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Lindsey Graham backs Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship

Sen. Lindsey Graham on Tuesday cheered President Trump’s latest plan to target illegal immigrants and fire up his base before the midterms — saying he would introduce legislation to end birthright citizenship.

“Finally, a president willing to take on this absurd policy of birthright citizenship,” the South Carolina Republican wrote.

“I plan to introduce legislation along the same lines as the proposed executive order from President @realDonaldTrump.”

Graham, who had floated the idea before, as far back as July 2010, said eliminating birthright citizenship, enshrined in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, should be part of overall immigration reform, though he offered no details.

“I’ve always supported comprehensive immigration reform — and at the same time — the elimination of birthright citizenship,” he wrote.





Birthright citizenship, he said, encouraged illegal immigrants to come to the US, where their stateside-born children would automatically become citizens.

“The United States is one of two developed countries in the world who grant citizenship based on location of birth. This policy is a magnet for illegal immigration, out of the mainstream of the developed world, and needs to come to an end,” he said.

The other “developed” country is Canada, though about 30 other countries also offer citizenship to babies born to undocumented mothers.

Graham, once one of Trump’s toughest GOP critics, has morphed into one of the president’s most ardent admirers.

And as Trump ramps up his rhetoric against illegal immigration to energize his base before the Nov. 6 midterms, Graham was quick to offer his support.





The president has condemned the caravans of Central American asylum seekers as “an invasion” and ordered 5,200 US troops to the border, where more than 2,000 National Guardsmen were already deployed.

The initial caravan, which now numbers about 3,500, Mexican officials said, remains more than 1,000 miles away and might not reach the US for weeks if not months.

Trump said in an interview with Axios that he can end the law by executive order, a position Democrats and legal experts say would be illegal.

“The 14th Amendment of the Constitution says all people born or naturalized in the United States are citizens. This executive order wouldn’t just be unjust—it’s unconstitutional,” tweeted Washington Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal.

“The president cannot erase the Constitution with an executive order, and the 14th Amendment’s citizenship guarantee is clear,” Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told CNN, calling the move a pre-election stunt.





“This is a transparent and blatantly unconstitutional attempt to sow division and fan the flames of anti-immigrant hatred in the days ahead of the midterms.”

But Trump disagreed.

“They’re saying I can do it just with an executive order,” Trump contended in the interview.

The Pew Research Center found in a survey published two years ago that births to “unauthorized immigrants” were declining and accounted for about 1 in 3 births to foreign-born mothers in the US in 2014.

About 275,000 babies were born to such parents in 2014, or about 7 percent of the 4 million births in the US that year, according to Pew estimates based on government data.

That represented a decline from 330,000 in 2009, at the end of the recession.

With AP





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