Amendment 14
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.
If you're born in the US, you're a US citizen. Period. I'm not sure why this is in dispute.
Not "period."
Disputes are caused when various people disagree with some supposed point of fact.
There's nothing in the section whatsoever about parents, immigration status or anything else.
That's because when the 14th was ratified and adopted as an amendment, our immigration laws were not nearly as complicated as they are today. As I pointed out in my first post in this thread:
Back then there was not the complicated,and apparently "broken," pile of laws regarding immigration. People simply came here, landed at Ellis Island, had their foreign names mangled into American names, and assuming they were healthy, welcome to America.
It wasn't until the 1898 case of
United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) where Justice Horace Grey writing for the 5/4 majority agreed with a view held by Blackstone (Sir William Blackstone, author of
Commentaries on the Laws of England,) that held that a child of Ark and his wife, who were subjects of the Emporer of China, but who had a permanent domicile in America and were doing business here (they were not here illegally) was an American Citizen. They were not diplomats or carrying on carrying on any diplomatic functions, which would have been a big factor in the decision.
According to
The Heritage Guide to the Constition, courts after the Wong Kim Ark case simply assumed that any child born in America is an American citizen.
To quote from the afore-mentioned book;
"INS v. Rios-Pineda(1985), dicta refering to the respondent and his wife. who illegally entered the U.S.. By the time of his deportation, 'respondent wife had given birth to a child. who born in the United States, was a citizen of this country.' However, there is also no clear case where the Supreme Court has explicitly held that birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens is the unambiguous command of the Fourteenth Amendment. It is hard to conclude that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to confer citizenship on the children of aliens illegally present when they explicitly denied that boon to Native Americans legally present but subject to a foreign jurisdiction." That said, that section also gives zero citizenship to persons not born in the US. So, yes, the kid is a US citizen if born in the US. Like pretty much everyone else said, the kid has an option to stay even if the parents are deported. Same is applicable for the kid of anyone vacationing here. I'm not sure what the law would say if a kid was born on an aircraft passing over the United States, but I imagine that'd be applicable too. The "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause is pretty obviously referring to any parts of the US where the US actually is in charge. I imagine that could be a sticky point for native reservations or some of our overseas possessions. I'm guessing that clause was more applicable while we were still moving westward.
There is no loophole or abuse. The amendment says what it says in clear English. Can anyone point out to me how exactly it cannot mean what it says?
I think the above, while not "explicitly" contradicting what you said, does point out that the matter is not as simple as you seem to believe it is.
IMHO it comes down to this:
Should SCOTUS take up this question again, in a future case (as Donald Trump apprently desires) how does the court go about deciding the case? Does it determine it by going back to "original intent," which (apparently) means that anchor babies are not covered by the 14th. or does it go by the
Ark case, in which the majority simply went along with Blackstone's assertion, or belief, that the child was an American citizen? Does the court follow the more modern assumption that seems to be the plurality opinion in today's existance, that the anchor baby is in fact an American citizen?
After what I regard as two botched SCOTUS decisions with regards to "Obamacare," I am not certain I would want to invest any $$$ in a gamble on what the court would do.
But I will provide a guess, based on the fact that I believe the court will revert to a political beast and simply apply what it regards to be the politically correct opinion (and in fact may be the real fact despite it being PC) that the court will decide that the "anchor baby" is in fact, an American citizen, and ignore original intent (to the degree it is possible to even determine what that was).
So why this post?
I am just pointing out it really is not as clear as some think.
