Therefore, I have no problem with either the Tea Party or Ted Cruz advocating for keeping immigrants, like myself, out of the United States. That is their prerogative and they are welcome to try to keep us out. What bothers me is the hypocrisy.
The Tea Party has notoriously advocated sealing the borders and expelling as many immigrants as possible. Ted Cruz, for all intents and purposes, has become a darling of the Tea Party and they are his largest support base. Ted Cruz has been a vocal obstructionist to meaningful immigration reform. Obviously, this is a major platform of the Tea Party movement and thus it makes Cruz a viable candidate for them.
Except that, it is hypocritical.
As almost everyone knows, Ted Cruz was born in Canada to a United States citizen mother. Because of this, Ted Cruz holds automatic US citizenship and thus is able to run for president of the United States. To be clear, Ted Cruz holds US citizenship because his mother was a US citizen at the time of his birth in a foreign country. US citizen was bestowed on him by his mother, not by being born in the United States.
The Tea Party has been pushing forth legislation that would end “anchor baby” citizenship. Birthright citizenship is citizenship acquired by someone being born in the United States, regardless of the status of the parents at the time of birth. It is part of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. I won’t bore you with the reasons for the Amendment but suffice it to say it was enacted to provide citizenship to former slaves after the US Civil War.
According to the rhetoric of the Tea Party, citizenship bestowed upon a child born in the United States should only be bestowed to those who have at least one parent that is legally in the country at the time of the birth. How they define, “legality” is open to interpretation and beyond the scope of my commentary.
What is important to understand is that the Tea Party advocates US citizenship restrictions based upon the child’s parents. In essence, the Tea Party wants to limit US citizenship to a narrow group of individuals. Yet, they have no problem using a foreign-born person, Ted Cruz, to push forth their agenda. Ted Cruz was not born in the United States.
That is hypocrisy at its worst.
Ted Cruz, on the other hand not only carries the Tea Party’s agenda, hence why they support him, but he has also been advocating strong anti-immigrant political agendas. Yet, and herein lies the hypocrisy, Ted Cruz is an immigrant himself.
Yes, I know that Ted Cruz argues that immigrants should do it the “right way” but he himself didn’t even understand his dual citizenship status until it was pointed out to him. His own father followed a circuitous route to US citizenship that many who have gone through the process understand that there remain many questions about how many “rules” his father circumvented or ignored to gain citizenship. Taking 48 years, after first arriving to the US, to become a US citizen and acquiring another citizenship, while legally in the United States would be seen by many as not “following” the rules.
Yet, to Ted Cruz and the Tea Party it is just the normal process of “following” the rules, except of course when it comes to hard working immigrants trying to mount a bureaucratic mountain that not even those who imposed it understand the full magnitude of the often colliding “rules” and misconceived processes.
Ted Cruz is on a quest for political power and being hypocritical is apparently not an issue for him. As for the Tea Party, their embracement of Ted Cruz shows that their agenda isn’t about conservative values but rather about imposing their xenophobic myopic worldview upon the United States with whatever tools they can use to get there, even if it is an immigrant that doesn’t even realize he is an immigrant.
As for the Tea Party, here is my message to all of you; feel free to keep us out but at least have the decency to not be hypocritical about it.