New legislation being drafted by Arizona state senator Russell Pearce to deny citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants touches a potential new faultline among Arizona’s Mormons—Latino, Anglo, and Native American—who are already divided over the state’s new immigration law, SB 1070.
The yet-to-be proposed legislation would reportedly prohibit issuing birth certificates to children unless one parent produces proof of legal status.
LDS proponents of SB 1070 often link support for the law to our religion’s Twelfth Article of Faith: “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.”
But the new legislation—which appears to contest the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: “All persons, born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States”—puts pressure on a belief in the divine inspiration of the U.S. Constitution cherished by many conservative Mormons.
Some Mormons have already gone on record in opposition to the new bill, sensitized perhaps by negative publicity about Mormonism within the Latino community in the wake of SB 1070’s passage. The LDS church’s strongest growth in the United States over the last decade has been among Latinos.
For his part, Pearce says that the 14th Amendment, originally devised to provide citizenship for slaves, has been used as a “wedge” by immigrants: “This is an orchestrated effort by them to come here and have children to gain access to the great welfare state we’ve created.”
Pearce (along with former Arizona governor Evan Mecham, also LDS) attended lectures delivered by LDS ultra-conservative Cleon Skousen, founder of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, in Arizona in the 1980s and 1990s.
Perhaps Skousen’s “originalist” views of the U.S. Constitution have led Pearce and other supporters of this new anti-immigrant legislation to believe that they are uniquely capable of channeling the Constitution’s divinely-inspired authors—at least more capable than the myriad of legal scholars who have already declared the new legislation dead on arrival.
