Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, bless his heart, was off in Texas this past week (his new hangout), promising to rid America of people like him.
That wasn’t exactly how he put it. But that’s the gist of his declaration to end the constitutionally enshrined right of American citizenship to anybody born in the United States. It’s known as “birthright citizenship.”
"This idea that you can come across the border, two days later have a child, and somehow that's an American citizen — that was not the original understanding of the 14th Amendment. And so we'll take action to force a clarification of that," DeSantis said in Eagle Pass, Texas, which is 1,044 miles from Tallahassee, the alleged place of his employment.
The contention that presidents can issue executive orders to prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution sounds nutty.
That’s because it is. DeSantis is just glomming onto the untethered musings of his proudly uninformed political mentor in Mar-a-Lago again. But DeSantis, a Harvard Law School graduate, ought to know better.
The idea that any child born in the United States, even one of undocumented non-citizens, is granted citizenship has been a constitutional right since 1868.
It was challenged 30 years later in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case finding that Wong Kim Ark — a child of Chinese parents barred from citizenship in the U.S. due to the then-existing Chinese Exclusion Act — was a U.S. citizen due solely to his birth on United States soil.
“To hold that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution excludes from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States,” the court’s opinion in that 1898 case noted.
Challenges to birthright citizenship these days are generated from a bigoted sector of white Americans who fear the “browning” of the country through Central America is destroying its Western European culture.
But what’s especially appalling about DeSantis signing on to this exercise in bigot recruitment is his family’s own personal history with birthright citizenship.
All eight of DeSantis’ great-grandparents emigrated to the United States from Italy early in the last century in the hopes of finding a better life here.
They weren’t English-speaking college graduates recruited by merit. They didn’t have visas. And they didn’t win immigration lotteries when they boarded the ships steaming to New York.
They just showed up uninvited. Today, DeSantis might call that “an invasion” of unwanted DeSantises engaging in “chain migration.”
One of his great-grandparents, Luigia Colucci, arrived at Ellis Island on Feb. 21, 1917, eight months pregnant.
For those of you still keeping score, today’s Ron DeSantis would probably refer to his own great uncle as an “anchor baby.”
And he’d be calling for putting a stop to letting his own ancestor become a U.S. citizen.
More: DeSantis turns back on his own roots: Immigrant's journey from 1917 echoes in Florida
Megan Smolenyak, a professional genealogist from St. Petersburg, researched DeSantis’ family tree, and wrote about it, including the arrival of his illiterate, very pregnant great-grandmother.
“Those who are less than welcoming of immigrants often proudly state that their ancestors came here legally, while failing to appreciate (or perhaps deliberately ignoring) how meaningless this claim is,” Smolenyak wrote. “Until a century ago, unless you were Chinese or Japanese (nationalities targeted by earlier legislation), this amounted to showing up at a U.S. port of entry.
“This is exactly what Luigia did, and what today’s asylum applicants are doing,” Smolenyak wrote. “The difference is that this process wasn’t criminalized until 2018.”
More: Hundreds march to protest new Immigration Law SB 1718 in downtown West Palm Beach
If today’s Ron DeSantis was the governor of New York in 1917, things might have gone really wrong for Luigia Colucci.
Instead of being given prenatal care upon her arrival to the United States, DeSantis’ illiterate great-grandmother might have been handed a liability waiver to sign, then taken under false pretenses to a train and sent off to another state as a political stunt with no regard for her or her baby's welfare.
That would have been a shame.
But lucky for Ron DeSantis, there wasn’t a Ron DeSantis available last century to derail his own American journey.
Frank Cerabino is a columnist at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at fcerabino@gannett.com.
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