Tom Tancredo's bill to deny U.S. citizenship to the American-born children of undocumented immigrants bears more than a little resemblance to the
"grandfather clauses" that became popular in the South and elsewhere after the Civil War:
The 14th Amendment, which conferred citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, was ratified in 1868.
In 1870 the 15th Amendment was ratified, which provided specifically that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude. This superseded state laws that had directly prohibited black voting. Congress then enacted the Enforcement Act of 1870, which contained criminal penalties for interference with the right to vote, and the Force Act of 1871, which provided for federal election oversight.
As a result, in the former Confederate States, where new black citizens in some cases comprised outright or near majorities of the eligible voting population, hundreds of thousands -- perhaps one million -- recently-freed slaves registered to vote. Black candidates began for the first time to be elected to state, local and federal offices and to play a meaningful role in their governments.
The extension of the franchise to black citizens was strongly resisted. Among others, the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, and other terrorist organizations attempted to prevent the 15th Amendment from being enforced by violence and intimidation. . . .
Once whites regained control of the state legislatures using these tactics, a process known as "Redemption," they used gerrymandering of election districts to further reduce black voting strength and minimize the number of black elected officials. In the 1890s, these states began to amend their constitutions and to enact a series of laws intended to re-establish and entrench white political supremacy.
Such disfranchising laws included poll taxes, literacy tests, vouchers of "good character," and disqualification for "crimes of moral turpitude."
. . .
In Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 (1915), the Supreme Court held that voter registration requirements containing "grandfather clauses,", which made voter registration in part dependent upon whether the applicant was descended from men enfranchised before enactment of the 15th Amendment violated that amendment. The Supreme Court found the Oklahoma law was adopted in order to give whites, who might otherwise have been disfranchised by the state's literacy test, a way of qualifying to vote that was not available to blacks.
The denial of citizenship to American-born children of undocumented immigrants is the modern version of the grandfather clause -- it makes citizenship, and therefore voting, partially dependent on whether your ancestors were permitted to vote. This isn't a fanciful analogy -- the Fourteenth Amendment's mandate that all persons born within the jurisdiction of the United States are citizens was intended to enfranchise people of color, and it is an obstacle to Tancredo's efforts to create a permanent underclass of noncitizens of color today just as it was intended to be an obstacle to efforts to disenfranchise Black people after the Civil War. How's that for original intent?
Tancredo's bill is flagrantly unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment, as even the conservative Rocky Mountain News recognizes. It may also be unconstitutional as punishment of children for crimes of their parents, something the Constitution expressly forbids in the case of treason. Nevertheless, opponents should not just sit back and let the Republicans pass this Tancredo garbage and hope the Courts do the right thing. We need to explain that creating a permanent community of noncitizens is un-American and will harm not only the new non-citizen class but would represent a major step backwards in the American march towards equal rights for all.