My boss Marty, who is a great communicator himself, read this article by the lingust George Lakoff on The Framing of Immigration, and came up with this great redux:
1. The US is dealing with an “Economic Refugee Crisis” that is pushing 800,000 people a year across our borders.
2. We are dealing with a humanitarian crisis that pushes good hardworking families to be separated and hundreds to die on a trek to earn a living wage.
3. We need Foreign Policy Reform that cuts support for corrupt governments and dysfunctional banking systems that bleed hard working and sacrificing people from developing countries. We need offer people freedom to follow jobs now that we have mutli-national corporations and trade agreements that are so fluid with capital and assets. Companies have more freedom and choices than the people.
4. We need to reaffirm the core American stand of birthright citizenship before small minded nationalists with fear of diversity attack another one of our core building rights in this nation. (I am the grandson of an economic immigrant from Ireland and I know they tried every trick possible to suppress the Irish too). Born in America is the test of American citizenship.
5. It is an economic crisis, fueled by American choices toward cheap labor. American consumers and businesses pay low wages to provide the crap served out at WalMart and McDonalds. As long as our country continues to do anything and everything to “save a buck” regardless of the human cost we will continue to have economic pressures to hire refugees.
– Network-Centric Advocacy: The Framing of Immigration: Economic Refugee Crisis
And, in fact, “the core American stand of birthright citizenship” is also a core principle of English common law, going back to a 1608 English court case involving the status of Scots following the union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603. This affirmed citizenship by birth (jus soli).
The nightmare scenario would be an eventual situation comparable to that in Germany, where third or fourth generation immigrants of, say, Turkish descent aren’t German citizens. I have no idea why citizenship by ethnic descent (jus sanguinis) wasn’t the first thing to be scrapped by allies building a post-Nazi constitution, but there you go…
Anyways, historical perspective in case you meet someone in favour of doing away with birthright citizenship!