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.

Did we think through the criteria for becoming a US citizen? This is the abridged version:



If you look at the real thing, you'll find that we refuse people because of lots of things. They are refused because of diseases they have, addictions, various crimes (blue and white collar), whether they are likely to require public support (welfare, etc.), lack of knowledge of the US legal system and US history, lack of proficiency in the English language, etc., etc. It goes on forever.



The fact is, if we applied what it takes to become and "American" to people who already are, a double digit percentage would be stripped of citizenship. You can look here at JU and see how much the average citizen knows about law, history, the English language, etc. It just seems sad to me that we can't apply our standards to ourself.

YOu cant choose your family. ONly your friends.

well put guy

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?

No, as usual of late, you missed the point.

Let me make it simple. No one who is Born American CHOSE to BE American. But America can CHOOSE who will become American who was not born here.

The black sheep in your family may not be your friends, but regardless of their crimes and transgressions, they are part of your family. However, you dont have to become friends with a rapist, murderer or pedophile.

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.

? You guys are straining hard, lol. It would be perfectly resonable to allow those born here citizenship until they prove unworthy of the title American. You guys are dodging clumsily. The fact of the matter is we set what it takes to become an American, and then ignore the fact that a great many people here don't meet those expectations.

Thus, the term is basically meaningless. It's like the idea of infallibility in the Catholic Church. It's only really meaningful as some esoteric ideal, in function it is meaningless. Well, the standards imposed as defining American citizenship are basically meaningless in the same way, since they really only count in name only.

This idea that we can't deport people or strip them of their citizenship is false too. The Patriot Act II had a section that gave them the power to strip anyone that renders material support to terrorist groups of citizenship. Hrm, 15k murders a year, and 3k deaths to terrorism in more than a decade. Sounds like our priorities suck.



Now you are just playing ignorant. We graduate kids from High School all the time that are functionally illiterate. We are constantly hearing how the NCLB thing isn't fair because we can't expect inner city kids, etc., to be able to meet those standards. There was something just the other day about how any testing at all under the age of 12 is supposedly unfair.

So, no, there are plenty of people in the US that don't meet the language requirement, and that aren't immigrants or kids of immigrants.

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.

Oh I got it alright. You are advocating kicking people out based upon the criteria we use to take people in. All I have been saying, and trying to say, that you are either not addressing or ignoring, is that the RULES state. Rules are not perfect and one of them is that if you are born here, that trumps all other rules. If you are not born here, then you have to qualify.

I never said it was perfect, indeed I stated the opposite. What I have said is that America cannot take in every one, no matter how saintly they are, who wants to come here. WIthout sinking the boat.

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

Umm, public education is free, charles, and most public schools take great pains to ensure that even homeless children are added to their rolls (when they don't take them from their parents for neglect). There is positively no excuse for not having an education in the US.

By the way, Baker, I got your point. I just have nothing to add.

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.

Baker, you missed my sarcasm. And you still have not gotten my point.

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.

Actually, Baker, felons ARE technically stripped of their citizenship, for a time at least.

The fact is, though, as Dr. Guy says, we can only do so much about our citizens who violate these rules. They were born here, after all, and we can't simply kick them out. Well, we could technically execute them, but that would in itself violate every precept of what we consider to be "American", wouldn't it? To some degree we have to endure some of these people simply because they were born here.

As for immigrants, there's nothing wrong with setting certain standards. No felony convictions, etc. The one thing that does gall me is that we pride ourselves on being the "land of opportunity" and yet we turn immigrants away at the gates because of poverty. Doesn't seem to be much of a land of opportunity when we only bring in the educated and the middle and upper classes.

Somewhere between the xenophobic "wall off the borders and lock 'em all out!" solution and the "open the gates and let everyone in" solution lies the truth. You know as well as I do that with a completely open border, there are elements that would exploit it. And those are elements we should at least attempt to keep out. But a completely closed border robs us of the riches we have gained through immigration, and also violates every precept we have as proud Americans.

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.

On the contrary, Gid, we can do anything we want, it's a democracy. We already passed legislation allowing us to strip people of citizenship and deport them if they are found to be supporting terror. Not killing people, mind you, but even fundraising.

I find it difficult to believe that such a thing is possible if it is impossible to do the same to a child murderer. I'm not saying that we SHOULD do this, but it seems the height of hypocrisy to me that we pretend that we have such a high standard, but natural-born citizenship is "once saved, always saved".



Not necessarily ease, but take out all the parts that are obviously there to make it difficult with little or no advantage to America once they are here. The stuff that looks suscpiciously like rules that snobby country clubs would use to keep out the "wrong sort of people".

Expecting people to be model "Americans", when people who've lived here all their lives couldn't meet the standard is a tad silly.

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.

Do you really feel that the majority of Americans couldn't meet most of the requirements, Baker? Are the majority criminals? Can the majority not speak the language? OK, I'll give you the citizenship test, but I believe that's a failure of our GOVERNMENT schools, not our people. Maybe passing the citizenship should be a prereq to a HS diploma.

The fact is, we need SOME standards, and even you must acknowledge that. And regardless of the standards we set, there will be some Americans who do not measure up.

And I wish you'd get past the idea that the will of the majority must always override the Constitution. Do we really want to revisit the days of Jim Crow? The majority can be a tyranny, and there must be checks, even against the power of the majority. Otherwise, personal property does not exist because the majority can vote it away. Freedom of religion is similarly violable by a majority vote.

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.

ladies and gentleman,,,put your hands together for the thought police!

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.

And a round of applause for people whose knee-jerk bias prevents them from even grasping the simplest of points. You read what you want to believe. I am not advocating the stripping of citizenship. Asking why people don't do something isn't necessarily demanding they do it.

...but, then I am growing to expect people around here to only be able to digest a thumbnail sketch of anything but their own complex excuses...

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.