Just days before negotiations began with Senate colleagues to reform the nation’s broken immigration system, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sent out notice that he wanted to eviscerate the birthright citizenship clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.

On November 8, Graham tweeted, “Without changes in birthright citizenship we will have future waves of illegal immigration.” 

We remind everyone, particularly the chief negotiators of immigration reform, Sen. Graham and Sen. Schumer, that citizenship for all those born in the United States and equality before the law should be forever entwined in the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. 

Passed after the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment promised full citizenship for the new Freedmen, the children of Chinese immigrants and all those born in the United States.  Unfortunately, it soon became a dead letter in the era of Jim Crow segregation, and was too often ignored by presidents, in Congress, by governors and in state legislatures.  The 1954 Brown v Topeka Board of Education decision and the black freedom movement brought the Fourteenth Amendment back to life, and we will not let it die once again.

We ask: What part of the Fourteenth Amendment does Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, not understand?

The Fourteenth Amendment is non-negotiable. Hands off the Fourteenth Amendment.

Click here to sign the petition.