Report: Five percent of kids in U.S. born to illegal immigrants

By Alan Gomez, USA TODAY

Four million children in the U.S. were born of illegal immigrant parents but were granted U.S. citizenship because they were born on American soil, according to a report released today.

Those children represented about 5% of all the children in the U.S. under the age of 18 in 2009, according to the report from the Pew Hispanic Center. That percentage will increase in the future, however, as an estimated 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the U.S. in 2008 — about 8% — came from illegal immigrant parents, the report says.

The study comes as some legislators, including U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., are calling for a revision of the 14th Amendment that grants automatic citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which wants lower levels of legal and illegal immigration, said automatic citizenship for children born in the U.S. is one of the two main magnets for illegal immigration.

(More here.)