Earlier this week, Chapman University law professor John Eastman used the announcement that Kamala Harris is Joe Biden’s pick to be Vice President to explain his unorthodox view of the citizenship clause of the 14^th Amendment.

Is Kamala Harris eligible for the office of Vice President? Here’s my article, published by Newsweek, exploring the issues. Short answer: It depends! https://t.co/A2K08EBUYu

— John Eastman (@DrJohnEastman) August 12, 2020

Eastman, who’s frequently the only constitutional lawyer on any panel or symposium who believes that birthright citizenship isn’t guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment, used his reasoning to argue that Harris is not a natural‐​born citizen and therefore ineligible to be Vice President because she is ineligible to be President.

This is because, according to Eastman’s theory, Harris’ parents were non‐​citizens when she was born on U.S. soil and not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. government. Funny enough, Eastman believes that Ted Cruz is a natural‐​born citizen while Harris is not, but this is actually perfectly consistent with his odd interpretation of the 14^th Amendment. So, while it is tempting to poke fun at his seeming partisanship on the Cruz vs. Harris question of natural‐​born citizenship, we must give him the benefit of the doubt on that point.

But that doesn’t mean that Eastman is correct on the broader point. Rather than delve into the legal weeds on this issue, which many others have done, I’ll focus instead on some erroneous statements that Eastman makes about American history.

In his opinion piece, Eastman states that the children of Mexican immigrants born on U.S. soil who were deported during the Mexican Repatriation on the 1920s and 1930s weren’t considered citizens by the government. Eastman wrote:

The children born on U.S. soil to guest workers from Mexico during the Roaring 1920s were not viewed as citizens, for example, when, in the wake of the Great Depression, their families were repatriated to Mexico.

Eastman is incorrect, the government did consider those born to non‐​citizens on U.S. soil to be American citizens. His story about the deportations of Mexicans and American citizens of Mexican descent doesn’t support his point. First, children born in the United States who are minors can follow their parents as they are deported even today. Many today end up staying in the United States with guardians, other relatives, or in the foster care system, but some also leave. Thus, removing or allowing U.S.-born minors to leave with their foreign‐​born parents who are deported doesn’t mean that the U.S. government doesn’t consider the minors to be U.S. citizens.

Second, many of the U.S.-born children of Mexican immigrants who were deported with their families eventually returned because they were American citizens. For instance, Jose Lopez was born to Mexican parents in Detroit in 1926. He was deported to Michoacán, Mexico in 1931 along with his family. As a five‐​year‐​old, there were few alternatives for him to stay and his parents didn’t want to be separated from their young son. Lopez eventually returned to the land of his birth (the United States) in 1945 as he could prove that he was a citizen, but others were not so lucky. Clearly, the U.S. government considered him to be a U.S. citizen then because he was born here.

Third, the term “repatriation” could be fairly applied to the Mexican‐​born immigrants who were being deported to their homeland, but it was surely inapplicable to the approximately half of all deportees who were American citizens by birth. “Mexican Repatriation” is a term commonly used to describe that mass deportation, but it is a phrase that assumes the restrictionist conclusion that all of them were foreign‐​born or non‐​citizens – which is incorrect because about 60 percent were U.S. citizens with most being born here.

Eastman also wrote that the children born to Mexican guest workers under the Bracero guest worker visa program were not considered citizens:

Nor were the children born on U.S. soil to guest workers in the bracero program of the 1950s and early 1960s deemed citizens when that program ended, and their families emigrated back to their home countries.

As far as I can tell from scanning an archive of testimonies by Bracero workers and their families, this isn’t true either. There weren’t many children born on U.S.-soil to Bracero workers because they were supposed to be all men, but children born to illegal immigrants who worked alongside Braceros were citizens, so it stands to reason that so were the few children whose parents were Braceros. Perhaps some U.S.-born children of Braceros were denied citizenship or had trouble proving that they were born in the United States, but I haven’t come across any systematic evidence that the U.S. government did not consider them citizens at the time. I would love to see evidence to the contrary, but I doubt it exists.

Constitutional scholars have been arguing about Eastman’s unorthodox constitutional theories for quite a while and he’s not changing many minds. Interestingly enough, his historical examples do not prove what he thinks they prove. Whether the standard interpretation of the 14^th Amendment is correct or not, the U.S. government has been acting like those born on U.S. soil who aren’t the children of diplomats are U.S. citizens.

