sorry charles, it wasn't personal. i disagree with anyone who wants to start stripping citizenship because of their deeds being deemed unworthy by anyone. i disagree with criminals losing their voting rights after they have paid their price. if they truly pay the price, the right should be restored.

it is just a variation of the "thought police."

but i didn't mean to go after you there personally...my apologies.

YOu cant choose your family. ONly your friends.

Huh? The naturalization process IS choosing your family, right? This is more like saying you can't be in my family because you have a disease or can't speak good enough English, but never mind the sexual predators we let roam the back yard...

The fact of the matter is if America turned the mirror it used to control immigration on itself, we'd probably lose about a third of our population. Isn't it a tad apeshit silly to claim we are protecting ourselves from people who can't speak English and keeping self-confessed predators in our society?

Lets see a newborn has not commited any crimes yet, they can't pay taxes till they old enough to work and chances are they usually do if they get jobs, there is no draft anymore so I don't see the point in that.



The odds of someone being born and raised here no knowing the language would be a first for me. But the are you including children who are mentally ill and can probably not learn the language?



Well if you were born here chances are you might have gone to school here (if you could afford to go, homeless children etc.) and chances are somewhere along the line you took American history and probably passed a test or 2, unless you just didn't care.



The average child probably doesn't even understand the concept of swearing.

Baker,

Do you realize that by this concept every child that does not understand at all any of these criterias are automatically stripped of their citizenship? And what about the mentally ill that are incapable of reading, writing or even speaking the language, should they too be stripped of citizen ship? And what about those billionaires that get away with murder, how can we strip them of citizenship if we can't even prove they are guilty because they rig the system. I'm sorry buddy but your living in a Borg universe where perfection if the goal.

P.S. By the way, before people keep saying I don't get it, you might want to reread and figure out that no one that has replied to me yet, no one, has gotten what I am saying, and most of you are just knee-jerk assuming the opposite.

Nope, you didn't get it at all...

Doc:

Imagine for a minute that you are trying to get into a country club. They have criteria like, you can't get in if you are apt to be on welfare. If you can't pass aptitude tests on law, history, and English, you aren't eligible. The list of things that disqualify you is immense, even sometimes if you are sick or have broken oppressive laws imposed by dictators.

Then you find out that they have members that violate all of them. They finagle their kids through school whether they learn or not, and when they get failed they fight to make the tests easier. Their sons murder, rape, and molest, and they after what is usually a minimal sentence get out and continue enjoying their membership status.

On the other hand people who sneak into the country club, clean the floors, wait on the ignorant wealthy, etc., are villified, and the club spends untold millions of dollars to make sure that only members are enjoying being in there. Then they complain that they don't have the money for, say, fighting terrorism, disaster relief, catching their predator sons and daughters, etc.

Standing on the outside, what would you think of such a place? To me, the whole membership thing would seem a little pointless and hypocritical. I'd probably feel justified to dodge membership as long as I could.

Does that mean we strip the citizenship of everyone who violates the terms of immigration? No, but obviously we can't believe we have any moral standing imposing standards that we can't keep ourselves. All this looking down our nose at people who work hard and simply don't want to jump through our hypocritical hoops is pointless.

P.S. And before someone reminds me, I am well aware that illegal immigrants commit crimes here, too.

As a long time fan of the NRA, though, I have to wonder. When you make legally owning a gun harder and harder, the average person who acquires a gun will be someone who doesn't mind getting it illegally. That's the old saw: when guns are illegal, only criminals will have guns.

The same thing works for immigration. The more difficult you make it, the more you discourage legal immigration and encourage criminals who don't jump through the hoops. Once they are here illegally, basically fugitives, the more apt they are to behave like fugitives while they are here.

Conservatives understand this with guns. Odd they don't understand it with immigration.

You want to ease the immigration process, Baker? That's fine, so do I. But let's ease it for everyone, NOT just the Mexicans because we want cheap agricultural work.

The problem is, Baker, WHERE DO WE SEND THEM? Who would take them? We don't necessarily want to endure them, but we HAVE to because we can't just set them adrift on a board in the middle of the ocean.

I have long advocated for the restoration of penal colonies for criminals like this, and still do. We should build a super, supermax in Alaska and shoot to kill anyone who violates the perimeter, in my perfect little world.

Why? We expect the ones born here to be that way. That is why we have laws and jails. Just because we cannot catch all murderers does not mean we should not try to catch any of them. And just because we cannot MAKE (note, not expect, make) all americans live up to an expectation of "good citizenship" does not mean we should not expect that of ones wanting to be citizens either.

Where do we send the ones we strip of citizenship for other crimes? What if no one wants them, either? Didn't seem to be a big enough problem to keep us from passing such laws for other crimes, did it?



I never said the majority, did I? Was a mistake if I did. I do think a large majority, maybe a third, couldn't pass the criteria to immigrate here.



LOL, wow, that's a big statement, Gid. You realize that if the will of the majority didn't, we'd be ruled by dead guys from 200 years ago. They said it, and we can't do anything to change it?

Nope. Not even the dead guys agreed with that, which is why they gave us the right to amend the constitution. I wish you'd get past the idea that there are some universal truths floating around out there that everyone agrees on.

At one time it was almost universally believed that slavery was okay, that "All men are created equal" really meant "men", etc. Thankfully, we didn't heed the will of people who believed that amending the constitution was somehow an affront to the way things were meant to be.

yeah..."inalienable rights" was just a joke...Ol' Tom fergot to put "LOL" at the end of it!

The truth is, there are some rights our founding fathers DID feel were inviolable and inalienable. This is why the Bill of Rights does not GRANT us rights, but rather limits the power of the government.

And Constitutional amendments require a legislative supermajority, both at the federal level and among the states. If it simply required a majority, we'd probably have 2-3000 amendments by now, as many state Constitutions do.