OPINION:
Can any serious legal scholar, much less a Supreme Court justice, argue with a straight face that the authors of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution intended for almost anyone born on U.S. soil to automatically enjoy American citizenship, regardless of the circumstances of their birth here?
That is at issue in a fraught case involving so-called birthright citizenship pending before the Supreme Court. The justices are expected to rule on the matter in Trump v. Barbara within days, deciding what is arguably the most consequential case of the court’s 2025-2026 term.
When the 14th Amendment was ratified in July 1868, it was clearly intended to grant citizenship to emancipated Black people and their children.
The amendment was made necessary a decade earlier by one of the most egregious Supreme Court decisions in American history, 1857’s Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that enslaved people were not citizens of the United States and that they could not, as a consequence, expect any protection from the federal government — or the courts.
The relevant portion of the 14th Amendment reads: “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.”
The authors of the 14th Amendment could not have foreseen — much less sanctioned — today’s scale of illegal immigration. Under the Biden administration, the southern border was effectively thrown wide open, allowing millions of noncitizens into the country.
If the Supreme Court rules against President Trump in his administration’s bid to curb birthright citizenship — as it stands now, with hardly any restrictions — all children born to those millions of illegal immigrants will automatically be citizens.
That is akin to agreeing to allow shoplifters to legally keep whatever merchandise they can smuggle out of a store’s doors.
Rewarding the children of illegal immigrants with birthright citizenship also makes it far more complicated, as a legal matter, to deport the parents of these “anchor babies.”
That, in no small part, is why Democrats, the American Civil Liberties Union and open-borders groups support the current interpretation of birthright citizenship, which also facilitates chain migration — the process for bringing in members of the extended families of illegal immigrants, including brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins and grandparents.
More recently, and just as ominously for U.S. national sovereignty, birthright citizenship has spawned the insidious practice of “birth tourism,” in which organizations have sprung up to enable pregnant women from foreign countries to travel to the U.S. on tourist visas expressly to give birth here — knowing their offspring will automatically be granted citizenship.
Despite legal crackdowns, a lucrative multimillion-dollar network of “maternity hotels” and facilitators has emerged, catering to pregnant foreign women by arranging visas, housing and medical care, most notably in California. Packages range from $20,000 to $80,000 and cover travel costs, hospital charges and other expenses.
Among the foreign nationals exploiting birth tourism in the U.S. are those from hostile countries, notably China and Russia.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued April 1 on behalf of the Trump administration before the Supreme Court that birthright citizenship “has spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism as uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades, creating a whole generation of American citizens abroad with no meaningful ties to the United States.”
Although those children most often return with their mothers to the mother’s home country, birthright citizenship enables the offspring to secure public benefits in adulthood, such as access to higher education, jobs and (most important for Democrats) voting rights.
All this is what the Supreme Court would be endorsing if a majority rules, unwisely, against the Trump administration and in favor of the current misbegotten interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
Most European and Asian nations do not grant birthright citizenship. Neither should we.
Just as the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 rightly, if belatedly, overruled its shameful 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” racial segregation decision, it is long past time for the high court to overturn long-standing precedent on birthright citizenship.
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