Birthright Citizenship

On January 20th, 2025, days after being inaugurated, Donald Trump signed executive order 14160 in which he redefines the interpretation  of the 14th Amendment, section 1, which defines birthright citizenship. Here is that Amendment which was passed by Congress in June of 1866, and ratified by the states in July of 1868.

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. 

The argument for this alteration was that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to address those born in America to slaves who did not have citizenship, not to mention any rights normally associated with human beings, and that it was not meant to include children born to people here illegally. (I guess all those slaves brought here against their will were here legally?)

A quick aside. The reason why people born to slaves on American soil were not automatically granted citizenship before the passage of the 14th Amendment was because the Naturalization Acts of 1790 and 1795, which were passed to grant United States citizenship for all people living in the colonies at the time, only granted citizenship to white people. Some might argue that if the founders had true divine inspiration they might have included all people regardless of skin color.

Anyway, what is being debated here is the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" which I underlined in the above reproduction. In the minds of some people, anyone born to a person who came to America illegally might be said to be outside that requirement, the idea being that the parents of that child do not have allegiance to America, hence their breaking of immigration laws to gain access. 

I am not immune to the logic of this point although, considering that the vast number of Americans who are citizens today, are descendants of people who came to America when there were no immigration laws, seems rather petty. Certainly, we can debate how many people we should allow entry into our country, how easy or hard it should be to become a citizen, but do we really want to punish the children of those who work around the immigration laws? 

Not to mention, we don't withhold or remove citizenship for those children born to Americans who blatantly violate our laws.   

Wouldn't it be more beneficial to identify those who are here illegally, register them as prospective citizens, provide a path to achieve this designation which would include some form of payment, all the while removing the minority of those who commit violent crimes, or who are repeat offenders of non-violent crimes?

Considering the budget for ICE is tens of billions of dollars, it seems very cost ineffective to spend money tracking down people who have only the blemish of entering the country illegally, but have since been upstanding, productive non-citizens.

Speaking of non-citizens, my paternal family line, the part of my family that a few of my Trump voting siblings are extremely proud of, includes non-citizens. Neither of my paternal grandparents were United States citizens when my father was born. It was only after the third of his children were born did my paternal grandfather apply for citizenship, and not till after all her children were born did my paternal grandmother become a citizen. Perhaps my father, uncle and two aunts were not anchor babies in the strict sense, as my paternal grandparents were here for 15 plus years before applying for citizenship, but they were certainly born to non-citizens. 

I sometime will ask those who favor this new interpretation about their family tree. Many have only a faint idea about their ancestry while being so adamant about who is American and who isn't.  

Of course, some people might say it is not about crimes, or jobs, or resources spent on people here illegally rather than on Americans, it is really about prejudice. It is not hard to make the case the president and some of his supporters are racist. He has made it abundantly clear that he prefers immigrants be white, and conversely, that he believes people from "those" countries are vermin, less than human, have bad genes, etc.

Notwithstanding the prejudice of Trump, I could understand someone whose family history included ancestors born in America for 150 years or more, making a case for "American" to be defined as a person with an extended lineage of people born here, but two of Trump's three wives are immigrants and his mother was born in Scotland. As is true of so many Americans today, a large percentage of us are first or second generation Americans with much longer family histories in Europe. I guess what I am saying is that it seems very disingenuous for so many first and second generation Americans whose ancestors came to America when the borders were truly open, to be so hung up on punishing today's immigrants who, like our own grandparents, came here looking for opportunity and freedom.

Another thing I ask people who defend this new interpretation of the 14th Amendment is, what did you do to earn American citizenship?

Unless they happen to be recently naturalized citizens, most either say that they were born here, without the added reference to their parents, such as "I was born to American citizens", or they say nothing because they know they are Americans precisely because of birthright citizenship. In either case, they had no control over who their parents were or which country they happened to be conceived and birthed in. They are the winners of the birth lottery which is as random a chance as there is, yet are adamant in punishing the losers of that same lottery, the babies who were born to non-citizens.

When I further dig in and say, "I guess God doesn't love them enough to have allowed them to be born to American parents", I mostly get silence. 

You see, that's the thing. Trump has convinced millions of Americans that people who want to come to America today are criminals, rapists, people left out of insane asylums, etc, so they are OK with denying the children of those people the exact same citizenship rights that they enjoy, even thought they did nothing to earn that right.

Finally, on multiple occasions, Trump has said that America is the only country that has birthright citizenship. This is, of course, just another lie that he tells people who prefer to live in ignorance, and prejudice, rather than googling the question which would reveal that many countries, especially those in North America, have the same birthright citizenship rules as we do.

I don't know how the Supreme Court will rule on this issue, although there was some sense during the oral arguments that they were skeptical of the arguments for the executive order. 

Frankly, the fact that they had the oral arguments in the first place, is a bad indicator of just how obsequious this Supreme Court is towards the whims of Trump. Once the executive order was deemed unconstitutional by lower courts, SCOTUS should have refused to take the case, especially considering the decisions which have already been rendered by the Supreme Court in the past, most importantly the case of United States vs Wong Kim Ark. Feel free to google it for the details, but in essence, the Court ruled that a Chinese child born to non-citizen Chinese parents, a young man who was refused re-entry into America because of anti-Chinese prejudice at the time, was deemed an American citizen by rule of, you guessed it, the 14th Amendment, section 1.

Let's just hope that the Roberts Court rebukes Trump in no uncertain terms. They owe us that after their horrendous decision to gut the Voting Rights Act.