Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

The United States has experienced a problem like this on a more vast scale but no US President has ever dared to upend so sacred a feature as birth-related citizenship to overcome the effects of small-scale abuse that inevitably happens when we have a liberal law or, as with child benefit in the case of social welfare, universal entitlements.

Although there was a debate on changing the law in both the USA and Canada 20 years ago similar to the one we are now having, and partly because of the flood of illegal immigrants from countries like Ireland at that time, they chose to retain the principle on the basis that they did not wish to create a hereditary caste of illegals. In other words, they wanted to ensure any children born to illegal immigrants would have their legal status regularised in order that successive generations would not remain illegal.

I wonder how many young Irish men and women who entered the USA illegally in the 1970s and 1980s had children who now happily have and intend to keep their American passports. Some may never use them. Some travel to and from North America with them but we never hear American political representatives yell from the rooftops about Irish abuse of American citizenship rules.

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