How many electoral votes does California hold in Mexico’s elections?

If you are not already outraged by the insidious ways the Mexican government undermines our sovereignty, pay attention to a recent story about a Mexican presidential candidate campaigning in California for votes in his home country’s election. There are now enough Mexican nationals – legal and illegal – living in California that Mexican candidates campaign there as if it were a “swing province” of Mexico itself.

But that’s not even the point.

While campaigning in California for “overseas” votes, Ricardo Anaya Cortes blasted Donald Trump and met with liberal activists to promote “Dream” amnesty. Cortes said in one of his speeches, as reported by the Center for Immigration Studies:

I want to ask you, with my heart in my hand, that every time you hear an aggressive or denigrating expression, remember that there, in Mexico, you are the heroes of the country, the brave, the enterprising, the generous, those who dared to cross the border to give their family a better future. Do not you forget that you are not alone … all of Mexico is with you and when I am President I will always be on your side.

Cortez reportedly told a group of Mexican nationals that he would always side with them over “an American president who has dedicated himself to insulting our community.”

Think about that: this man is seeking the votes of Mexican nationals living in the United States under the promise of being tough with Trump and advocating that these very same people become Americans and vote in American elections?

They can’t have it both ways. If they care about their people, they should stop sending them here and doing everything possible through their consulates to circumvent our immigration laws and enforcement. And if they badly want them to be Americans, why do they continue to treat them as Mexicans and seek their votes? Obviously, they want their votes but don’t want the responsibility of taking care of them. They’d rather we do that, on our dime.

Also, weren’t we told that the “dreamers” “know no other country but America?” Why would they be voting in Mexico’s elections?

There is something fundamentally wrong when a foreign presidential candidate can come here and urge American residents to vote for him so he can use his diplomatic tools to undermine America’s laws and sovereignty.

Dual voting is an affront to American sovereignty and violates the immigration principles of all sides of this debate

The problem of our stolen sovereignty and immigrants’ lack of assimilation runs much deeper than illegal immigrants or unnaturalized legal immigrants voting in Mexican elections. There are well over 1 million naturalized U.S. citizens voting in Mexican elections, many of whom likely live in California, according to a 2014 report by the Los Angeles Times editorial board. This practice is likely illegal and should be abolished.

Advocates of open borders virtue-signal about the need to open our arms to all those who want to become Americans. Great, so let’s all become Americans. When immigrants complete their naturalization process, they must swear an oath with the emphatic commitment to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.” Liberals often remind us about our “traditions on immigration,” but this law and tradition is as old as America’s Founding. The language to abjure and abandon the new citizen’s former sovereign was officially codified into the Naturalization Act of 1795.

There has long been a heated debate over the concept and practice of holding dual citizenship. Let’s put that debate aside for the moment. Many countries, due to their citizenship laws, very loosely throw citizenship at the children of their expatriates living abroad. I’m not suggesting that we force every American, especially naturally born Americans, to actively renounce that other citizenship. But what we should all agree upon is that we must enforce the law and the oath of allegiance so that no dual citizen takes active steps to vote in foreign elections, in violation of that sacred oath. The entire concept violates not only the letter of the law but the entire spirit of welcoming immigrants.

I would argue that such an act should be grounds for de-naturalization by retroactively rendering the oath fraudulent, much like we de-naturalize those who obtained citizenship through fraudulent circumstances.

The courts should not serve as an obstacle to reclaiming sovereignty

But alas, there’s a court case behind every backward policy. The lawless Supreme Court of the Warren era ruled (Efroyim v. Rusk, 1967) that Congress cannot de-naturalize someone who votes in a foreign election, a violation of previous court precedent. However, this ruling needs to be revisited. Felix Frankfurter, writing for the majority in upholding Congress’ right to de-naturalize in this circumstance a decade earlier (Perez v. Brownell, 1958), got it right when he observed how dual voting undermines foreign relations and is well within the province of congressional power to regulate:

[T]he activities of the citizens of one nation when in another country can easily cause serious embarrassments to the government of their own country as well as to their fellow citizens. We cannot deny to Congress the reasonable belief that these difficulties might well become acute, to the point of jeopardizing the successful conduct of international relations, when a citizen of one country chooses to participate in the political or governmental affairs of another country. The citizen may by his action unwittingly promote or encourage a course of conduct contrary to the interests of his own government.

This rationale is evident from comments by one of these Mexican nationals quoted in the Dallas Morning News as saying that she is voting in the Mexican elections to counter what is going on here in the United States. “Of course I’m voting; especially with the situation with the United States, Mexican leadership is important,” she said. “What’s at stake in Mexico’s upcoming election is the battle for stability amidst a wave of rising nationalism.”

In the meantime, the Trump administration should use all the tools of statecraft to discourage rather than encourage this practice. The Mexican consulates undermine our sovereignty in many ways and recently has allowed Mexican nationals to obtain voter IDs on our soil without going home. We can place restrictions on such policies for U.S. citizens. Alternatively, Congress can officially criminalize foreign voting of naturalized citizens as a violation of the citizenship oath but stop short of using de-naturalization as a punishment and opting for a fine instead. At the very least, we should prospectively make this a condition on the application for naturalization.

This is a growing problem because in recent years Mexico and Central America – the countries that supply us with the most immigrants – have liberally granted citizenship to children of those living abroad. Thanks to the rule change, there are now seven times as many Mexican citizens living in America who can vote in this Mexican presidential election compared with Mexico’s last election in 2012. Many of them are not yet American citizens or are illegal aliens, but at least the naturalized U.S. citizens should be barred from voting in foreign elections.

Even more offensive, so many of these dual nationals are anchor babies who only obtained citizenship in America through their parents’ violation of our laws and a misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. As I note in great detail in Chapter 4 of my book, our Constitution, laws, and history are clear that birthright citizenship can only apply to legal immigrants who are brought here with the consent of the citizenry. Citizenship can never be asserted without the consent of the citizenry.

Those who extol the virtues of mass migration often chide us about the need to reach out to those who yearn to become Americans. Well, this is a simple test. Anyone who truly wants to become an American and abide by the oath of citizenship should have no problem surrendering his right to vote in foreign elections.

There is nothing of greater importance to the American people than the preservation of American citizenship and national sovereignty. If the people don’t reclaim control over citizenship and instead allow the courts and the political elites to concoct a birthright for anyone in the world to claim for their children at will – while continuing to leverage their former countries against our own government – the sovereignty of the American people and the birthright of American citizens will be forever lost.

Then again, if California wants to continue its neo-confederate ways, it may as well make it official and become the northernmost province of Mexico. (For more from the author of “Mexican Presidential Candidate: Vote for Me, California!” please click HERE)

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