* The United States is just not a serious country anymore. This shouldn’t even be a difficult issue–children born to foreign diplomats on U.S. “soil” are not American citizens, so why should children born to foreigners also on U.S. soil for the express purposes of gaming the system be automatic U.S. citizens? I’m reminded of the Tunisian terrorist who couldn’t be deported because Tunisia wouldn’t take him back (smart people, those Tunisians) but who couldn’t be detained because, well, as I remember it, he didn’t have any papers. The West is so tied up in legalisms it can no longer act to preserve its own existence. It’s almost like being a body that’s lost its ability to recognize disease organisms.
* Fascinating quotation from the article:
“For better or worse, Chinese mothers’ first impression of American life is often in places like Rowland Heights, a mostly-Asian sprawling suburb of homes and vast strip malls 25 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.”
‘For better or worse . . .’? Is the writer actually worry-editorializing that these gravid ladies might be finding their new host country insufficiently impressive and welcoming? Perhaps the US government should step in to address this horrible injustice by implementing a new program to build birth-tourist hotels in nicer places such as Santa Barbara and La Jolla. We should provide shuttle service from LAX also, of course.
* Deftly presented, it could be a huge political winner. Birth tourism, for one thing is very unpopular. For another thing, I sense that birthright citizenship to noncitizens has great potential to trigger in American women a strong competitive/protective instinct in favor of their own children and grandchildren and in opposition to outsider women trying to elbow into their nest. There’s also just the basic injustice of rewarding lawbreakers.
