Immigration law is complex and tricky, fueling a demand for busy lawyers — but babies can’t hire a lawyer, and babies adopted from other countries shouldn’t be penalized for faulty paperwork. That’s the basic argument for a new bill to clean up citizenship status for tens of thousands of adoptees who’ve been excluded from U.S. citizenship because applications weren’t completed during their childhood.

The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 provided automatic citizenship for all youth from other countries adopted by U.S. citizen parents. But it set an arbitrary cut-off, specifying that automatic citizenship would apply only to adopted youths who were under 18 when the bill took effect on Feb. 27, 2001. This leads to bizarre distinctions — for example: Of two adopted children from overseas, one b

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