Spotlight: Birthright citizenship a challenging issue for GOP

For a whole week, New York real estate mogul Donald Trump's call to end birthright citizenship for the offspring of illegal immigrants has split the crowded U.S. Republican presidential field, refueling concerns among the party leadership that the somehow destructive immigration debates might neutralize its long-term efforts to court Hispanic voters.

Targeting the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which grants citizenship to anyone born in the country, Trump repeatedly called last week for an end to the nearly 150-year-old practice.

"This (birthright citizenship) remains the biggest magnet for illegal immigration," said a policy paper issued by the Trump camp on Aug.16.

As Trump's attack at the country's illegal immigrants evolved into a fight that would include even a larger number of children born here to illegal parents who automatically gain U.S. citizenship, a national debate over the issue erupted.

Shortly after his remarks on repealing the 14th amendment, fellow Republican presidential hopefuls, including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, also jumped in.

So far, two Republican candidates from Florida -former governor Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio - are the ones who have most vocally opposed Trump's stance of birthright citizenship.

For Scott Walker, another candidate from the top tier of the 17-strong Republican field, a proper response to Trump's provocation at not just illegal immigrants but also their offspring endowed with rights to vote in the 2016 election seemed especially elusive.

Within seven days, Walker offered multiple answers to the same question - whether or not he supports ending birthright citizenship.

On Aug. 17, he first said he supported ending birthright citizenship, then noted that the problem should be addressed by enforcing other laws. A day later, when confronted with a major donor, he reportedly said he would not do away with birthright citizenship. On Friday, however, when asked about his stance on the issue, Walker said he did not have a position. Then Sunday, he said he did not want to alter the 14th amendment.

Walker's flip-flops on birthright citizenship reflects a dilemma generally facing the Republican Party that actually wrote birthright citizenship into America's constitution in the first place almost 150 years ago.

While Republican candidates agree that Hispanic votes are crucial to the party's win in next year's general election, they have to catch up with Trump to pamper conservative voters to win their party's nomination first.

After the fiasco in the 2012 election cycle in which Republican nominee Mitt Romney took just 27 percent of the Hispanic votes while his Democratic rival Barack Obama took 71 percent, the GOP leadership scrambled to improve the party's image and broaden its reach.

According to estimates by Latino Decisions, a leading organization in Latino political opinion research in the United States, 13.1 million Latinos will turn out to vote in 2016, up from 11.2 million in the 2012 election, and the Latino constituency is predicted to account for 10.4 percent of the electorate next year.

Now, with the legitimacy of the citizenship for millions of U.S. Latinos under fire from Republican candidates, the Party's efforts to reach out to constituency beyond the white population could again be unraveled.

Even without the blistering immigration remarks from Trump, who has made fighting illegal immigration, which typically targets those from the neighboring Mexico, a linchpin of his campaign, the Republican Party could've had tremendous difficulty in garnering enough Hispanic votes to make a comeback to the White House.

According to a bipartisan survey conducted by Bendixen and Amandi and The Tarrance Group in July, 64 percent of Hispanic respondents said they would pick Hillary Clinton, the undisputable front-runner in the much smaller and less competitive Democratic presidential field. Endit