Is it time to end birthright citizenship? https://www.yahoo.com/news/inside-trump-team-plans-try-130042965.html
- Trump’s team is assessing multiple options to fulfill his long-promised pledge to end birthright citizenship
- Expectation is the Supreme Court would ultimately have to rule on the matter as it is protected by the 14th Amendment
- Trump stated, “We’re gonna have to get it changed, or maybe I would go back to the people, but we have to end it.”
- Multiple options are being considered to tighten the interpretation as any action would likely get legally challenged and eventually land before the Supreme Court
- Trump allies argue that 14th Amendment has been misinterpreted and doesn’t apply to children born in the United States to undocumented parents
- Some ... have argued that children of undocumented immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US and shouldn’t be considered citizens under the Constitution
New York Times - Jan. 18, 2025:
Birthright Citizenship Defined America. Trump Wants to Redefine It - The 14th Amendment made the U.S. a place where every child was born equal under the law. That might be about to change -
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/birthright-citizenship.html- 14th Amendment ... grants citizenship to almost everyone born inside the country ... Among the 20 most developed countries in the world, only Canada and the United States allocate citizenship using the legal principle of jus soli, the right of soil.
- Trump has vowed to overturn territorial birthright citizenship. “We’re going to have to get it changed”
- Trump ... will release an executive order denying birthright citizenship to the children of “illegal aliens” on the first day that he takes office
- His team ... will not issue passports and Social Security cards to children born to undocumented parents
- These moves will inevitably be challenged in court
- Efforts to end birthright citizenship ... Trump’s return ... greatest challenges in the 14th Amendment’s 157-year history. Legal arguments that were once regarded as fringe have moved to the mainstream
- The Supreme Court has proved itself willing to break with historical precedent ... Trump, who campaigned on the idea of restricting birthright citizenship, is entering office with a majority of the vote
- Trump ... represent a triumph for a certain vision of America ... Angered by the challenges posed by rising global migration ... led several other industrialized nations to replace birthright citizenship with less welcoming laws
- Battle over birthright citizenship will be a fight between ... two nationalisms, as it was when the 14th Amendment was proposed.
- 14th Amendment is not fundamentally about immigration. It is about equality. Before the amendment passed, men and women of African descent could not be citizens, even if they were not enslaved.
- When the 14th Amendment was ratified — granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” — it turned the United States into a multiracial democracy for the first time ... “constitutional reset button.”
- But its relevance to immigration policy remained open to debate until the Supreme Court decided the case of Wong Kim Ark in 1898. At the time, Chinese immigrants were explicitly banned from becoming American citizens ... when asked if a man born to Chinese immigrants in California could claim citizenship, the Supreme Court ruled he could — because he was born on American soil.
- Many legal scholars contend that the application of territorial birthright citizenship to all immigrants has been a settled matter in the United States since the Wong Kim Ark decision in 1898
- The current challenges to birthright citizenship have their roots in the 1980s, when two Yale professors, Rogers M. Smith and Peter H. Schuck, began to write about the possibility that birthright citizenship might not apply to the children of unauthorized migrants
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Their 1985 book, “Citizenship Without Consent” ... captivated conservatives who appreciated its argument that Congress did not address the issue of children of unauthorized migrants when it wrote the 14th Amendment in the 1860s and that it retained the power to resolve the ambiguity through legislation.- In 1991, when Representative Elton Gallegly, a California Republican, sponsored a bill trying to restrict the Fourteenth Amendment, he referred to Schuck and Smith’s work ... rise in illegal immigration was a burden to law enforcement, medical facilities, schools and social welfare agencies. - When considered together with the expanded welfare state, the effects of birthright citizenship laws were “clearly harmful.”
- He also noted that it was harder to deport unauthorized parents if they had children who were citizens.
- Bill died in committee, but support for the idea of restricting the application of the 14th Amendment grew
- The epithet “anchor babies” gained traction in the early 2000s as a way to suggest that undocumented parents had children in the United States primarily to ward off deportation.
- For three years beginning in 2013, Texas stopped issuing birth certificates for some children of unauthorized migrants.
- Unlike Schuck and Smith, most legal scholars believe that changing birthright citizenship requires ratifying a new constitutional amendment, a process that takes years and is unlikely to succeed.
- So many proponents of restriction would like to see the Supreme Court issue a decision that defines the amendment more narrowly. If Trump issues an executive order, it could force that court battle.- As the global population turns more transient, more countries have tossed out jus soli. Since 1980, England, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand have all redefined citizenship so that it falls primarily along blood lines. In each case, new laws followed a rise in immigration from less developed regions of the world.
- Wars, political upheavals, climate change and advances in communications and transportation have supercharged migration. According to the United Nations, the number of refugees and asylum-seekers in the world has more than quadrupled since 1980, reaching 44.5 million by the end of 2023.
- This trend has affected the United States intensely. Millions of immigrants entered America around the turn of the 20th century, but at rates starkly slower than today.
- According to the Economic History Association, from 1870 to 1920, new arrivals numbered between 260,000 to 892,000 people a year. But the
U.S. Border Patrol encountered more than two million migrants a year along the U.S.-Mexico border in 2022, 2023 and 2024.
- “There’s a reason all developed countries have gotten rid of it,” Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-wing group that advocates drastically slowing migration, said about birthright citizenship. “If we had 500 kids a year born to tourists or students or illegal aliens, there would be no reason to even have this debate.”
- Krikorian wants American citizenship limited to children with at least one parent who is a citizen or legal permanent resident, but even he favors implementing a “statute of limitations” that would automatically grant citizenship to those born in the United States after they’ve lived in the country for a given period, like 10 years. Australia and France both have policies like this in place.
- Without this sort of safeguard, the United States risks the creation of an underclass composed of millions of native-born residents who are banned from full participation in our nation’s economy and politics [Being able to vote 
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