Citizenship of the United States
Controversies

Generally, eligibility for citizenship is denied for the millions of people living in the United States illegally, although from time to time, there have been amnesties. In 2006, there were mass protests numbering hundreds of thousands of people throughout the United States demanding United States citizenship for illegal immigrants. Many carried banners which read "We Have A Dream Too". One estimate is that there were 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States in 2006. Many American high school students have citizenship issues. In 2008, it was estimated that there were 65,000 illegal immigrant students. The number was less clear for post-secondary education. A 1982 Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe 457 U.S. 202 (1982), entitled illegal immigrants to free education from kindergarten through high school. Undocumented immigrants who get arrested face difficulties in the courtroom as they have no constitutional right to challenge the outcome of their deportation hearings. In 2009, writer Tom Barry of the Boston Review criticized the crackdown against illegal immigrants since it "flooded the federal courts with nonviolent offenders, besieged poor communities, and dramatically increased the United States prison population, while doing little to solve the problem itself". Barry criticized the United States' high incarceration rate as being "fives times greater than the average rate in the rest of the world". Virginia senator Jim Webb agreed that "we are doing something dramatically wrong in our criminal justice system".
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