They are just children who carry great gifts, depending on what the culture and their families support them with or burden them with.
One wonders where this idea of including some and excluding others really comes from. As a start, I’d offer…
A very famous man writes about immigrants in America: They are, he says…
“…generally of the most ignorant stupid sort of their own nation. Not being used to liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it. They are not esteemed men till they have shown their manhood by beating their mothers. Now they come in droves. Few of their children in the country learn English.”
The writer is Benjamin Franklin, in 1753. He was writing about German immigrants. Franklin, a man who decided as part of his ‘help’ in writing the D of I and the Constitution, that equality for all did not include dark skinned persons, nor half the population, that is, women… and that it was perfectly fine to have slaves… people who were given NO liberty, no justice, no right to the pursuit of happiness.
As a younger man, Ben was a fugitive who ran from the law as he had given a troth for an apprenticeship and did not complete it and instead ran away. Franklin didnt legally marry the woman he was sleeping with, had an ‘illegitimate’ son by another woman, who grew up to also father an “illegitimate’ son.
Ben Franklin’s published Almanac today would be said to have plaguerized much older work, and Franklin’s modest “discoveries’ about cooling and storms and wind, had been known in the Americas and Africa and Persia by ancient peoples for a very very long time.
Finally, in his later years, he decided abolition might be a good idea after all, and wrote for it, and made himself president of an abolitionist group. Though he claimed to be a ‘Christian Deist”, he was actually a Puritan through and through, and was bombastic and hyperbolic throughout life. He preached temperance and was obese. He preached frugality, but lived like a king. He vaunted humility but wanted to be the last word and the head of every and anything. He preached chastity, but, well…
Thus and so, old Ben made his pronouncement about immigrants, helping to set opprobrium against immigrants –just for the fact of their existence… a trope against ‘the newcomer’ that would endure to our day.
Ben Franklin was born in Boston, Mass in 1706. His father Josiah Franklin was an immigrant from Northamptonshire, England… and who had two wives and 17 children that he supported by making candles and soap. Ben’s mother was the daughter of immigrants, with his grandmother agreeing to work at whatever she was given to do in order to pay passage to America, otherwise known as a way of slipping into the Americas as ‘an indentured servant.’ Thus, even one born on this soil, has many reasons to find him unfit as a citizen when/if one looks at how his family actually got here, and how his ‘character’ seemed to be.
In coming days, I may put up the background of the immigrant relatives of say, Sen Grassley, whom I’ve found had persons by the same surname flang unto the American shores from prison ships. No papers. No visas.
Interesting that none of us can ever claim purity of place or heritage through the centuries of generations living in a world of displacement, crime and war, injustice and exclusion. Domicile is often happenstance, and people have migrated –and fled- and been force marched to new lands, for better or worse, since forever. Trying to strip children of citizenship who are born in the USA? Start with stripping Ben Franklin and others of his friends whose pathways to what would become the US were irregular often, and often dicey and would not pass muster today or even a hundred years ago in the US.
The capriciousness of modern-medieval immigration law in the US, made by those who favor one or another for their own reasons, who fear as I heard one governor call it, ‘the brown tide’—the laws and especially the ONES WHO MAKE THE LAWS and for WHAT reasons… those are the places to examine, not the worthiness of little children born in the USA.