Although Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) calls his amendment to end birthright citizenship “stupid,” Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) is thanking the Democratic leader for his past support of the effort.
In 1993 Reid supported ending the policy of granting automatic citizenship to anyone born in the U.S.
Vitter has introduced an amendment to a human trafficking bill — currently under consideration in the Senate — aimed at ending birthright citizenship and with it the practice of birth tourism.
Wednesday, Reid called for Republicans to eliminate abortion funding restrictions from the bill. Once they did so, he said, Democrats would be “happy” to debate all the GOP’s amendments, “including Vitter’s stupid amendment.”
In response, Vitter read from a 1993 speech Reid gave in which he voiced support for ending birthright citizenship.
“Even Harry Reid has acknowledged that it’s crazy to grant birthright citizenship to every child born in the U.S. It’s an absolute magnet that encourages more illegal aliens to come here,” Vitter said on the Senate floor Thursday.
The Louisiana Republican first introduced his bill to end birth right citizenship in 2011. He reintroduced it earlier this year and recently sought to attach it to the human trafficking bill.
The amendment follows a raid on a number of Southern California locations being used for “birth tourism,” where pregnant foreign nationals — in these cases Chinese women — come to the U.S. to give birth so that their children are U.S. citizens and afforded all the benefits that go with that.
“We have a whole industry of birth tourism, which highlights just one part of our very broken immigration system,” Vitter said. “Ending birthright citizenship would dramatically improve this situation.”
Watch: