"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Known as the equal protection clause or the due process clause, the 14th amendment to the constitution guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States. The 14th amendment, passed in 1868, is one of a series of post civil war amendments that was designed to prevent the defeated confederate states from enacting legislation to subjugate their former black slaves. By ensuring that anyone born within the US would be a US citizen, congress aimed to prevent a permanent black underclass in the South that would not enjoy equal protection under the law.

Like many other clauses in our constitution, the basic principles have evolved over time to mean rather different things to our society. Due process and equal protection are often used today as the basis of law suits over discrimination. Birth-right citizenship, no longer a racial issue, has become an immigration issue. Immigrants who want to come to the US, either legally or illegally, often shortcut the bureaucratic procedures of the US and give birth to a child on US soil, thus "anchoring" their families in America. The 14th amendment guarantees their children citizenship and equal protection, or does it?

The United States is one of very few countries that has birth-right citizenship. Most other countries give citizenship at birth only to children of current citizens. Switzerland, for example, recently defeated a referendum aimed at bestowing citizenship to third generation residents. This means that people born in Switzerland whose grandparents immigrated there are not considered Swiss citizens! Other countries who had birthright citizenship such as Australia and New Zealand have recently done away with it opting instead for parental citizenship rights.

In explaining their decision, the government of New Zealand writes: "The Government chose to amend the Citizenship Act of 1977 to recognize the value of New Zealand citizenship. The changes mean that a person cannot travel to New Zealand on a temporary permit solely to give birth and gain New Zealand citizenship for the child born in this country. By restricting citizenship by birth to the children of citizens and permanent residents, the Act's new provisions ensure that citizenship and its benefits are limited to people who have a genuine and ongoing link to New Zealand."

The citizenship clause of the 14th amendment never actually intended to bestow citizenship to foreign aliens. Sen. Jacob Howard, the clause's author, explained it to the Senate in 1868 as follows:

"[T]his amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons."

Birth right citizenship, as we know it today, came into effect in 1898 when the Supreme Court expanded the scope of the 14th ammendment in US v. Wong KimArk. In this case, a Chinese laborer born in the US of Chinese parents was denied entry into the US after a temporary visit to China. Wong KimArk claimed US citizenship under the 14th amendment, and the Supreme Court agreed. The Supreme Court chose to ignore its own precedent from Elk v. Wilkins in 1884 which held that "The persons declared to be citizens are, 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.' The evident meaning of these last words is not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject..." Furthermore, the court expanded the definition of citizenship on the basis of British Common Law that predated the US.

Pro and Anti Immigration activists have been arguing the point ever since. This argument has reached somewhat of a crescendo recently as Congress considers sweeping changes to US Immigration laws. The problem is that despite the loud street protests and heated debate on both sides, much of the legislation is simply much ado about nothing. Based on the current law of the land, any "illegal" immigration into the United States is necessarily temporary in that it is limited to only the current generation.

The heated arguments about whether to legalize 12-15 million undocumented migrants (estimates vary) seemingly ignores the fact that any children born to these migrants are currently US citizens. Those wishing to remove or deport the illegal migrants also seem to ignore that, despite the logistical problems that would result, under current US law families of US Citizens -- their children -- are entitled to special protections.

The Congressional debate over immigration is a valid and constructive debate that Americans need to consider with care and wisdom. The current proposals, however, fail to actually solve the current problem. The House of Representatives' bill, which would turn most current illegals into felons, doesn't seem to consider what exactly we'd do with 12-15 million new felons (5% of the population) walking the streets, many of whom have American children. The Senate's bill, which would create some sort of legal status for migrants already here seems to ignore that the problem is getting worse daily as we do nothing to check the flow across the border.

If we truly want to do something to actually solve the immigration problem, we really need to define how much immigration we can (and wish to) absorb. Immigration without any limits would quickly stretch any citizenry's infrastructure and ability to cope. We could choose to check the flow of migrants across the border and prevent the problem from getting any worse. Once that is done, and only once that is done, then a serious discussion should occur about what to do with the people currently here, a problem that actually disappears entirely in one generation.

Alternatively, Congress could move to change birthright citizenship. This would take years, if enacted, to go through the courts. Ultimately, the Supreme Court would need to decide if the issue is decidable by statute or require a Constitutional amendment which would inevitably end the discussion. A guest worker program with no birth right citizenship could be another potential solution to the problem.

Either way, piecemeal legislation that panders to one political group or another would do very little to ease the problem as the amnesty bill of 1986 has shown. When Reagan proposed amnesty to 2.8 million illegal aliens at the time, he promised that it would be a "one time deal." There have been 6 more "one time deals" since then and the current legislation would be, by far, the biggest yet. If we wish to prevent having to pass a new amnesty every few years, steps must be taken to ensure a solution to the problem. Perhaps, as Thomas Friedman of the NY Times writes, "build a big fence with a big gate," or perhaps end birthright citizenship. Citizens of the United States should demand no less from their representative government.

This past Sunday, April 2nd 2006, I was coming off a ski slope when I received a phone call that I had lost my grandmother. I had been enjoying a particularly nice day on the mountain. It had just snowed the day before, resulting in that all-too-rare combination of soft, warm sunshine with fresh, fluffy, winter powder. I couldn't help thinking about how much my grandmother would have enjoyed being with us there that day. She had grudgingly accepted the need to go in for surgery to remove a tumor in her lung a few days earlier and died of a post-operative infection.

With her passing, my family not only lost a beloved matriarch, we lost our last direct link to the German Holocaust of European Jewry during World War II. My grandmother had spent her early life in a small town called Aleksandrov, just outside the Polish city of Lodz. When the Germans conquered Poland in September 1939, Europe's largest Jewish community was rounded up into two Ghettos at Lodz and Warsaw. She often told stories of how difficult life was in the Lodz ghetto.

Acquiring basic necessities such as bread and cheese turned into adventure stories of life and death. My Grandmother, who was only 13 at the time, would remove her required yellow Star of David and sneak under the fence into the "Polish" part of town to buy food. She did this fairly frequently, but on one such trip she was caught by the German guards trying to sneak back in to bring the food to her family. She related the conversation between the two Germans to me once, how they argued about whether to shoot her immediately, or bring her in for punishment. When one guard exclaimed "how young, and pretty" she was and "what a waste shooting one such as this" would be, her life was spared but her horror began. She recalled how she was taken into a dark room by the guard and then paused to look at me with pain, only to smile and say "well, thank God you'll never know of such things."

She told me how one morning she remembers chasing her parents who were put on a German truck to ostensibly go to a "work camp." They had made her older sister promise to look after my grandmother and keep her safe while they were gone. Her younger sister, however, was too small to stay behind and went on the truck that day. That was the last she would ever see of them. My grandmother, now 14, and only her older sister would have to make it through the war on their own. They were forced to work as slaves in a German munitions factory. There she spent over a year, making shells for the German army that killed her family. It was there that she would also acquire the beginnings of the tumor in her lung that would eventually lead to her death.

My grandmother's horrors of the Holocaust were far from over. As the end of the war approached, the Germans started becoming nervous about their treatment of the Jews and attempted to start covering their tracks. They cleared the ghettos and factories of Jewish prisoners and shipped them en-masse to concentration camps. My grandmother was forced onto a train where she headed for one of the most notorious of the German death camps: Auschwitz. By this time the Germans were barely ahead of the Russian advance and were "liquidating" as much as possible, as fast as they could. Once my grandmother arrived at Auschwitz she was told that the group she was with would be staying overnight in the barracks as the "sanitation areas" (gas chambers) were full. The next morning, as her turn arrived for gassing and cremation, a new train arrived with fresh bodies for the German death machine. And so it continued for days, until the news of Russian soldiers on the march caused her German captors to flee in panic. She remembered fondly how the Russian soldiers set them all free and how she met my grandfather and fled to Berlin in the aftermath of the war.

There were so many stories of those horrific and fascinating days. Stories of how she and my grandfather had booked tickets on an ocean-liner bound for the United States when news of David Ben-Gurion's declaration of the Jewish State of Israel reached Berlin. There were stories of how my grandfather stubbornly refused to travel to America declaring that "finally, Jews have a home of their own!" and that they would be going to Israel. Stories of the beginnings of the State of Israel and how the combined Arab armies invaded the fledgling country to try and finish the work that Hitler had started. Stories of how the sister who saved her life back in the Lodz Ghetto lost her husband in the Israeli War of Independence. There were so many awful stories she told, but not every story was disturbing.

Despite terrible shortages of food and supplies in the early days of Israeli independence, my grandparents managed to provide for two young daughters. They eventually bought a small apartment and scraped together the money for a modest neighborhood clothing store. The two daughters eventually married and one of them, my mother, ended up moving to the US after-all, following my father who had come to America to study. My mother had three children, two boys and a girl, rounding out my grandmother's seven grandchildren. She called us "her miracles" wearing a reminder of every one of our names on a charming gold necklace until the day she died. She often told me how lucky she felt to "be blessed with seven grandkids and already two great grandkids," after everything she had been through. She and her sister were all that escaped of a once large and proud family and she always smiled at how well everyone was doing and saw our success as a "slap in the face" to her German oppressors of so many years ago.

As I sat with my wife, sister, and father in the shadow of those beautiful snowy mountains last Sunday, I remembered so many of her stories. Mostly, though, I remembered the times we spent together. We lived on different continents, but visited frequently. My visits to Israel to see her and other family and friends were typical enough, the moments that really stood out where her visits to the States. We took her to Hawaii where she couldn't get over "being in Honolulu," a childhood conceit for the end of the world. She joined us on a ski trip in the mountains of Utah, scenery that reminded her a lot of pre-war Poland and ice-skating as a little girl. The last time she came to visit was two years ago to celebrate my wedding, the happiness she exuded that night will forever indelibly be etched in my memory.

Last Sunday I lost a grandmother, a pillar of strength, a living history, and a friend. I can't imagine what it will be like the next time I'm in Israel and won't be able to visit her for lunch or a quick game of Gin-Rummy, her favorite. I know, however, that she would be smiling looking down on my family and that of all of my cousins. To her we will always be a miracle that the Germans, and all the horrors of war she had to endure, could never take away. Goodbye Savta (Hebrew for Grandma), we'll miss you always.

Last week's column about the Federal debt in the United States drew an interesting response challenging that debt levels perhaps are not that far out of line when compared against GDP. The nation's gross domestic product (GDP) is a number that estimates the total domestic output of the entire economy. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this figure was about $12.5 Trillion dollars in 2005. So how does our current debt stack up with our nation's history?

First of all a disclaimer about budget numbers coming from the federal government: Despite popular notions to the contrary, the Social Security trust fund is running a surplus, and has been since the 1980's. All working people who receive W-2's, pay into social security through a special payroll tax. This tax is supposed to go into a Social Security Trust Fund where it is to be used exclusively for social security payments. The reason this fund has been in surplus is that while baby boomers remain at work, there are more people paying into the fund than people drawing from it. We know, however, that as baby boomers begin to retire, this demographic reality will start to shift and social security will begin to run deficits.

The problem is that Social Security is not a trust fund at all. We have been using the surplus in order to pay for items in the general budget and thus making our deficits seem smaller then they really are. For example, the reported deficit number for 2005 is $318 Billion, however if you include the $173.5 Billion Social Security surplus that was spent in the budget, the real deficit was actually $493.6 Billion. This little deception of accounting goes virtually unnoticed while the surplus continues, but when Social Security goes into deficit, it will make things look much worse. Furthermore, the money we have spent from Social Security is actually money we borrowed from ourselves. The treasury calls this number "intra-governmental holdings" and as of March 30, 2006 it is about $3.5 Trillion.

So what is really going on? The official public debt for 2005 is $4.592 Trillion. If you include the intra-governmental holdings, the actual 2005 debt was $7.932 Trillion. As we know from the last column, Congress just increased the debt ceiling in 2006 to approximately $9 trillion (which includes both types of debt). So answering our reader's question, how do these numbers stack up?

If we choose to ignore Social Security (the way the congressional budget office does) then the debt level in 2005 as a percentage of GDP was 37.4%. This is pretty much in the middle of the historical numbers provided (between 1962 and 2005) which range from a low of 23.9% in 1974 to a high of 49.4% in 1993. The problem is that if you factor the intra-governmental (social security) debt back in, then you have a (projected) 2006 debt of approximately 72% of GDP. This is the highest level of debt as a percentage of GDP in US history (excepting a brief period during World War II).

It wasn't always this way. If you look at the public debt levels before 1969, the year in which Lyndon Johnson started including Social Security numbers "on budget," the public debt levels were around one third of GDP. Of course most of that debt was held by US bond holders at that time while much of our debt today is held by foreign governments. These numbers are most alarming because they show that the government has routinely borrowed money from itself that was supposed to be for Social Security and effectively almost doubled our debt level.

As for interest payments as a percentage of GDP, the interest on the public debt in 2005 was approximately $352.4 Billion. This amounts to approximately 2.8% of GDP or just over the 2.7% we spend on Medicare. This means that Uncle Sam paid out, on average, about 4.3% interest on our outstanding debt. Unfortunately, much of this debt that used to be in 30 year treasury bonds was refinanced during the 1990's into 10 year treasury notes meaning that our interest payments are sure to go up as interest rates rise.

Interestingly, the CIA keeps information on public debt as a percentage of GDP for many countries. The United States ranks 36th on the list with 64.7% debt to GDP (2005 estimate). By contrast, Great Britain is 63rd with 42.2%, France is 34th with 66.5%, Spain is 53rd with 48.5%, Germany is 31st with 68.1%, and Israel is 10th with 101%.

So now that you have seen the numbers for yourselves, why should you care about our alarming rise in debt? The simple answer is that as the debt grows, the money we must spend to service it necessarily comes from somewhere. The more we borrow the less we have available to pay for things we care about the most. Right now we spend more on our debt then we do for all of Medicare. Our debt spending is equivalent to 70% of our entire defense budget. If we continue to let this debt grow increasingly out of control we will necessarily forfeit a great deal of our economic and military might.

Our politicians spend so much time arguing about the many programs that affect our lives as Americans, yet the cost of these programs are literally dwarfed by the debt and the cost of servicing it. We must begin to get a handle on our own borrowing and to do so we must first become aware of just how bad it has become.

As if to illustrate this point, the Economist recently wrote about the US desire to pressure China into revaluing its currency, the Yuan, which it believes to be significantly undervalued and therefore contributing to the enormous trade deficit between the two countries. Unfortunately, in order to do so, China would have to significantly drop the amount of US Treasury Bills it currently buys from us. The problem is that it is precisely the purchase of these Treasury Bills that allows the US to continue its deficit spending. Therein lies the dilemma: The US increasingly is in a position where we must act against our own national interests in order to secure our creditors' ability to continue lending us money. How much longer will we continue to dig ourselves into this hole?