Food-Stamp Program Finally Speaks Their Language - Los Angeles Times

Food-Stamp Program Finally Speaks Their Language - Los Angeles Times:

"Advocates say immigrants, if here illegally, are also worried about being deported if they apply for food stamps. Or they fear jeopardizing a pending application for residency or citizenship. Illegal immigrants can apply on behalf of their minor children here legally.

"Other immigrants say they were simply embarrassed.

"'The Mexican man is macho. He doesn't want to come to this country and beg,' said Alfonso Chavez, the Community Action Partnership's outreach coordinator. 'I tell them this is a program that will help the children. The kids are American-born, and they have a right to this program.'"

It seems that the California and Federal governments have finally hit upon a way to increase the state's abysmally low food stamp participation rate - 34% of the working poor in 2003, lowest of any state in the US. By farming out application processing to non-profit advocacy groups they are overcoming illegal immigrants' fear of government.

But notice the nice twist Mr. Chavez puts on things: "The kids are American-born, and they have a right to this program." Of course, this is non-sense. The "kids" are neither the program applicants nor the recipients of payments, the parents are and they are here illegally.

Mr. Chavez' statement also implies that the children may be US citizens when the US Constitution clearly states that they are not. See Amendment XIV, Section 1 - the operative phrase being "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" - foreigners cannot acquire such status for themselves unilaterally, it must be requested of the US and granted by the US. And, they cannot acquire such status for their children simply by coming here illegally and having those children born here.

The child has the status of the parents. If a couple arrive on a tourist visa and happen to have a child while here, the child has their nationality and they can take the child with them when they go home. If a couple enter the US as diplomats, their child born here has diplomatic dependent status. It follows that the child of parents here illegally is here illegally even if that child happens - through no fault or virtue of its own - to have been born here.

Mexico is anxious to push the idea that one can be a citizen of Mexico regardless of their immigration status while living abroad. The want the Bush amnesty plan to give American citizenship to all the Mexicans and other illegals who have arrived here over the last two decades (since the Reagan amnesty) while continuing to recognize those persons as Mexican citizens entitled to vote in Mexican elections. This is a part of the strategy to use the Hispanic population of the US as a Fifth Column to reverse the outcome of the 1846-48 Mexican War.

By the way, Mexican partisans seldom mention that the US government assumed the obligation for $3 million in debts owed by Mexico to US citizens and paid a further $15 million to the Mexican gogernment to buy out its claims to territory - from Texas to California - which Mexico relinquished as a result that war.