The Constitution says that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are automatically U.S. citizens. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that this includes children of illegal immigrants, children of tourists, and children of people who took a wrong turn in Manitoba and gave birth in Minnesota.
I don’t second-guess the court on this. Judging by the divisions on the court, the legal question seems pretty difficult, and my own reading of the text leaves the majority’s decision plausible.
But this is obviously bad law. It makes no sense that every child born to an illegal immigrant is automatically a U.S. citizen. Our current policy is not that some children born to some illegal immigrants can become citizens. It’s automatic.
So if you sneak across the border to have a baby, that baby is a citizen. If a shady Chinese billionaire hires a dozen surrogates to have babies in Los Angeles, those babies are all citizens. If someone gets a tourist visa and times her visit for her due date, that baby is automatically a U.S. citizen. And in any of these cases, it seems there is nothing that Congress or ICE can do about it.
It is totally reasonable that Congress should be allowed to pass laws declaring which illegal immigrants’ children and which tourists’ children get citizenship. To give Congress that power, we would, it is now clear, have to amend the Constitution.
I suggested as much on social media, and this was somehow received as an extremist or racist proposition.
Again, it makes me automatically unreasonable to posit that Congress should have the power to determine citizenship laws for children of illegal immigrants and children of birth tourists.
One college professor actually accused me of being a “white nationalist” for endorsing the possibility of an immigration system that a vast majority of Americans would prefer, and which almost every country in the world has: One where the children of non-citizens do not automatically get citizenship.
This is obviously nuts, because I am proposing a moderate position, and that’s my main point here: There is lots of middle-ground on immigration where our politicians and journalists seem unwilling to step.
I would be open to birthright citizenship for every child of a permanent resident, and maybe most Americans would be, as well. I would propose an easy path to citizenship for children of illegal immigrants who lived here for a long time and never broke the rules. These are political questions which could be hashed out in a congressional debate.
REPUBLICANS DIVIDED ON BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP RULING
The position of my liberal critics is that it would be racist to even consider such a debate, as if I was proposing a debate over slavery.
Part of the reason Democrats lost in 2024 and a huge part of the reason Trump steamrolled the GOP establishment in 2016 is that too many of our elites refuse to tolerate any suggestion that our immigration laws are too loose. But we ought to have this debate, because part of having a democracy is giving the people a voice in who gets to join us.