> I *think* I remember a news article about a US
>resident who was deported because someone
>realised that one of his sets of grandparents
>had been an illegal immigrant, and therefore so
>were their descendants. I might be completely
>wrong on that though. My memory often plays
>tricks on me.

No. If you are born on US soil, you are entitled to US citizenship, unless they've changed the laws since the last time I studied civics. It doesn't mean you necessarily WILL be a US citizen, though. If two Canadians have a child and it is born in the US, their child is entitled to US citizenship. However, unless they're looking to stay in the US, they'll probably not take that option and instead their child will be Canadian, as I think the laws in Canada concerning citizens having babies in other countries are similar to the laws in the US (meaning that the product of two Canadians is Canadian disirregardless of the country of birth.) I'm not sure if Canada allows dual citizenship or not. I know the US basically frowns upon it, but doesn't disallow it, meaning if you're legally entitled to be a citizen of another country you can be both a citizen of that country and a US citizen simultaneously. But it brings up a bunch of legal issues that the US government would rather not deal with, so they discourage the practice.

Anyway, my great grandfather was an illegal immigrant. He was a Canadian citizen from Nova Scotia who came to the US in the early 1900s and was never naturalized (although, strangely enough, he had a (bogus) US birth certificate--but that's another story you can ask me about sometime.) But that doesn't mean I'm not a US citizen, or that my father isn't, or that my father's mother wasn't. We were all born on US soil, so we're entitled to US citizenship.

-- Dave