Source: John Eastman on Birthright Citizenship, Kamala Harris, the Mexican Repatriation, and Citizenship for the Children of Braceros

Alex Nowrasteh

Three days after President Trump took his re-election campaign to a construction site of his border wall in Arizona, a federal appeals court ruled Friday that he had defied Congress’ constitutional authority over federal spending by redirecting $2.5 billion in military funds to build 130 miles of barriers in California, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Congress appropriated the funds for military pay, weapons and other Defense Department purposes, and never authorized Trump to spend them on wall construction, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said in a pair of 2-1 rulings.

Funding for the wall had been denied by Congress,” and the Trump administration “lacked independent constitutional authority to authorize the transfer of funds,” said Chief Judge Sidney Thomas, joined by Judge Kim Wardlaw. Both were appointed by President Bill Clinton.

Judge Daniel Collins, a Trump appointee, dissented from both decisions. He said the military funds were legally transferred and also that the plaintiffs — California and 15 other states, the Sierra Club, and an advocacy group for border communities — had no right to sue over the alleged violation of congressional spending powers.

Although the appeals court upheld a federal judge’s injunction against the construction of the wall segments, the ruling did not halt construction. The Supreme Court voted 5-4 last July to allow the work to continue while the case proceeded. Its brief unsigned decision said the administration “has made a sufficient showing at this stage that the plaintiffs have no cause of action” — that is, that they had not shown direct harm from the construction that would entitle them to challenge it in court.

The appeals court majority reached a different conclusion, citing the plaintiffs’ claims that the wall was harming the environment and wildlife at the border and the states’ ability to enforce their own environmental laws. Similar issues are pending before the same panel in a case over $3.6 billion for additional wall segments, and the dispute could soon return to the high court.

“There’s no undoing the damage that’s been done, but we will be back before the Supreme Court to finally put a stop to this destructive wall,” said Dror Ladin, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition. He said Trump’s “xenophobic wall is already leveling protected lands, desecrating cultural sites and destroying wildlife.”

The appeals court “reminded the president — once again — that no one is above the law,” said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

The Trump administration’s Justice Department declined to comment on the ruling.

After Congress refused to approve funds for the wall in 2018, Trump shut down many government operations for a record 35 days. When lawmakers then approved only $1.375 billion for limited barrier construction, the president declared a state of emergency over illegal immigration and said he would fund the wall with $8.1 billion that was in the budget for other purposes.

Some of the $2.5 billion at issue in Friday’s case was taken from Defense Department funds under a law that allows the Pentagon to redirect spending for important “unforeseen military requirements.” Other funds came from congressional appropriations to stop drug smuggling.

But “the border wall was not an unforeseen military requirement,” Thomas said in the majority opinion. He also said the administration had not shown any evidence that a wall would reduce drug smuggling, citing Justice Department reports that smugglers most commonly bring drugs across the Southwest border in motor vehicles at U.S. ports of entry.

Both the states and private organizations whose members live at or travel to the border have a right to challenge the construction, Thomas said. For the Sierra Club, he said, the “unconstitutional transfer of funds” harmed their members’ “environmental, aesthetic, and recreational interests.”

In dissent, Collins said neither the states nor the private plaintiffs had any rights at stake in the funding dispute between Congress and the president. He also said Congress had assigned the military to support “counter-drug activities” of other agencies, and, in the Defense Department budget, had authorized the Pentagon to decide whether “unforeseen military requirements” justified funding for a “higher priority item.”

Transfers of funding for the wall “were thus based on ‘military requirements’ that were ‘unforeseen’” and never forbidden by Congress, Collins said.

 

Source: 👎THIEF-IN-CHIEF: TRUMP MISAPPROPRIATED MONEY TO BUILD WASTEFUL WALL — Symbol of Hate, Stupidity Built With Stolen Funds, Says 9th Circuit!

Photo by Marco Zuppone on Unsplash

 

The iCERT Portal System is currently unavailable. IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT (Updated January 2, 2019, 12:00PM EST): Within the first five minutes of opening the semi-annual H-2B certification process on January 1, 2019, the U.S. Department of Labor iCERT system had an unprecedented demand for H-2B certifications with more than 97,800 workers requested in pending applications for the 33,000 available visas.

Source: News: DOL’s iCERT System is currently unavailable

Yep, you have probably already seen it. But here it isif you didn’t -the DOL stats have been out a while, and word from attorneys is that they are seeing record audits. We all know it’s probably because of all the politics in Washington.  But in a day or so, Congress will recess, -so that’ll give Obama and anyone else some room to start chatting up the “immigration reform issue“. It won’t affect PERM.

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