XENOPHOBIA, HERE AND ABROAD Leading Republicans have gotten chilly toward the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to people born in the United States. Sens. Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Jeff Sessions and Jon Kyl have been suggesting that the country should take a look at it, re-examine it, think it over, hold hearings. They seem worried that maybe we got something wrong nearly 150 years ago, after fighting the Civil War, freeing enslaved Africans and declaring that they and their descendants were not property or partial persons, but free and full Americans. As statements of core values go, the 14th Amendment is a keeper. It decreed, belatedly, that citizenship is not a question of race, color, beliefs, wealth, political status or bloodline. It cannot fall prey to political whims or debates over who is worthy to be an American. 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,' it says, 'are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.' People like Sessions, who pride themselves on getting the Constitution just right (on, say, guns), are finding this language too confusing. 'I'm not sure exactly what the drafters of the amendment had in mind,' said Sessions, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, 'but I doubt it was that somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home with that child, and that child is forever an American citizen.' It's true that air travel was not a big focus in 1868, but this is not about a horde of pregnant jet-setting Brazilians, if, indeed, such a thing even exists. The targets are Mexicans, and the other mostly Spanish-speaking people who are the subjects of a spurious campaign against 'anchor babies' -- children of illegal immigrants supposedly brought forth to invade and occupy. Usually alarms about scary foreign infants are made by one-note zealots like Tom Tancredo of Colorado. But it's a bipartisan temptation. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, who berated Republicans this week about abandoning their principles over birthright citizenship, did so himself in a 1993 bill for which he later apologized. Thankfully, the Constitution is sturdy. The birthright-deniers will not easily rewrite it or legislate around it. More than a century of jurisprudence stands against their claim that the phrase 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof' (an exception for diplomats' children and members of sovereign Indian tribes) also alienates undocumented children. The proponents of changing the 14th Amendment also would have to acknowledge the big-government colossus that new rules would require, burdening all parents to prove their children's status. New battalions of attorneys would gain full employment to fight over thousands of newborns rendered stateless each year, an instant, permanent underclass. Then there's the obsolescence of all those civics texts, old movies, patriotic picture books and red-white-and-blue songs. The United States has never had a neat, painless way to add newcomers. But our most shameful moments have involved the exclusion of groups, often those that do our hardest labor: Indians, African-Americans, Chinese, Irish, Italians, Catholics, Jews, Poles, Japanese-Americans, Hispanics. America has stood proudest when it dared to stretch the definition of who 'we' are. As a result, this is still the most welcoming country for immigrants. A few politicians chumming for votes in an off-year election cannot be allowed to destroy that. CASTING OUT THE UN-FRENCH France has no equivalent to the 14th Amendment, but the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who likes to be known as Sarko the American, also is fanning dangerous anti-immigrant passions for short-term political gain. Last week, he proposed stripping foreign-born French citizens of their citizenship if they are convicted of threatening the life of a police officer or other serious crimes. Lest any voter miss the point that such a law would be particularly aimed at Muslim immigrants, Sarkozy's interior minister, in charge of the police force, helpfully added polygamy and female circumcision to the list of offenses that could bring loss of citizenship. Days earlier, Sarkozy promised to destroy the camps of the Roma and send them back to where they came from, mainly Romania and Bulgaria. Both countries are members of the European Union. Hundreds of thousands of their residents, in France legally, now risk being swept up and expelled in police raids. And Sarkozy proposes denying automatic French citizenship to people born in France if their parents are foreign and they have a record of juvenile delinquency. All of this in a country that has long proudly upheld the principle that all French citizens -- native-born or naturalized -- are entitled to equal treatment under the law. That applies to Sarkozy's Hungarian-born father and Italian-born wife, both naturalized French citizens, and should apply to everyone else. But immigrant-bashing is popular among nonimmigrant French voters and Sarkozy has never been shy about doing it. He built his 2007 presidential campaign around his tough record (and inflammatory words) as interior minister. Earlier this