Trump Is Right About Birthright Citizenship: Trump isn’t Rewriting the 14th Amendment; He’s Applying the Law as It Is, Based On Its Plain language and the Supreme Court’s existing precedent; Birthright Citizenship Is A Pernicious Lie That’s Destroying America

Trump Is Right About Birthright Citizenship:

Trump isn’t rewriting the 14th Amendment; he’s applying the law as it is, based on its plain language and the Supreme Court’s existing precedent.

If you were wondering how long it would take for Democrats to sue the Trump administration, we have an answer. With the ink barely dry, eighteen Democrat state attorneys general, four additional Democrat state AGs, and a collection of outside groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union all filed federal lawsuits over President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. Their argument, that the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship for practically anyone born here, is flatly wrong as a matter of law. The courts should use this opportunity to get it right.

The 14th Amendment — ratified after the Civil War and ensuring that former slaves were U.S. citizens — provides that “[a]ll 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.” The plaintiffs focus on the first part, but barely glance at the second, arguing that, with few exceptions (such as the children of foreign diplomats in the United States), anyone born in the United States is “subject to its jurisdiction,” simply by virtue of being within its borders.

They do this by relying almost entirely on United States v. Wong Kim Ark, an 1898 U.S. Supreme Court opinion that the plaintiffs get hopelessly wrong. In Wong, the court held that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants was a U.S. citizen under the 14th Amendment. Omitting some key facts, the plaintiffs argue this means that all children born in the United States of all immigrant parents, with the aforementioned very rare exceptions, automatically are U.S. citizens. Even a cursory read of the opinion, however, shows that the Supreme Court ruled nothing of the sort.

Wong was born in California and lived his entire life in the United States, until he took two trips to China to visit family as an adult. The first time he returned to the United States, he was admitted through customs as a U.S. citizen. A few years later, after visiting China a second time, he was denied reentry after a customs official concluded that he was not a citizen, because his parents were not U.S. citizens when he was born here.

SCOTUS sided with Wong, but for a very important reason the plaintiffs fail to mention: Wong’s parents were legal immigrants to the United States. The entire foundation of the plaintiffs’ argument — that SCOTUS has already upheld birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants by this decision — is therefore completely and obviously wrong. —>READ MORE HERE

Birthright Citizenship Is A Pernicious Lie That’s Destroying America

Beyond the legal arguments about the 14th Amendment is the moral argument: who is America for, and what makes someone an American?

On his first day in office, President Trump did the country a great service by issuing an executive order rejecting birthright citizenship as a requirement of the 14th Amendment.

Whether Trump’s order will withstand the legal challenges remains to be seen (a federal judge in Seattle temporarily blocked the order on Thursday). But the challenges themselves will force a reckoning on this issue, perhaps even at the Supreme Court.

Such a reckoning is overdue. For far too long we have accepted without question the outlandish idea that every single person born on U.S. soil automatically becomes an American citizen, and that the 14th Amendment somehow mandates this suicidal policy.

I’m not going to do a deep dive into the legal arguments for why the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause doesn’t grant automatic citizenship to everyone born on U.S. soil (for that, see here, here, here, here, here, and here). Suffice to say, it wasn’t until about the middle of the 20th century, amid massive upheavals in American life, that the notion of “birthright citizenship” was adopted — over and against how we had understood the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause since it was adopted in 1868.

Briefly, the legal argument is this: to acquire citizenship, the 14th Amendment requires a person to be born in the United States and be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which means you owe your total allegiance to the United States alone and not some foreign power. In other words, the children of illegal immigrants, or those here on a temporary basis, were not American citizens. That’s what the drafters of the 14th Amendment said at the time and that’s how the Supreme Court understood it when ruling on 14th Amendment-related cases in the decades following ratification.

On that point, actually, we’re going to be hearing a lot in the coming weeks and months about an 1898 Supreme Court case called United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Proponents of birthright citizenship point to this case as proof that the 14thAmendment does indeed confer birthright citizenship, but they’re wrong. Wong Kim Ark involved a child born to parents who were lawfully present and permanently domiciled in the United States, not to illegal immigrants or temporary residents.

(Indeed, the Supreme Court has never held that children of illegal immigrants are entitled to citizenship simply because they were born in the United States. Maybe a majority of justices will rule that way if the cases challenging Trump’s executive order make it to the Supreme Court, but if so it will mean a break with previous court rulings.)

But beyond the legal arguments there is a pressing moral argument about citizenship and nationhood that lies at the heart of our current debates about the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship. The moral argument engages a different and arguably more important set of questions. What is an American? Who is America for? What is the purpose of immigration? What do immigrants or would-be immigrants owe to the native-born population?

For a long time, conservatives didn’t want to talk about these things because doing so risked being labeled a xenophobe or a racist. It was easier to take refuge in platitudes about how we should crack down on illegal immigration but expand legal immigration, as if we were all agreed that mass immigration was a net positive, we just need to make sure it’s orderly. It was easier to affirm the conventional wisdom that America was a “propositional nation,” an idea, and that anyone could be an American if they adopted our idea. —>READ MORE HERE

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