Can you point me to such debates?
And more to this: In the only clarifying cases on this issue ever adjudicated by the Supreme Court, the Court made it clear that the definition of US persons in Amendment XIV was intended only to include those "subject to its jurisdiction," which does not include illegals, Indians, or the children of foriegn nationals not intending to remain in the United States.
That is doubly wrong: first, the cases you are talking about were construing the citizenship provision of section 1, not the apportionment provision of section 2. Section 2 doesn't say anything about "subject to the jurisdiction"; it says "the whole number of persons", which means "the whole number of persons." Second, even if we were talking about section 1, there is no Supreme Court case that says that illegal aliens are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. If they weren't, they couldn't be prosecuted for illegal entry (like diplomats, who are truly "not subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States because they have diplomatic immunity).
I thought we supported the Constitution here on FR; I guess some people only support the parts of it they find temporarily convenient.
The SCOTUS did not rule that diplomats were not subject to the laws of the United States because of "diplomatic immunity" please actually read the decision.
SCOTUS has NEVER directly ruled on whether illegals are covered by Amendment XIV.
The whole persons discussed in the 14th Amendment were women, children, assessed Indians and other non-voters and this point was made clear in the debate over passage of the Amendment. Again: look it up. It's publicly available.
I thought we had Constitutionalists at FR who believed in original intent, not some idiocy the ACLU wants to pretend is part of the document through tortured logic and sophistry. There is no precedent for considering illegals as part of the enumeration of the Census. Like the slave power of the nineteenth century, it's another gimmick to give more political power to the slave masters. Conservatives -- and actual libertarians (not liberals who just want to be able to smoke dope legally) -- who're interested in the rule of law shouldn't take advocacy positions on behalf of the lawless. Neither should they supply millions more willing voters to the statists.
Here is the context of the 14th Amendment: it is a point-by-point answer to the preposterous definition of American citizenship claimed by Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. It is nothing more or less. In the debate over the 14th Amendment, proponents specifically denied that it could be applied to refugees, migrants, tourists, business visitors or other foreign nationals.
You want to live in a fantasyland where the Founders and post Civil War Republicans envisioned the United States allowing millions of foreign nationals to settle in the country and claim all the rights of Americans, go right ahead. But don't claim the Constitution as written or as Amended at the time supports your decision. It doesn't. Peddle your liberal crap elsewhere. If twelve million Mexicans had invaded the United States in 1867 they wouldn't have lived long enough to be counted in a Census. Those who managed to survive by going into hiding wouldn't have been marked down as "whole persons" by any Federal employee. We got where we are because our fore-bearers didn't have their heads up their @sses with respect to national sovereignty like the open borders liberals and "libertarians" do.