Letters to the Editor: Don’t think you benefitted from birthright citizenship? Think again

To the editor: There are very few Americans who can say that their citizenship is not by way of birthright. (“Meet the architect of Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship, a California lawyer facing disbarment,” column, Jan. 23)

My own English paternal grandfather entered Canada as a teenager on a cattle boat. He made a living by catching and training wild horses across the western part of our continent then selling them.

He married a German woman whose family came from the Polish Corridor, which was part of Germany one year and Poland the next, and they started their family in Minnesota.

There is no paperwork to prove that they were ever naturalized as Americans, and I don’t know that they ever were. Still, their 12 children, 26 grandchildren (my generation), our children, our grandchildren and our great grandchildren are unquestionably American based on the 14th Amendment.

Carol Nelson-Selby, San Luis Obispo

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To the editor: Ideas that start as positive turn out to have many negatives when dealing with human nature.

Birthright citizenship is one of those wonderful positive ideas, coming at the end of the evil days of slavery. The decades passed, and being human, some people have taken advantage of birthright citizenship.

For example, people from other countries have come to the United States in the last days of their pregnancy to give birth here — known as “birth tourism” — making their children American citizens.

This is known, and whether it continues should be up to the opinion of we the people. Should we continue with birthright citizenship?

Elaine Vanoff, West Hollywood

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To the editor: Apparently, not only do the birthright deniers attack the right of persons born in the U.S. to undocumented parents to be citizens. Also, one of their foremost opponents to this right, John Eastman, states that persons born here to unnaturalized persons should also not be “natural-born citizens.”

My three children were born in the U.S. to a father from Spain and a mother from the Netherlands, neither yet naturalized at the time. Would Eastman, who was one of my daughter’s professors at the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University — and with whom she sometimes sparred in class over politics — deny her natural-born citizenship?

I would like to see him take her on in court, and he would lose.

Anneke Mendiola, Santa Ana