year, he ran a divisive campaign to define French national identity because he wanted to fend off the far right anti-immigrant National Front in regional elections. It didn't work. Now, with his political fortunes at a new low and the National Front resurgent under younger leadership, he has gone further, worrying traditional conservatives who still believe in the rights of man and the equality of all French citizens. They are right to be concerned, and he is recklessly wrong to ignore their cautionary advice. THE BROADBAND GAP Since it started measuring in 1999, the Federal Communications Commission invariably concluded that the spread of broadband service was progressing just fine. In 2008, it said more than 99 percent of Americans lived in areas that had access to high-speed Internet networks. Well, not exactly. In a report issued last month, the FCC estimated that 14 million to 24 million Americans -- 5 percent to 8 percent of the population -- still have no access to broadband from their homes. And it suggested that private companies are unlikely to serve these relatively unprofitable households. Throughout the Bush administration, the FCC stuck to a definition of broadband created in the heyday of Pets.com: a link that could handle at least 200 kilobits per second. And it counted all households in ZIP codes where a broadband provider had at least one subscriber. The FCC has brought the assumptions into the present. It defined broadband as a connection with an upload speed of at least 1 megabit per second and a download speed of at least 4 megabits per second -- enough to download a 45-minute TV show in five minutes, rather than an hour and a half on a 200 kilobits-per-second line. It analyzed data by county rather than ZIP code. And it set a minimum threshold: people in a county were classified as having broadband access only if 1 percent or more of the county's population were connected. Lack of access is not the only problem. A separate FCC study found that 80 million Americans do not subscribe to broadband service at home, and 50 million do not use the Internet at all. But lack of access deprives too many families, mostly in poorer rural areas, of any chance to use an essential tool for modern life. The report is likely to discomfit Republicans, who, during the Bush administration, used the mirage of 99 percent coverage to support the view that unfettered markets were delivering universal broadband. It is true that Internet penetration has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, but the FCC must fill the gap. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 orders it 'to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market.' The FCC's strategy, published in March, lays out ways to do this. It is working on rules to redeploy the Universal Service Fund, created to bring telephone to hard-to-reach places. And it proposes to reallocate telecommunications spectrum from broadcast TV to mobile broadband service. To enable this, the House and Senate should pass without delay bills that would allow the FCC to auction spectrum to telecommunications carriers and use the proceeds to compensate broadcasters. A CAMPAIGN VOW COME DUE As the nation veers toward an era of laissez-faire campaign spending by corporations and unions, it is urgent that President Barack Obama deliver on his promise to repair the system of publicly subsidized campaign financing. It was Obama who enjoyed such a rich windfall in small Internet donations as a candidate that he rejected the public option with its spending limits. He did so despite earlier promises to continue with a system that had served presidential politics well for a generation after the big-money corruption of Watergate. A new bipartisan proposal to update the public option seems tailored for Obama's promise to tune the system to the realities of modern campaigns. The measure faces up to the devastating effects of the Supreme Court's striking down decades of limits on corporate campaign spending -- a decision Obama heatedly denounced. It does so by putting the focus on the sort of small-donation Web supporters that he pioneered. The measure creates a 4-1 federal matching formula for donations up to $200 in primary and general elections, requiring participants to honor both cycles. In the face of the legalized flood of special-interest dollars, the proposal necessarily drops the past spending limits for public-option candidates. But it allows them matching funds of up to $100 million in primary races and up to $200 million in the general election. These parameters are a viable alternative to the fat-cat splurges of influence brokers, in the estimate of the bill's sponsors. In contrast to the current law, it's vital the measure have the flexibility to be updated for campaign inflation. Stronger disclosure requirements, a ban on public financing of party conventions and an increase on the tax-form check-off to $10 per individual (instead of $3 presently) are part of the bill, which is estimated to cost $1.1 billion across a four-year cycle. Opponents of the public option, sensing the goodies to come, already have a bill to kill the system entirely. Congress and Obama have no time to waste. 