We are a nation of immigrants — and a nation of laws. You cannot be the first without the second.
America has always welcomed people who come the right way: who wait in line, learn the country, and pledge themselves to it. Our grandparents did it. That is not what is happening now — and what is happening now was never put to a vote.
They didn’t ask you. They just sent the bill.
Washington and Beacon Hill decided, on their own, that your community would absorb the consequences of an open border — and that you would pay for it. Not through a law you voted on. Through agencies you can’t reach and “emergencies” that never end.
Here’s the part they don’t want you to sit with: your own tax dollars are funding it. Federal grants flow to a network of NGOs to shelter, transport, and resettle people who entered illegally. Then Massachusetts’ “right to shelter” law puts the housing bill on the taxpayer. You are being asked to fund the remaking of your own home — and to call it compassion.
Written to free the slaves. Twisted into a magnet.
The 14th Amendment was written in 1868 to overturn Dred Scott — the ruling that Black Americans could never be citizens. Its purpose was to make freed slaves and their descendants citizens. It was never meant to reward illegal entry with an automatic citizen child and a permanent claim on your country.
The text grants citizenship to those born here “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” — language the drafters used to exclude those who owe allegiance to a foreign nation. And the Supreme Court has never actually ruled that the children of illegal immigrants get automatic citizenship — the case everyone cites, Wong Kim Ark, was about a child of parents here legally. The courts stretched it. You were never asked.
The receipts
- Your money pays for it. FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program and the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement route hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to NGOs that shelter and resettle migrants.
- Massachusetts made it worse. The state’s right-to-shelter mandate drove emergency spending toward roughly $1 billion a year at the peak of the crisis — on your tab.
- Birthright citizenship was written to right the sin of slavery — not as a prize for breaking our laws.
Where we stand
- Legal immigrants: welcome. Illegal entry: not a policy you consented to.
- Enforce the laws already on the books — and stop using your taxes to subsidize the people breaking them.
- Taxpayers and citizens first. Every dollar spent housing the world is a dollar not spent on the neighbors who built this place.
- Back the men and women of ICE and law enforcement doing a job Washington made impossible.
Sources: Dred Scott (1857); 14th Amendment text; Wong Kim Ark (1898); Sen. Jacob Howard’s Senate remarks; FEMA SSP appropriation; HHS/ORR grants; MA emergency shelter budget reporting.
