College Newspaper Essay Prompts Debate on Immigration, Freedom of Speech and Press

WINTER PARK — Jamie Pizzi, a freshman at Rollins College, said she never meant to come across as racist or hateful in the opinion piece she wrote for the campus newspaper last week.

But the essay that’s sharply critical of immigrant children has spurred an outcry from some students and faculty.

And while she’s upset by all the negative attention — including nasty e-mails and comments left on The Sandspur website — she said she stands by her writing.

“I don’t regret what I wrote,” Pizzi said. “I regret it was taken that way.”

Pizzi’s essay questions whether babies born in the United States to illegal immigrants should be automatically given U.S. citizenship. It’s accompanied by a picture of a green alien that has apparently taken a guy’s clothing and TV.

“These ‘anchor babies,’ as they are commonly referred, gain full citizenship from simply being born on American soil, and they are entitled to all the same benefits as you and I, including: free public school educations, financial aid for college and even Medicaid,” she writes.

The strong reaction from faculty, students and others prompted a big gathering Thursday afternoon in the Bush Science Center auditorium. An estimated 200 to 300 people turned out — a significant crowd for the small private college in Winter Park, organizers said.

Everyone took turns expressing themselves and sharing their views on free press and the role of a school newspaper.

For full article: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/education/os-rollins-student-newspaper-immigran20110324,0,1530297.story

14th Amendment did NOT Create “Anchor babies”

Democrats act as if the right to run across the border when you’re 8 1/2 months pregnant, give birth in a U.S. hospital and then immediately start collecting welfare was exactly what our forebears had in mind, a sacred constitutional right, as old as the 14th Amendment itself.

The louder liberals talk about some ancient constitutional right, the surer you should be that it was invented in the last few decades.

In fact, this alleged right derives only from a footnote slyly slipped into a Supreme Court opinion by Justice Brennan in 1982. You might say it snuck in when no one was looking, and now we have to let it stay.

The 14th Amendment was added after the Civil War in order to overrule the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which had held that black slaves were not citizens of the United States. The precise purpose of the amendment was to stop sleazy Southern states from denying citizenship rights to newly freed slaves — many of whom had roots in this country longer than a lot of white people.

The amendment guaranteed that freed slaves would have all the privileges of citizenship by providing: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The drafters of the 14th amendment had no intention of conferring citizenship on the children of aliens who happened to be born in the U.S. (For my younger readers, back in those days, people cleaned their own houses and raised their own kids.)

Inasmuch as America was not the massive welfare state operating as a magnet for malingerers, frauds and cheats that it is today, it’s amazing the drafters even considered the amendment’s effect on the children of aliens.

But they did.

The very author of the citizenship clause, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, expressly said: “This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”

In the 1884 case Elk v. Wilkins, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not even confer citizenship on Indians — because they were subject to tribal jurisdiction, not U.S. jurisdiction.

For a hundred years, that was how it stood, with only one case adding the caveat that children born to legal permanent residents of the U.S., gainfully employed, and who were not employed by a foreign government would also be deemed citizens under the 14th Amendment. (United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 1898.)

And then, out of the blue in 1982, Justice Brennan slipped a footnote into his 5-4 opinion in Plyler v. Doe, asserting that “no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.” (Other than the part about one being lawful and the other not.)

for the rest of Ann Coulter’s column: http://www.anncoulter.com/

Mexican with Anchor Baby: God Will Help Americans Stop Resenting Us