Will Wilkinson keeps writing up a storm on his quirky and implausible effort to build a pro-immigration case for ending birthright citizenship. You can read his latest here and here and a pretty persuasive reply from Tim Lee if you’re interested.
My bottom line is that I’m not particularly interested in purely hypothetical compromises. If immigration restrictionists really feel so strongly about the injustice and immorality of granting citizenship to the US-born children of undocumented migrants that’s they’re willing to make concessions on other fronts, that’s definitely something I would encourage members of congress to explore. But as best I can tell, they’re not even coming close to offering anything like that. So what are we even talking about? There are a lot of different moving pieces to the immigration debate, but it’s impossible to move any of them forward as long as such a large political bloc is basically against anything other than wall-building and deportation. What’s more, since modifying the 14th Amendment would require a constitutional amendment, it’s always going to be one of the least politically viable potential points of compromise.