CREST RIDGE, IOWA — Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) is running for president, no matter what his poll numbers say. Those low polling numbers may be a result of a number of factors, but for whatever the reason, according to sources close to Jindal the 2016 Republican hopeful knows his campaign is in trouble and that he needs to wrest some major amounts of spotlight from Donald Trump, Scott Walker, and Jeb! if he plans to make any headway in his bid to not become a has-been washout “where are they now” type political figure in five years.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, Jindal aides told The Political Garbage Chute that their boss plans to come out with his own set of immigration proposals that he hopes places his campaign even further to the right of Trump, Walker and !. Chief among those proposals is Jindal’s approach to birthright citizenship. Though Trump et. all are bandying about the idea of ending birthright citizenship altogether, despite it being firmly enshrined in the 14th Amendment and over 130 years of constitutional precedent, Jindal’s approach will differ slightly.
“Governor Jindal is prepared to propose to congress on day one of his presidency that birthright citizenship be altered,” one Jindal staffer told us. The same staffer said Jindal plans to propose “a system of determining birthright citizenship” based on “the country of origin of the child’s parents.” If a child is born to two parents that are American citizens, that child will continue to enjoy the same birthright citizenship status that babies born in the U.S. have enjoyed for decades. However, if a child is born to one or more people from another country, that’s where Jindal’s proposal would kick-in.
“If a child is born to one U.S. citizen and one person who has either dual citizenship or is here on a work visa or some other kind of legal, documented way, the child will receive 75% birthright citizenship, and will earn one-half of one percent of the rest of his or citizenship leading up to his or her eighteenth birthday,” the Jindal staffer also told us. When a child is born in the U.S. to two parents who are both undocumented, Jindal wants to break from the three front runners and doesn’t suggest ending birthright citizenship for those situations.
The Jindal staffer told us that children of two undocumented people — children pejoratively referred to by many on the right as “anchor babies” — will still receive birthright citizenship, but that it’l be a “lesser kind of citizenship” than children of American citizens. According to the staffer “children of illegals will be treated equal; separate but equal.”
“Technically speaking,” we were told by the Jindal aide, “yes the kind of citizenship the governor is proposing isn’t actually equal since there’d be less protections and rights for them, but we think once he’s president he can pretty swiftly deal with that pesky 14th Amendment that we really don’t need anymore anyway since slavery is like so passe now.” Jindal does understand, according to his staffer, that some in his party might balk and think he is being too soft on undocumented immigrants, but he and his staff disagree with that assertion.
Jindal will also propose that children of undocumented people be given their own separate government buildings, website for accessing services, and drinking fountains. This way, Jindal will argue, “it will be easier to identify who is American and who is American Lite,” according to copies of his new stump speech provided to us by his campaign staff.
“In the proposal, Governor Jindal makes it very clear that these new citizens would only get access to six of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights, and anything added to the Constitution post-Reconstruction would be null and void for them,” the Jindal staffer said. “So really, it’s like we’re giving them citizenship in the late 1700s. We think many Republican voters would be quite interested in sending illegal immigrants back to a time when they’d most likely be used as cheap human capital.”
Ultimately, said the Jindal aide, “our candidate knows it’s very important to look racist to the base but not racist to the general populace” and that he’s “doing that tap dance on the line right now.” Both Jindal and his team know this is a bit of a Hail Mary play, with his campaign on life support, but he hopes if nothing else taking these stridently anti-immigrant postures will assure him “a sweet-ass gig at a conservative think tank,” according to one member of his team.
“If he can’t win in 2016, Governor Jindal would like to position himself in a way that would let him run every four years, collect millions in donations, and live off those donations, er we mean keep fighting to get into the White House, his whole life,” our source told us as he was ending the interview. “Being on record as racist against people who weren’t born here is a great way to show conservative bonafides these days, and that’s what Governor Jindal will continue to do until he is polling so embarrassingly low it’s almost as if he doesn’t exist…which will probably be tomorrow.”
