Arizona Immigration Kerfuffle Coattails? Not in the U.S. Congress

The passage of SB 1070 in Arizona will certainly have a strong impact within the state of Arizona. When the law goes into effect in less than three months, it will force police officers to stop and search citizens who look like illegal aliens to them, without probable cause to believe that they are actually illegal aliens. U.S. citizens will be put in detention if they don’t have identity papers on them.

Does the passage of SB 1070, certainly a victory for Arizona’s right wing, signal the onset of victories for right wing Americans on a national level? Does the momentum theory of politics apply, in which the passage of policy in one venue leads to the promotion of similar policy elsewhere?

If there was any Big Mo for right-wing America after the passage of SB 1070, we’d see some kind of progress in right-wing legislation on immigration currently under consideration of Congress. A perennial cause of right-wing legislators on Capitol Hill has been the denial of citizenship to babies born right here in America. Two bills to revoke American-born babies’ citizenship are H.R. 126 and H.R. 1868.

The way that U.S. citizenship works is pretty simple when you get down to it: if you are born in this country, you are a citizen. That’s the standard set out in the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. But for some years now, right-wing members of the House of Representatives have been unhappy with the Constitution. They would either like to change it to deny the presumption of citizenship rights, or they would like to pass a law that simply ignores the 14th Amendment.

H.R. 1868 is a bill designed to remove the guarantee that what makes you an American is being born in the USA. This bill, inappropriately named the Birthright Citizenship Act, actually takes away birthright citizenship from people born in the USA if their parents aren’t permanent residents or citizens. If passed into law, H.R. 1868 would apply the old German Heimatland model of citizenship rights guaranteed by proper bloodline rather than by place of birth, a model in which generations of people of Turkish descent, all born in Germany and living in Germany all their lives, were denied German citizenship. Germany abandoned this system in the 1990s, but the American right wing is eager to put America on this path, with 92 members of the House indicating their formal support through cosponsorship.

H.R. 126, even more extreme than H.R. 1868, is a bill designed to work in concert with a constitutional amendment to remove the guarantee that what makes you an American is being born in the USA. Once that is accomplished, the supporters of H.R. 126 would implement a plan according to which you’ll have to be born to an American resident mother or citizen mother. You read that right: “mother.” Not father. Even if you are born in the USA, the son or daughter of a male American citizen, H.R. 126 would still strip you of your citizenship.

These draconian immigration measures may warm the cockles of right-wing hearts across America. But the bills have not gained discernable momentum from the high-profile passage of SB 1070 in Arizona. Neither bill has made any procedural step forward toward consideration by the House since SB 1070 became law. H.R. 1868 has gained no new cosponsors at all, and H.R. 126 has gained just one new cosponsor — Rep. John Duncan of Tennessee. This takes the number of cosponsors of the bill from 0 to 1, which is an infinite increase proportionately but a miniscule increase in absolute terms. Duncan has long held strong anti-immigrant views.

What this lack of momentum in Congress signifies is that while the passage of SB 1070 in Arizona has grabbed the attention of Americans on both sides of the immigration policy divide, its passage and the discussion of its ramifications do not seem to have changed minds.