Feds worsen Texas midwife scandal

In 2004, 0.8 percent of all births in the U.S. by Caucasian mothers happened at home, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Of those mothers who had home births, 66 percent of them chose to have a midwife rather than a physician. Fortunately, for those 12,019 white women, the citizenship of their children will probably never be called into question.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the government is currently denying some Latinos from a southern region of Texas access to their citizenship rights.

These U.S. citizens were born here, have had years of residence and employment here, and even passed background checks, but they are being discriminated against simply because they were delivered by midwives in private residences.

The excuse is that in the 1990s, there were many midwives convicted of forging U.S. birth certificates for about 15,000 Mexicans as long as 50 years ago.

Hence, the government is now taking away the rights of anyone from this part of Texas that was born at home with a midwife. So much for innocent until proven guilty.

“Usually a state-issued birth certificate is sufficient to establish U.S. nationality,” said Michael Kirby, a senior official for consular affairs at the State Department, according to the Wall Street Journal. Due to the fraud committed by a few midwives, “we want to be careful we issue passports to everybody who is eligible and not to anyone who isn’t.”

As of next year, a passport will be required for those crossing the U.S-Mexico border. For many of these Latinos, going back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. is an integral part of their life.

People as old as 70 are being forced to dig up evidence of their citizenship, and some are even trying to track down their midwives so they can testify.

It’s hard to even begin to imagine what that would be like ¬— living your whole life in the U.S. only to suddenly have your citizenship called into question, to have your rights taken from you and then to be told you might want to consider applying for naturalization.

This is not an issue of illegal immigration. This is a display of racism towards Latinos and discrimination against midwifes by the government.
Suppose the federal government’s only motivation really was to challenge illegal immigration, and it was deemed important enough that it didn’t matter if it meant taking away the rights of citizens.

There are more than 1 million illegal immigrants in Texas, who, by the way, are rather important to the state’s economy.

If Texas’ policies and U.S. border controls have been unable to keep out that many illegal immigrants, why is it so important to sacrifice the freedom of many legal American citizens for the sake of possibly weeding out a few who are not supposed to be here?

The U.S. State Department isn’t really fighting illegal immigration along the Texas border. It’s just harassing citizens who have as much of a right to live here as the racist politicians who are trying to drive them out.