“Birthright citizenship” may sound benign, but thanks to an overreaching Supreme Court decision 126 years ago, it’s the biggest legal hole in our border.
President-elect Donald Trump has the opportunity to seal it, but it won’t be easy.
When the Supreme Court handed down its United States v. Wong Kim Ark decision, illegal immigration was nothing like the crisis it is now.
And the subject of that case, Wong Kim Ark, was the son of legal immigrants—permanent residents, in fact.
But in the 21st century, liberal legal experts insist the court’s 1898 ruling today means any child born on American soil is automatically a citizen.
Convicts fleeing across our borders?
Tren de Aragua killers?
Terrorists sneaking into the country?
Their kids all become Americans if they’re born on our soil.
It’s an outrageous, absurd situation, and Trump has vowed to stop it.
He renewed that vow on “Meet the Press” Sunday. “We’re going to end that because it’s ridiculous,” he told host Kristen Welker.
Birthright citizenship at present is so ridiculous it even gives children of illegal immigrants rights that naturalized citizens—and some Americans born to citizen parents—don’t have.
For example, it allows them to be elected president.
“No Person except a natural born Citizen” can hold that office, according to the Constitution.
That excludes everyone who’s come from another country and explicitly pledged his or her loyalty to this country, and it even excludes children of American citizens who are born outside the United States or its territories.
But according to the crackpot interpretation of birthright citizenship progressives have pressed into service in our day, the children of illegal aliens with no loyalty to this country—or worse, actual hostility to this country—are “natural born citizens.”
If Mohamed Atta or another 9/11 hijacker had a son while in this country, that boy would have top-tier U.S. citizenship.
Foreign elites routinely take advantage of this loophole to acquire all the rights, privileges, and immunities of being American for their offspring.
All an official of, say, Communist China has to do is fly his pregnant wife to the United States and have her give birth here.
A “birth tourism” industry caters to this scam in China and elsewhere.
It shows the dangers of birthright citizenship are about more than just illegal immigration: Holders of valid tourist visas, who don’t have any intention of becoming Americans, can arrive pregnant and depart with a newly minted U.S. citizen added to the family.
It’s a threat to national security and sovereignty itself.
So what can Trump do about it?
His advisers are crafting language for an executive order to be implemented his first day back in office.
But the weakest version of such an order would only curtail birth tourism by restricting visas for travel to the states—which wouldn’t do a thing about illegal immigrants who take advantage of birthright citizenship.
Trump said on the campaign trail he wants to issue an order that restricts automatic citizenship to people with at least one parent who’s already a citizen or legal permanent resident—a test Wong Kim Ark, who set the Supreme Court’s precedent, would have passed.
But does that mean the justices today will uphold the president’s action?
The policy’s supporters don’t take it for granted.
Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, for one, tells The Wall Street Journal, “I think they’ll probably uphold the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment,” yet he still wants the administration to make the effort.
After all, it’s not as if the justices can hand down a ruling any more absurd than what Wong Kim Ark means now.
The dissenting justices 126 years ago looked to the Civil Rights Act of 1866—passed just two months before Congress took up the 14th Amendment—to explain what the amendment meant by “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States …” (emphasis added).
Pointing to the statute’s language, they argued that “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” meant, among other things, “not subject to any foreign power.”
That was how Congress viewed birthright citizenship then—and it’s a commonsense interpretation that would exclude illegal aliens and birth tourists today.
Trump is trying to restore us to the understanding of citizenship held by the framers of the amendment that guaranteed equal protection for all Americans.
Yet progressives say nothing less than another amendment can change the present policy, which awards citizenship even to the offspring of foreign criminals, so long as they’re born here.
It’s a battle Trump must fight, all the way to the Supreme Court, and America can’t afford to lose.
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