US Presidential Election - Monitoring Swing States

[StarDoor]

Final-Fan said:

Just because the US still cares if its citizens commit crimes abroad doesn't mean that they have the authority to go over there and arrest them.  Either the government has to work with the foreign government in question or just wait until the criminal comes home, AFAIK.  So I have to disagree with your analysis of which nation can be fairly said to "have jurisdiction" over that person at that time.  I'm not a lawyer, though. 

When the constitutional amendment in question was being written, I have a well-sourced article reporting that its framers were concerned with excluding diplomats and quasi-sovereign Indians, and no one else.  In fact, if I recall correctly, the US didn't even have laws limiting immigration at the time!  (I may be misremembering something here, please correct me if that's wrong.) 

The only other Supreme Court involvement on the issue is a footnote in a 1982 decision in the case Plyler v. Doe, which dealt with the issue of whether states must provide education to children not “legally admitted” into the United States. In that case, Justice William Brennan, writing the majority opinion in the 5-4 decision, stated that “no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”

Considering that this argument of yours flies in the face of current precedent, aren't you the one on the side of radical judicial activism? 

And going back to what you bolded, it doesn't seem to me that you actually directly addressed this question:  if the USA is, for example, prosecuting and potentially jailing an illegal immigrant from Mexico, what power does Mexico have over the USA's actions? 

Yes, neither of us are lawyers. I'm not making a foolproof legal argument here. At this point, we should agree to disagree.

The definition of jurisdiction is "the official power to make legal decisions and judgments" or "the extent of the power to make legal decisions and judgments." It doesn't really say anything about the ability to act upon any legal judgments, so Mexico would still technically have jurisdiction over Mexican nationals in the United States. A case can be made for either side.

I guess in the technical sense, no federal law restricted immigration, but naturalization law limited citizenship to "free white persons of good moral character".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1795

After 1870, Africans could also become naturalized citizens, but the logistics of native Africans crossing the ocean prevented any surge of immigration. In 1882, Chinese immigrants were banned, and the national quota system was implemented in 1924, which heavily favored those from the British Isles and Germany. US immigration was explicitly white from 1790 to 1965.

And, yeah, in this case I would be on the side of judicial activism. It's equally available to both sides of the political spectrum, after all.