Off Course

Lindsey Graham, a powerful Republican senator from South Carolina who recently was noted for his aptitude at reaching a consensus with the opposition, today has united his voice with the discordant chorus that cries for the modification of the 14th amendment of the Constitution, a text that is considered to be the cornerstone of civil rights in the United States.

In an interview for the Fox television channel, a station that bases its notoriety on the radical conservativism of its commentators and brazenly ideological news coverage, Graham stated that it is necessary to modify the constitutional amendment that confers United States nationality to all children born within the the United States.

“To have a child in America,” stated Graham, “they [pregnant women] cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child’s automatically an American citizen. That shouldn’t be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons.”

In an election year, the reaction to Graham’s message in the Republican Senate has been more positive than negative. Prominent senators, such as Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, John McCain and John Kyl of Arizona, Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, have backed up Graham’s proposal and have asked for a debate about the possible merits of a new amendment to the historical amendment.

The perversity of their arguments is transparent. They want to construct an absolute argument based on half truths. It is true that beginning in the ‘90s there were many cases of Mexican women crossing the border to have their children. It is also true that in the last four years, there have been 600 cases of pregnant Chinese women who have paid $15,000 to tourist agents to get them tourist visas to enter the U.S., and they only come here to have children. Quantifying the number of children that benefit from this trick is difficult, but according to the Pew Center, it could perhaps be thousands per year. In other words, it is a number so insignificant that it would never merit an amendment of the constitutional text.

But this is not the true objective of Graham and the rest of the Republican congressmen that advocate for the amendment. What they really want is to deny the rights of the children of the controversial undocumented workers that, upon reaching lawful age, could legalize the status of their parents. And they are doing so, three months before the midterm elections, to appeal to a base that identifies with the platforms of conservative groups, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, that on distinct occasions have openly expressed their racist and xenophobic tendencies, opposing massive migration by non-Europeans because, in their opinion, the United States is a “European country.”

In the opinion of the majority of political analysts, the probability that the Graham initiative will succeed is almost zero. And its political benefit, if it has any, would be in the short run. On the other hand, the only possible explanation for his conduct would be that the Republican Party has lost its bearings, confused by the incoherent messages of Sarah Palin; the furious diatribes of commentators like Glenn Beck of Fox; the poisonous comments of Rush Limbaugh and the unintelligible demands of the members of the tea party.

In a recent interview, a conservative South Carolina congressman [Bob Inglis] revealed that in a meeting with tea party members, one of them, following the script written by Beck, told him: “Bob, what don’t you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as a dictator. Health care is part of that plan. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the U.S.] into a Muslim nation.” Revealing, don’t you think?