Birthright Citizenship Is A Pernicious Lie That’s Destroying America

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Posted on 01/24/2025 2:42:49 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum

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 14^th 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 14^th Amendment somehow mandates this suicidal policy.

I’m not going to do a deep dive into the legal arguments for why the 14^th 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 20^th century, amid massive upheavals in American life, that the notion of “birthright citizenship” was adopted — over and against how we had understood the 14^th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause since it was adopted in 1868. 

Briefly, the legal argument is this: to acquire citizenship, the 14^th 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...

(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...

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