IMMIGRATION REFORM campaigners in the US have expressed concern about a proposed change to US law, which means the birth certificates of children of illegal Irish and other immigrants would be marked differently to the children of US citizens.
Former US democratic congressman and attorney Bruce Morrison said the proposal, made earlier this month by the group State Legislators for Legal Immigration, would take away the automatic right to citizenship afforded to those born in the US under the 14th Amendment to the US constitution.
“Right now we have a very simple system of what makes you a citizen. You were born in the United States, end of question,” Mr Morrison said. “Now the question would be who are your parents and are they legal?”
He said the idea of birthright citizenship had been “earned by the blood of people who died in the [American] civil war to end slavery and second-class citizenship for black people, so messing around with this is like reopening this huge scar of American history”.
Mr Morrison, who gave his name to a successful visa scheme in the early 1990s which saw over 40,000 receive visas for the US, said it should be pointed out to the Irish people “that they already did worse than this [to] people who are immigrants in Ireland” in the 2004 referendum which changed citizenship law here.
Although the proposal claims not to confer any particular benefit or penalty, the international organisation Human Rights Watch has warned that differentiating citizens on the basis of their parents’ immigration status would inevitably result in discriminatory treatment.
Ciarán Staunton, president of the US-based Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, said: “Of course we would be opposed to it but I don’t think it will ever come to that.” He said different estimates put the number of Irish citizens in the US between 30,000 and 50,000.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs said it and the Irish Embassy in Washington remained “actively engaged in advancing a legislative solution to the needs of the undocumented Irish in the US”.