Trump's call to end birthright citizenship is a necessary corrective
Former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump pledged to end birthright citizenship in a recent campaign announcement, promising to sign an executive order on his first day in office to prevent “the future children of illegal aliens” from receiving automatic citizenship. The proposal promises to clarify at least a century of constitutional ambiguity on the subject of American citizenship and its automatic bestowal upon anyone born on the soil of the nation. Immigration has emerged as the most important domestic issue in the 2024 election cycle, with estimates of upwards of ten million illegal aliens flooding the country under the Biden regime. The magnitude of the ongoing crisis far surpasses the number of illegal border crossings in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, when then-candidate Trump first proposed the idea in response to a crisis whose scale was itself unprecedented for the time. Nearly a decade later, the problem has only worsened. The need for dramatic action—even more than in Trump’s first term—is palpable.
The idea that the Fourteenth Amendment does not license birthright citizenship based on its proper, constitutional interpretation Fhas found support from both legal scholars and political historians...
The undesirable and unsustainable practical consequences of birthright citizenship flow from an absurd principle. The prevailing doctrine declares that foreigners have a right to become American just by having a pulse, that citizenship is an entitlement rather than a privilege of those already belonging to the political community. But to argue this is to negate the right of the people to political independence. What could be more perverse than to reward those who trespass America’s borders by welcoming their descendants with the privilege of citizenship, and all the entitlements attached to it? A sane country does not confer citizenship on just anyone who sets one dry foot on its territory....
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Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, and the 14th Amendment