Border war.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia I.

In his 1987 interview with REASON, Clarence Thomas said people in Washington need to ask the big-picture questions, starting with this one: "What is there about this country that will lead people to crawl through sewers, get on innertubes and float across miles of water, to sneak out in the middle of the night, to cram in under trucks and buses, and other things, risk their lives going across mountains, etc.--what is it about this country that people will do all those things to come in, and what is it about the Soviet Union or Cuba or the Eastern Bloc countries that would force people to do those same things to get out?"

California Gov. Pete Wilson thinks it's welfare. And he's dead wrong.

During the Cold War, Americans instinctively understood what their country was about, what it offered that was special, why a pregnant woman would go to extreme lengths to have her baby born on U.S. soil. When I was a little girl, my father told me that such a woman had burst into the U.S. embassy in Moscow and stayed until her child was born a U.S. citizen. I don't know if that story was literally true, but it was the kind of story Americans told their children to teach them important truths about their country: that to be an American was to be free; that freedom was a precious commodity, rare in the world; and that to appreciate freedom was to cheer for the woman who wanted her child to have it.

Sometime after the Wall fell, however, a lot of Americans forgot what their country was about. Now Wilson, along with a growing number of ambitious politicians of both parties, wants to sacrifice the meaning of America to save the welfare state.

Wilson wants to change the U.S. Constitution to deny citizenship to children born here if their parents are illegal immigrants. The proposal is murky: Does it apply if one parent is legal? What if the mother is here on a tourist visa? What happens if one of these non-citizens marries a citizen and has children? Will those children be citizens, or shall we apply the old "one drop" rule that governed race in the Jim Crow South? What shall we do about the new underclass of uneducated non-citizens created as illegal immigrants drawn here to work have children?

But this radical proposal is wrong at a much more fundamental level. It repudiates the founding principles of the country. And it does so to keep the welfare state working at full tilt.

Wilson says we must adopt lineage-based standards of citizenship because "federally...