NY Times Races to the Bottom on Immigration

The New York Times editorial board headlines, G.O.P. Candidates Follow Trump to the Bottom on Immigration. It’s a typically unhinged Times screed, and as such not worth deconstructing in detail. But a couple of assertions are so ignorant as to be worth singling out.

The Times editorialists write:

[Donald Trump] would restrict legal immigration, and impose a national job-verification system so that everyone, citizens too, would need federal permission to work.

This is known as the “Social Security Act.” I am old enough to remember when liberals were in favor of it. Are the Times editorialists now advocating Social Security fraud? Yes they are, although they don’t want to put it that way.

Then there’s this:

[Trump] would replace the Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship by birth with citizenship by bloodline and pedigree…

I assume the humor here is inadvertent. Whether the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to everyone born within the territory of the United States, including the offspring of Chinese women who visit the U.S. for a few weeks while 8 1/2 months pregnant specifically for that purpose, is hotly debated. I think it does not. But “bloodline and pedigree”? Translation: if you are an American citizen, your children are American citizens too. A shocking concept–blood and soil!

..leaving it to politicians and bureaucrats to decide what to do with millions of stateless children.

This is crazed. The illegal immigrants we are talking about are not stateless wanderers, as I have written many times. They are citizens of various countries–most commonly, Mexico–just not of the United States. They have a country, but this isn’t it. And their offspring born in America are not, in any event, “stateless.” Under Mexican law, the children of Mexicans born in America are Mexican citizens. As they should be. “Statelessness” does not enter into it.

The Times editorialists are astonishingly ignorant. If any of them were to apply to write at Power Line, they would be instantly rejected as unqualified.

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