For Immediate Release
April 29, 2015
Contact: Emily Kessel, eakessel@nakasec.org
NAKASEC, KRC, and KRCC’s Joint Statement to the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Hearing on Birthright Citizenship
Annandale, Virginia— Today, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing to examine whether birthright citizenship is the right policy for America. For more than 115 years, the Supreme Court has affirmed that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to all individuals born in the United States and has rejected the argument that children born in the United States could be denied citizenship based on their parents’ immigration status.
Dae Joong Yoon, executive director of the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC); Jenny Seon, Immigrant Rights Project Director of the Korea Resource Center (KRC); and Inhe Choi, executive director of the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center (KRCC) released the following statement:
“NAKASEC, KRC, and KRCC urge members of the House Judiciary Committee to focus on fixing the broken immigration system instead of attacking U.S. born children by reevaluating birthright citizenship, a fundamental American value. We have been dedicated to helping our hardworking families naturalize and register to vote since the 1980s and 1990s. We need anti-immigrant politicians to stop creating additional barriers for aspiring Americans in our community.
The consequences of eliminating birthright citizenship are monumental. Contrary to claims made by anti-immigrant politicians, the elimination of birthright citizenship would actually cause the undocumented population to grow, rather than shrink. By creating a self-perpetuating class of undocumented immigrants, this policy would inevitably result in children in the United States being born stateless—having no citizenship in any country in this world. The Citizenship Clause was adopted in the wake of the infamous Dred Scott decision to foreclose the possibility of an unequal class system of people born in the United States.
Let’s learn from past mistakes with the Chinese Exclusion Act and other anti-immigrant laws and move this country forwards, not backwards. It is time to be a country that welcomes immigrants in search of a better life and protection from prejudice or persecution in their home countries.
In any debate about immigration, we must remember our core American values of family, equality and humane treatment of all individuals in our country.”
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