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Essay On Birthright Citizenship

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Another controversial assumption made by advocates who want to see a change in birthright citizenship is that unauthorized immigrants and their U.S. born children place a drain on many social resources. When an unauthorized immigrant has a child born in the U.S., that child has access to all the social resources that U.S. children born to legal citizens are entitled to. It is believed that undocumented immigrants do not pay taxes and come to America with the sole intentions of living on welfare. Evidence provided by the Social Security Administration, contends that there are taxes that cannot be matched to workers’ names and social security numbers. This is also known as a “suspense file” and it has grown by twenty billion dollars in recent years. Migrants and undocumented immigrants contribute more in taxes and social contributions than they will ever receive in individual benefits (Van Hook and Fix 2010). Immigrants earn about $240 billion a year, they pay about $90 billion a year in taxes but only use roughly $5 billion in public benefits (Van Hook and Fix 2010). In …show more content…

Such changes would require that a newborn must provide proof of his/her birth as well as his/her parents legal status at the time of birth. This would place a huge burden on the state government and would make the issuance of birth certificates very expensive. U.S. citizenship and immigration laws are complex and providing proof of a parent’s legal status at the time of the child’s birth can be very difficult. Every American born baby would face a bureaucratic hurdle that would result in the need of legal services. A change in the citizenship clause will cost American households $2.4 billion annually (Stock 153). It is also expected that the change would fall on minorities and the poor because the wealthy and most middle class families would have access to a lawyer, when the poor could not afford to retain

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