House Resolution 140, the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2011, has created some interesting dialogue. The bill amends the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which states, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." This bill would change this amendment a bit so at least one of the person’s parents must be a citizen of the country or serving in the military.

Most people in this country agree we have an immigration issue. Regardless which side of the argument you are on the amount of dialogue going on about this topic is a good thing. Bills like this and others force us to think through possible solutions to the issue.

In reading about this bill I came across an article online that concerned me. The first part of the article is well thought out and the author has a good argument. The author stumbles a little though. The author says “you'd be hard-pressed to find many aliens in the army.” Hard-pressed is of course a relative statement, but I don’t think its true. In 2009 the military started recruiting immigrates with temporary visa’s and green cards. The pentagon reports that about 29,000 people serving in the armed forces are not American citizens.

I agree this bill has issues and I cannot support it in its current state. The idea of sending a person back to a country they have never been to and may not even know the language is a concern to me. We also need to think through how the other country views the person’s citizenship since they were born out of country.

These are all great questions and conversations to have. However, the author goes on to make arguments that no longer make sense. The author makes the following statement.

“Do not tell me affirmative action is unfair because it excludes white people from college programs and then institute immigration and naturalization laws that exclude people of color from the work sector and the country.”

This statement is so loaded with unrelated and misguided statements it is hard to untangle. These statements just confuse the issue instead of helping to clarify and refine the issue. First, immigration laws are not created to exclude people of color. They are created to control the flow of people, regardless of color, between nations. Second, the concern with affirmative action is not that it excludes white people. It doesn’t. It sets different criteria for people. A white male needs a 3.9 GPA to get into a program but an American of Japanese dissent only needs a 2.8 GPA. The discussion about affirmative action is not the point here so I will stop there.

If we hope to clarify and solve these problems we must not muddy up the conversation with disconnected thoughts and arguments. We need to clarify and refine the issue and it’s problems. Only be doing this can we identify solutions for the problem. Like the author, I agree this bill has some issues, but we need to stop at the first half of the article which calls out those concerns, and refine possible solutions from there.