Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group that favors restricting immigration, said the policy of granting automatic citizenship to people born here is "out of sync with the modern world." He and Deal said that the U.S. is one of the few wealthy industrialized nations that still allows birthright citizenship.

Deal, who has submitted his bill to the House Judiciary Committee, said he's not optimistic about it becoming law this year unless it is tacked onto another bill.

In his July 15 column "Immigration debacle," Tim Rutten uses Americans' natural reluctance to deport illegal immigrant parents of U.S.-born children as a weapon to attack efforts at immigration enforcement. Nothing new there. In his dissent to the majority ruling in United States vs. Wong Kim Ark -- the 1898 Supreme Court decision affirming that birth in the United States automatically confers citizenship -- Chief Justice Melville Fuller foresaw how this "birthright" would hinder enforcement of immigration law:

"[C]an the persons expelled be subjected to 'cruel and unusual punishments' in the process of expulsion, as would be the case if children born to them in this country were separated from them on their departure, because citizens of the United States?"

A majority of Hispanic children are now U.S.-born children of immigrants, primarily Mexicans who came to this country in an immigration wave that began about 1980, according to a report released yesterday.

The analysis of census data by the nonpartisan, Washington-based Pew Hispanic Center charts a substantial demographic shift among the nation's 16 million Hispanic children, who constitute one of the fastest growing child populations in the United States and account for more than one of five U.S. children. As recently as 1980, nearly six of 10 Latino children were in the third generation or higher, meaning that their parents, and often their grandparents and great-grandparents, were native-born U.S. citizens. Only three of 10 were in the second generation -- born in the United States to parents who immigrated.