There's no secret about this ...

Eduardo Porter, late of NY Times economic journalism and now writing in the Wapo, goes for the gut in his explanation of the Trump regime's attempt to do away with birthright citizenship. People born in the USofA, are --simply -- citizens; MAGA wants none of it.

Here's the gist: 

Ending birthright citizenship won’t make America White again.

For a country seemingly proud of calling itself a melting pot, a country that is unquestionably a nation of immigrants, it is astonishing just how hard the United States has tried over the years to put an end to the process that has shaped it. ... 

... Trump’s urge to protect the homeland from alien races, religions and cultures taps into a feature of the American psyche that has been around for 100 years or more. ...

... Muzaffar Chishti from the Migration Policy Institute once told me that American tolerance for accepting new immigrants seems to hit a limit every time foreign-born citizens reach about 15 percent of the population. They reached that share when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 and when the [restrictive] Johnson-Reed Act [of 1924] was signed into law. And they are nearing 15 percent today.

I would, however, propose another numerical tipping point, one that has no precedent in American history: when the non-White share of the population approximates one half of the population. The fact that the United States is approaching this milestone underscores how, in that long battle between the nation’s demand for foreign labor and the entrenched mistrust of foreigners, so far the economic imperative has won. Xenophobia today is punching back. ...

... [The immigration reform of 1965 was managed by] Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) who promised that the new legislation “will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.” As he signed the act in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, Johnson assured the American people that it would not change much of anything.

Artist Yolanda Lopez

But migration didn’t proceed according to plan. Europeans, as it happens, no longer wanted to come, as Europe was growing like gangbusters. Mexicans, on the other hand, did. They had been supplying labor in the fields and pastures of the American West even before the Bracero Program had formally invited them in from the 1940s to the 1960s. And they were untouched by the 1924 quotas. When limits were imposed as part of the 1965 reform, they kept coming to work anyway.

The story of immigration over the next several decades was largely a Mexican affair. By 2000, Mexicans accounted for 30 percent of the foreign-born population, up from 6 percent 40 years earlier.

That, in a nutshell, is why Trump so vehemently wants to do away with the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution’s 14th Amendment: The Mexican immigrants had babies.

Read the whole article (as a gift). It's the history of immigration that our media seldom teaches.