Anyone born in the United States is an American citizen, a right with post-Civil War roots and defined in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

But a controversial bill filed for the 2007 session of the Texas Legislature, one of a flurry of measures seeking crackdowns on illegal immigration, is challenging this long-held tenet of U.S. citizenship.

House Bill 28, filed Monday by Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, would exclude U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants from access to public education and health care, unemployment, public housing, disability and other state benefits. Analysts think it is the first-ever state challenge of birthright citizenship.

With the start of the legislative session still more than seven weeks away, the bill is stirring an outcry among critics, who say it is blatantly unconstitutional and who question the fairness of punishing U.S. citizen children for their parents' decisions to enter the country illegally. The dust-up is rekindling a bitter debate about birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment that provides it.

"It's very, very clear beyond reasonable doubt that under current interpretation of the 14th Amendment, and simply U.S. law, that anybody born in the United States, except for a few exotic examples, becomes a citizen," said Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Texas.

Berman's bill is unconstitutional, Levinson said. "That's not even a close case," he said. In recent years, however, some who want to clamp down on illegal immigration have seized on the 14th Amendment, saying it was never intended to grant citizenship to children of illegal immigrants.

Contending that birthright citizenship encourages illegal immigration, some critics have dubbed the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants "anchor babies" because they can sponsor their parents for legal permanent residency when they turn 21.

"That's the reward they get for violating our laws," Berman said. "That's got to stop."

More than 3 million children born in the United States have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant, according to researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.

Immigrant rights groups say the number of cases in which parents enter the country illegally for the purpose of having a baby is considerably smaller than critics allege, a position captured in the plain-spoken language of the late U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan of Texas in 1995.

"People come to this country because they want jobs. They don't come to have babies," said Jordan, then the chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.

Berman said he expects — and wants — a court challenge if his bill passes because he hopes to force the Supreme Court to review the 14th Amendment. Levinson says it'll never get there.

"It would be knocked down by whatever court heard it first," Levinson said.

Legal experts interpret a 1982 Supreme Court decision as at least indirectly affirming the 14th Amendment's citizenship rights for U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. The decision struck down a Texas law and required that the state provide public education to children regardless of their legal status.

"The environment has changed considerably since that time. We didn't have 20 million illegals," Berman said. Analysts generally estimate the illegal immigrant population in the United States at 11.5 million to 12 million.

Push hasn't gone far

For more than a decade, concerns about surging illegal immigration have led to a re-examination of birthright citizenship.

But congressional efforts to revoke the right have proved to be nonstarters, said Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum.

"The basic reason is because it's unconstitutional," Kelley said. In 2005, U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal, R-Ga., offered a bill to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to end birth citizenship. The measure has not moved beyond committees.

U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, one of the bill's co-sponsors, was unavailable for an interview. But in an op-ed piece published in the San Diego Union-Tribune last year, Smith and U.S. Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., wrote that one of every 10 births in the country are to illegal immigrant mothers.

"Congress is long overdue in making sure the Fourteenth Amendment is correctly interpreted. Illegal immigration has become a crisis in America," Smith and Lungren wrote. "Passing a law to eliminate birth citizenship would help deter illegal immigration and reduce the burden on the taxpayer of paying for illegal immigrants' education, health care, and other government benefits."

Legal experts disagree about whether a constitutional amendment or a federal statute is needed to end birthright citizenship.

Levinson said such a decision would "have to be made at least by Congress, and I suspect most people would say by a constitutional amendment."

'Big problem' in Texas

As filed, Berman's bill would deny education and health care benefits. But later in the week, Berman said he had decided to remove them from his bill because the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed them as constitutional rights and because leaving them in would hurt his bill's chances. "We're not violating the Constitution," Berman said.

He said his legislation is necessary because the federal government is doing nothing about illegal immigration, which he claimed costs Texas taxpayers $3.5 billion a year, citing a report by the Lone Star Foundation, a think tank that touts what they call traditional family values and free enterprise.

The net cost of illegal immigration is among the most disputed topics in the nation's roiling immigration debate.

"(Illegal immigration is) a big problem in every district in Texas," Berman said. "People are getting sick and tired of spending money in hospitals, on education, in our prison system, in our courts."

Removing the carrot of government benefits, he said, is one way to discourage illegal immigration.

A member of the Texas House since 1999, Berman narrowly won re-election in March.

Berman's bill and others signal that Texas is joining a growing list of states and municipalities attempting to legislate responses to illegal immigration, long viewed as a federal responsibility.

Earlier this week, the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch became the first city in Texas to pass measures fining landlords who rent to illegal immigrants and declaring English the city's official language.

On the same day Berman filed his bill, the first day to file bills for the 2007 session, lawmakers introduced several measures targeting illegal immigration issues. Rep. Burt Solomons, R-Carrollton, filed a bill authorizing the state to sue the federal government to recover costs incurred by illegal immigration and demanding that it enforce immigration laws.

Dan Kowalski, an Austin immigration attorney and editor of Bender's Immigration Bulletin, said states and cities are "trying to find that middle ground point in the law where they can legislate locally and that does not step over the (federal government's) pre-emption line."

But Kowalski added, "Whether it's the issue of the 14th Amendment or housing or local employment, state and local lawmakers need to know that all these issues have been carefully examined by constitutional law experts for decades. They should do a little research before filing bills or enacting local ordinances."

The 14th Amendment

Ratified in 1868, the amendment was designed to protect freed slaves and their children. Section 1 says: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."