Institute Notes: A Dialogue on Overcoming Hunger and Poverty

Sen. Lindsey Graham’s proposal to modify the 14^th amendment (yes, the one that granted slaves citizenship after the Civil War) is perhaps the clearest signal yet of the depth of anger over immigration.

The change to the amendment isn’t going to happen—and don’t expect to hear much about it after the November election—but the mere fact that it’s being discussed, even as a purely political tactic, speaks volumes about the current feeling toward immigrants among wide swaths of the American public (recent polling gives the proposal the support of almost half of all Americans.)

Behind the proposal and anti-immigration feeling in general is the view that legalizing immigrants devalues U.S. citizenship. If you can just cross the border and become a citizen (after paying a fine, waiting for years, undergoing a background check, learning English, and working jobs that no one else wants), what’s the value of being an American?

But as anti-immigrant voices protest that amnesty debases citizenship, they haven’t defined what citizenship means or what it’s worth. In this respect illegal immigration can be instructive, because immigrants—much more than most Americans—know intimately the value of living legally in the United States.

In 2007, 27 percent of Americans carried U.S. passports. Historically, most Americans choose not to use their U.S. citizenship—which opens doors around the world—to travel internationally. But illegal immigrants are dying to get into the United States—something they wouldn’t be obliged to do if there was a more rational system for matching immigrant labor with available U.S. jobs.

From 1998 to 2009, 4,375 immigrants—men, women, and children—died