Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude —
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
–Amendment XV
Passed by Congress on March 3, 1869, and ratified in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was the last of the three Reconstruction Amendments. Though the language of the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits all race-based discrimination in qualifications for voting, the Framers were primarily concerned with the enfranchisement of African-Americans. As early as 1866, many of the Republicans were convinced of the need for a constitutional amendment that would require the states to allow African-Americans to vote. Indeed, at one point the Joint Committee on Reconstruction voted to report a version of the Fourteenth Amendment that explicitly embraced the principle of race-blind suffrage. However, many Northerners continued to oppose black suffrage in principle, and fears of a political backlash led the committee to abandon the issue before the proposed amendment came to the floor.
Congress had forced black suffrage on the ex-Confederate states by statute, and Republicans faced the charge that they were hypocritical in not imposing the same requirement on Northern states. Some also believed that if blacks were enfranchised in the states that had remained in the Union, they would provide critical support for Republican candidates in those states.
Republicans were, nevertheless, deeply divided over the question of what precise language should be adopted. A number of prominent Republicans complained that this narrow language would allow states intentionally to disfranchise most African-Americans by adopting qualifications that, although neutral on their face, would in practice be impossible for most freed slaves to satisfy. Responding to these and other concerns, the Senate proposed to eliminate not only discrimination on the basis of race, color, and previous condition of servitude but also discrimination on the basis of nativity, property, education, or creed in both the right to vote and the right to hold elective office.
In the complex parliamentary horse trading that followed, the Senate did not vote to enter into conference; instead, the entire drafting process began again in both houses. The House then produced a draft that tracked the original Senate version, except that it deleted the reference to discrimination on the basis of education.
The Senate, by contrast, now passed a simple prohibition on racial discrimination with respect to the rights to vote and hold office. A conference committee was convened, and it produced the current language of the Fifteenth Amendment, which embraced only the prohibition on racial discrimination in voting, omitting any reference to the right to hold office.
Because of the difficulty of agreeing to the precise language, the framers adopted a simple prohibition on discrimination on the basis of race, color, and previous condition of servitude even though there was a risk that a court could interpret the language narrowly and thereby allow deliberate evasion by facially neutral statutes. At first, the Supreme Court did exactly that and refused to inquire into the motives of those who adopted facially neutral statutes, such as literacy tests.
The Court has invoked both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to invalidate facially neutral restrictions on voting rights where the legislative history reveals an intention to exclude or hinder African-Americans. Rogers v. Lodge (1982), Hunter v. Underwood (1985). The Court also invoked the amendments in cases where there was evident racial gerrymandering designed to disenfranchise blacks. Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960). On the other hand, the Court has held that race may be considered in the redistricting process only so long as racial considerations do not predominate, and there is no effort to dilute the voting strength of minorities. Bush v. Vera (1996).
Similarly, the Court adopted variable views on the sweep of allowable congressional authority under the enforcement clause. One critical issue was whether the amendment armed Congress with the power to regulate purely private action. Many of the congressional Republicans, who were responsible for passing the Fifteenth Amendment, apparently believed they had such authority: a section in a statute passed in 1870 made private, racially motivated interference with voting a federal crime. Nonetheless, although Ex parte Yarbrough (1884) suggested that this statute was constitutional, in 1903 the Supreme Court reversed course and held that the Fifteenth Amendment did not allow Congress to regulate purely private activity. James v. Bowman (1903). This basic principle was maintained until at least 1941, United States v. Classic, although the Court preferred to take the route of expansively defining nongovernmental activity as state action for purposes of the Fifteenth Amendment, applied particularly to the institution of the white primary. Smith v. Allwright (1944), Terry v. Adams (1953).
Recent decisions have upheld the constitutionality of sweeping remedial measures adopted to combat government-imposed racial discrimination. For example, when Congress had evidence of widespread racial discrimination in state elections, the Court allowed Congress to place the entire state and local electoral apparatus under federal supervision and to forbid the adoption of measures that had even the effect of diluting the voting power of racial minorities. Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). The Court, asserting that enforcement power had the same breadth as a necessary and proper clause, has also upheld the power of Congress to forbid literacy tests. South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966).
As usual, where politicians are involved, in an attempt to remedy one perceived problem, the solution has created many more. And, in the process, the American taxpayer has been bitten in the ass by the law of unintended consequences.
