Trump Threatens Birthright Citizenship
HE’S BACK! And this time Donald Trump will have a compliant Congress and a whole roster of willing Cabinet ministers. The first thing he promises to do — after upending international trade with tariffs — is to deport millions of immigrants. If this did not promise to be both tragic and harmful to the economy, I would feel like making a big bowl of popcorn, pulling up a chair and watching the whole thing crash.
There is no question that we need to get control of our borders and reform our immigration system. If we purport to be a country of laws, then our immigration laws need to be enforceable. While I don’t subscribe to Trump’s racist and xenophobic reasons for deporting people, orderly immigration is an important goal. But equally so are the need to buttress our dwindling working age population and our national responsibility to behave with grace and compassion.
Listening to interviews of people who cross our borders illegally at great peril to themselves, one is struck by the ordinariness of their motivation. They just want to live more prosperous, secure lives. I’ll wager that any of our ancestors who came here voluntarily had the same motivation.
Birthright citizenship is the legal principle that if a child is born in the United States, she is a citizen of this country regardless of the citizenship or immigration status of her parents. More than thirty countries, including Canada and Mexico, recognize birthright citizenship. Others in Western Europe do not. They require at least one parent of the child to be a citizen.
Trump says birthright citizenship is a magnet for illegal immigration and wants to eliminate it. He has threatened to use an executive order to do so once he assumes office. There is one problem. Birthright citizenship is not a government policy that can be changed with a counter policy, or even a law Congress can repeal or modify. The Constitution itself establishes this type of citizenship.
After the Civil War, the United States ratified several constitutional amendments designed to clarify the status of formerly enslaved people. Among these was the Fourteenth Amendment, which states “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” This is clear enough. The only possible ambiguity relates to the second clause regarding being subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
Far right immigration opponents like John Eastman have urged Trump to declare by executive order that children born to illegal immigrants are not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States because they are not lawfully here and still theoretically owe allegiance to a foreign sovereign. Recall that Eastman, the criminally indicted and disbarred lawyer, was the one who came up with the theory that Mike Pence could simply refuse to certify the results of the 2020 election.
Of course, no established precedent or once-secure right seems safe with the current Supreme Court. But in the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, decided in 1898, the Court established that the Fourteenth Amendment creates birthright citizenship even for the children of non-citizen residents. The case arose while federal Chinese exclusion legislation was in force. The government argued that Wong Kim Ark, although born in San Francisco, was the child of two Chinese non-citizen parents who were subjects of the Chinese emperor making him also a subject of the emperor. He was thus not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, or so the argument went.
But the Supreme Court wasn’t buying this argument. It ruled, with two exceptions not relevant to today’s immigration debate, that anyone born within the territorial boundaries of the United States and residing here was “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” The jurisdiction of a country within its territorial boundaries is complete. It would certainly seem correct that our “jurisdiction” applies to children born to illegal aliens — they are required to pay our taxes and are subject to criminal penalty for failure to comply with our laws like the rest of us.
It is hard to imagine West Virginians with serious concern about the practical effect of immigration on their lives, lawful or unlawful. In 2023, there were 32,309 foreign-born people in West Virginia, which is about 1.8% of the state’s population. This is lower than the national average of 14.3%. As a recent article in The Wall Street Journal put it, “there is little evidence that many recent immigrants – either those who entered legally or those who didn’t – have any inclination to go to West Virginia, the only state with fewer residents than it had in 1940.”
The same article pointed out that West Virginia has one of the two lowest labor-force participation rates in the country, while having the second highest rate of job openings and the fourth-highest rate of vacant housing. In other states eldercare is provided disproportionately by immigrants. And the National Association of Home Builders reports that while our native-born workers remain reluctant to join the industry, one in three craftsmen in the construction trades come from outside the U.S. Don’t we need more workers to care for our elderly and build our homes?
Other states with workforce problems like West Virginia’s and an aging population are trying to recruit immigrants. Maine’s government has a dedicated office to welcome and support immigrants. Utah has extended in-state college tuition to refugees, asylum seekers and other migrant groups.
But reason and good public policy don’t seem to matter as much these days as the appeal to emotion. The Trump juggernaut is set to roll. It’s just that when it comes to West Virginia, don’t count on good things happening from the President-elect’s attack on immigration and birthright citizenship.
