GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: You just heard the argument in favor of birthright citizenship. Well, now the other side. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham wants to change the Constitution, and we went to Capitol Hill, where Senator Graham went "On the Record."

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VAN SUSTEREN: Senator, nice to see you.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, R-S.C.: Good to be with you.

VAN SUSTEREN: All right, you're getting a lot of controversy, at least you're generating in some corners about the fact that you want to amend the 14th Amendment so that just mere being born in the United States doesn't necessarily make you a citizen. Why are you doing this?

GRAHAM: Well, to me, I'm looking at the laws that exist and see if it makes sense today. The 14th Amendment was passed after the Civil War. Citizenship was awarded before the Civil War based on states giving citizenship. Well, after the Civil War, they were afraid that Southern states may not award citizenship to freed slaves, so they put it in the 14th Amendment that if you're naturally-born American, then you're automatically entitled to citizenship as a constitutional requirement.

That made sense to me then. But now, birthright citizenship doesn't make so much sense when you understand the world as it is. You have found and I've provided you information about groups that are marketing to Chinese, and Mideastern and European families a 90-day visa package, where you come to America as a tourist. You come to a resort. You have your child at a hospital within the resort. That child is an American citizen. You turn around and leave.

That to me cheapens American citizenship. That's not the way I would like it to be awarded. And you've got the other problem, where thousands of people are coming across the Arizona/Texas border for the express purpose of having a child in an American hospital so that child will become an American citizen, and they broke the law to get there.

So I want to put on the table fixing immigration so we don't have a third wave in the future. We went from 3 to 12 million in the last 20 years. Twenty years from now, I don't want to have 20 million. So I think we ought to have a logical discussion. Is this the way to award American citizenship, sell it to somebody who's rich, reward somebody who breaks the law? I think we need to look at it really closely.

VAN SUSTEREN: All right, in terms of people selling sort of these 90- minute -- or 90 -- 90-day ability to come to the United States and have babies, I looked up the article, Washington Post, July 18th. It talks about a couple that is running a program where they get pregnant women in China and they offer them three months in the United States, two months prenatal, and then they have the baby and then they spend a month in the United States and then they go back home. They're American citizens. And the -- and what the -- what the couple says is that, you know, they're not breaking the law. It says, We don't -- we don't encourage mothers to break the law, just to take advantage of it.

GRAHAM: Well, that's right. They are taking advantage. And the question for us as a country, should we look at the law and maybe redo it to make it make sense. You know, there are young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan who are Green Card holders. They've applied lawfully for American citizenship. You have to wait five years normally, unless you join the military.

In July of 2007, I went to a naturalization ceremony in Baghdad. A hundred and thirty people were going to be granted their citizenship because they had served in the military for one year. They expedited getting citizenship by serving in the military. There were two empty chairs in the front row with boots on the chairs. Two of those 130 were killed the week before, trying to expedite their citizenship, fighting and dying for this country.

So it bothers me a lot that we would have a situation where you could come to a resort in America, have a child, get American citizenship, turn right around and leave. It bothers me a lot that you come across our border, breaking our laws on purpose, just to have a child in an American hospital, and that child's entitled to citizenship. Very few countries, if any, do that. If you visit France or England and you have a child, you're not going to be an English or French citizen. And no country that I know of rewards people by breaking the law and giving them citizenship.

So America needs to change our laws. And if we don't, we're going to have 20 million more in 20 years.

VAN SUSTEREN: Do you have any concept of how many people are doing this with the deliberate intention of coming to the United States because I saw one number -- I think it was ABCNews.com said there are about a little over 7,000 a year.

GRAHAM: On the people who buy the visas, it's in the thousands. But it's going to grow. As the word gets out, it's going to grow. That's one problem. But how many people come across the border illegally for the express purpose of having a child? God knows how many. In some hospitals along the border, there are more children born to illegal immigrants than actual American citizens. So this is a huge problem.

The incentives are all wrong. The incentives are such that we're allowing people to get American citizenship just by buying it through a visa, and we're enticing people to break our law to get American citizenship, and those two things need to be looked at.

VAN SUSTEREN: Your critics would say, "Why are you penalizing the kids, the babies?"

GRAHAM: Well, I'm trying to reward American citizenship and honor and respect it. I'm not penalizing the children. They can be citizens of the country where their parents live. If you come from Mexico to have a child in Arizona, the child is still a Mexican citizen because the parents are Mexican. Why should we, as a nation, incentivize people to break our laws?

I want American citizenship to be respected, be honored and to be earned. Every other nation does it that way. It bothers me greatly that young men and women are dying to get their citizenship and people are waiting for years to play by the rules, and somebody with money can buy it on a vacation and somebody who wants to break our laws gets rewarded. So I'm not punishing anybody, in my view. I'm protecting the sovereignty of our country and I'm protecting something that's very valuable to me. And I think people in the world at large and us (ph) being an American citizen, it shouldn't be cheapened.

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