GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Friday he would deport the children of undocumented immigrants with their families, despite them already being U.S. citizens.

“There are legally contested questions under the 14th Amendment of whether the child of an illegal immigrant is indeed a child who enjoys birthright citizenship or not,” Ramaswamy said after a town hall in Iowa.

Ramaswamy is not the only GOP candidate to question U.S. citizenship rules. Former President Trump announced in late May that on his first day back in office, he would seek to end birthright citizenship by way of an executive order.

  • @[email protected]
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    1710 months ago

    This debate has been ongoing in Canada for a while now, but personally I’m going to hold off on forming an opinion until someone can actually prove it’s an issue, because in Canada only ~500 births per year are from mothers who don’t live in Canada. It’s not even worth forming an opinion over, it’s just another polarizing distraction. Not sure if it’s as much of a non-issue in the US as well, but honestly it’s not even worth thinking about until someone shares some actual data.

    • @[email protected]
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      510 months ago

      Much, MUCH different in the US.

      There were just shy of 800,000 births by undocumented immigrants between 2010 and 2016, or over 110,000 births per year. So several orders of magnitude above Canada.

      • @[email protected]
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        810 months ago

        Technically only a single order of magnitude in terms of total births (3% vs 0.1%). Up to Americans to determine whether 3% of all births is worth worrying about though.

        • JJROKCZ
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          1110 months ago

          It’s not worrying, only racists are upset about this. A growing, working, tax-paying population is only good for a nation. Almost every single one of those 110k a year will spend 5-7 decades contributing to the American economy and workforce, that’s a plus in my book regardless of how they got here.

          • @[email protected]
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            310 months ago

            What’s interesting is back in the day Republicans supported this. Milton Friedman, Reagan’s infamous economic advisor, advocated for open borders. It’s essentially what we had in the 1800s. Chicago was 80% immigrant or child of immigrant in 1880s.

            Hell, Reagan even gave amnesty to millions of illegals.

            I think we should have more or less open borders. Block criminals and extremists… but everyone else let them in. Give them a trial period of like 5 to 10 years. If they pay taxes during that time period and don’t commit serious crimes… let them join the country.

            We’re gonna need the population to compete with China. There’s plenty of space in this country for many more people. And more people = more demand for goods and services = more jobs = more opportunities = more GDP

            I really don’t see many good reasons why not. Sure, the price of labor will go down but illegals are already doing much of the menial labor already anyways.

        • @[email protected]
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          -910 months ago

          Technically only a single order of magnitude in terms of total births (3% vs 0.1%).

          It goes by factors of 10

          So it would be a bit over 3 orders of magnitude above Canada.

          With that said, it doesn’t matter anyway because it would require a constitutional amendment to change, which is nigh on impossible in today’s political climate on any topic.

          • @[email protected]
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            910 months ago

            That’s actually not how orders of magnitude work, the definition is a change by a factor of 10, which means that if a number is n orders of magnitude larger than another it’s 10^n times larger. 2 orders of magnitude = 100 times larger, 3 orders of magnitude is 1000 times larger, etc.

            The exact order of magnitude of a ratio is log base 10. So log10(3/0.1)=1.4771 orders of magnitude.

          • Rentlar
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            610 months ago

            3 orders of magnitude greater is 10 × 10 × 10 = 1000x larger… which refers to 100~999% compared to 0.1%.