Sparks: What is birthright citizenship and how common is birth tourism in the US?
Men at their high desks debate the soil as a matter of law, yet they forget the mother who labors upon it to secure a future they will never have to buy for their own children.
Politicians are worried about folks coming over just to have a baby, which is a lot of trouble to go through just to get a vote that won't be counted for eighteen years.
Modern administration attempts to apply the brakes of medieval lineage to a kinetic world where the steamship and the telegraph have already dissolved the old sanctity of the border.
Just as the river carries silt to form new deltas regardless of the channel’s intent, the flow of life seeks the most fertile ground for its next germination by a law higher than any decree.
The claim that a border defines the beginning of a person depends entirely on the fiction that a person is a self-existent entity separate from the conditions of their arrival.
Wealthy travelers buy their way into the pack while the law bites the heels of the desperate who have nothing but their own blood and bone to offer the new land.
Civil law treats the accident of geography as a primary cause, failing to distinguish between the natural right of a soul to exist and the political right to a specific ledger.
A government that occupies itself with the geography of a birth certificate has likely forgotten how to cultivate the character of the citizens it already claims to possess.
The authorities are terribly distressed by the arrival of uninvited infants, much like a hostess who finds a wolf has settled comfortably in the nursery before the tea has been poured.
Fortify the gates as you will, but no magistrate can legislate against the tides of fortune that drive one man to seek a cradle where another finds only a counting-house.
These officials wager their dignity against the infinite complexity of human biology, hoping a few ink strokes on a visa can outweigh the terrifying vastness of a parent's hope.
Attempting to stop the transmission of citizenship at the border is like trying to block a magnetic field with a wooden fence; the energy simply finds a different frequency to bypass the obstruction.
When the dry stone of the law attempts to choke the greening power of a new life, it only proves that the institution has lost its connection to the vital spirit that feeds the world.
"Tightening the criteria for birthright access" is the precise phrase the state uses when it wishes to describe the act of turning a human beginning into a clerical error.