The social reality is that pregnant women are traveling to the United States by the thousands using travel visas with the hope of giving birth in the country, which would make their child an American citizen under the Citizenship Clause of the United States Constitution.
This practice of birth tourism, common among Chinese,Taiwanese, and Turkish nationals, has continued to grow in recent years. While undocumented immigration into the United States across the Mexican border remains the main topic in U.S. immigration debates, birth tourism represents a new topic that many in the United States are ill -prepared to tackle. Birth tourists to the United States mainly come
from Pacific Rim countries like Taiwan and China. Some private companies even transport, house, and provide the necessary arrangements for birth tourists to enter the United States and remain until they are able to give birth.
For example, throughout the latter part of 2012 and early 2013, individuals in Chino Hills, California made national news for protests of apartment buildings alleged to be “maternity hotels.” In The Washington Post, longtime birth tourist business-owner Robert Zhou reminded Americans that his company does not “encourage moms to
break the law —just to take advantage of it.”
Following the abolition of slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, sought to grant all Americans born within the United States standing to file suit, partly in an effort to avoid outcomes similar to that of the notorious case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.
In an effort to address the “loophole” created by the Citizenship Clause, many states have implemented policies to prevent “anchor babies”—children born to undocumented parents in the country and used as an “anchor” into U.S. citizenship for the parents—but federal law, the ultimate authority on regulating immigration, is largely silent on birth tourism. This makes law enforcement problematic, since technically these “tourists” enter the country legally. However, birth tourism seems to strike many as unethical because it allows foreign citizens to take advantage of a “loophole” to gain U.S. citizenship for their children.
Jon Feere, testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security; “between 350,000 and 400,000 children are born annually to an illegal-alien mother residing in the United States — as many as one in ten births nationwide. As of 2010, four out of five children of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. were born here — some 4 million kids”.
Reporting that finding, the Pew Research Center noted that, while illegal immigrants make up about 4 percent of the adult population, “because they have high birthrates, their children make up a much larger share of both the newborn population (8 percent) and the child population (7 percent) in this country.”
The cost of this is not negligible. Inflation-adjusted figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture projected that a child born in 2013 would cost his parents $304,480 from birth to his eighteenth birthday.
Given that illegal-alien households are normally low-income households (three out of five illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children live at or near the poverty line), one would expect that a significant portion of that cost will fall on the government. And that’s exactly what‘s happening.
71 percent of illegal-alien headed households with children received some sort of welfare in 2009, compared with 39 percent of native-headed houses with children. Illegal immigrants generally access welfare programs through their U.S.-born children, to whom government assistance is guaranteed. Additionally, U.S.-born children of illegal aliens are entitled to American public schools, health care, and more, even though illegal-alien households rarely pay taxes.
The short-term cost of “anchor babies” was revealed a decade ago in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. “‘Anchor babies’ born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income.”
While perhaps humane, measures such as the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires hospital emergency departments to treat all patients with an “emergency” (an infinitely malleable term), regardless of documentation or ability to pay, have facilitated the abuse of American health care by illegal aliens.
There are long-term costs, too. U.S.-born children of illegal aliens can sponsor the immigration of family members once they come of age. At 18, an “anchor baby” can sponsor an overseas spouse and unmarried children of his own; at 21, he can sponsor parents and siblings. There may be a long waiting period before that legal benefit is of use. But it’s a fact that illegal aliens with American-born children are much less likely to be deported, and that policy has been effectively enshrined in law.
In 1966 American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven formulated “The Cloward-Piven strategy” which was a blueprint for making massive disruptions in the welfare system of the United States
Cloward and Piven had determined that many people in the U.S. were eligible for welfare, but were not receiving it. They believed that if all these people were to apply for welfare all at once, the local welfare offices would be overwhelmed and the states would be threatened with bankruptcy.
In advocating such disruptions, Cloward and Piven were making a deliberate attempt to incite racial, ethnic, and class tensions, setting whites against racial minorities and middle class liberals against working class immigrant groups.
They further wrote: “The ultimate objective of this strategy—to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income—will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.”
Anyone can see the so-far successful implementation of this strategy through the vehicle of illegal immigration and “anchor babies” through “maternity tourism”. The question then becomes; “What can we do to combat this?”
Stopping illegal immigration at the border, and instituting an actually effective visa-tracking system to crack down on overstays, would do much to discourage efforts to take advantage of American largesse, (while there is still American largesse to take advantage of).
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