decreased to 21 percent in 2021 before increasing to 24 percent in 2023.
It's important to note that this data does not differentiate between illegal and legal foreign-born mothers and includes mothers from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Both sets of my grandparents came to the U.S. from Europe (France and Belgium) just before WW II. They did not become citizens. My father and mother were born in the U.S. and lived here all their lives. I was born in the U.S. and have also lived here all of my life.
Am I a U.S. citizen? If so, what proof can I provide that doesn't rely on the "loophole"?
Or, that you are only allowed to vote if you can prove you have previously voted for the correct party in a past election. Anything else is unamerican.
Why is that a difficult question to answer? Nearly all adults have Star ID driver licenses that are basically as good as passports for that very purpose. Required documentation is consistent and easily acquired. In general, birth certificate record-keeping is extremely reliable in the US. That's not the case everywhere, though; the Philippines, for example, is notorious for easily being able to acquire fake birth certificates.
In other words, Trump and DOGE have absolutely nothing to do with proving citizenship. You're just angry and emotional.
> Nearly all adults have Star ID driver licenses that are basically as good as passports for that very purpose.
Do they? Most people I know well enough to know this about them don't have one.
The most recent statistic I could find is from last September, where the DHS was predicting that about 60% of people will have a Real ID by this March.
> Why is that a difficult question to answer? Nearly all adults have Star ID driver licenses that are basically as good as passports for that very purpose.
I have such a driver's license; it did not require me to "prove citizenship."
> Required documentation is consistent and easily acquired.
It's relatively easy for me to prove I was born in the US (birth certificate), but one of my parents was born at home and the other was born at a hospital that no longer exists -- if I can't prove citizenship based on my birth certificate, please tell me how exactly I can prove it?
Foreign diplomatic personnel stationed in the US sometimes have babies while in the US. These children get the same birth certificates as any other child born in the US, but they are not citizens. Ergo, a birth certificate is not proof of citizenship.
I’d be willing to bet that >99.999% of people with US birth certificates are citizens, but it most certainly is not 100%.
The person I responded to thinks a birth certificate is sufficient to prove citizenship. My birth certificate can not be used to establish citizenship even though it was issued by the U.S. government and I’m a natural born U.S. citizen.
Just another reason to not bother voting. I don't get how I can register a new account on a completely new tax website and file my taxes online in like 5 minutes... yet voting is still waiting in line for hours to make caveman scribbles on paper and stuff it into boxes.
> As of 2022, eight states – California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington – allow all elections to be conducted by mail. Five of these states – Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington – hold elections "almost entirely by mail."[18] Postal voting is an option in 33 states and the District of Columbia.
But it sounds like you haven't voted for a long time, so might not even if your state offers an alternative.
My voting in person has never taken hours, but I suspect that's because I've not lived in one of the areas where the government was attempting to suppress the vote by underfunding voting opportunities ("those who waited the longest tended to live in urban areas and were disproportionately African American and Latino" - https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/long... ).
Look at how “real ID” has played out - you need to plan a decade or more in advance and actively help people get the IDs.
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