Whose Country Is It?
8th June 2023
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 has found support from both legal scholars and political historians. The text of the amendment itself 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.” Of controversy is whether the phrase “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” should be read in conjunction with—“and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” As scholars John Eastman and Michael Anton, as well as others, have persuasively argued, the plain meaning of the text itself requires that both elements of that constructive phrase be satisfied in order to qualify for the fruits of citizenship. In other words, a person must not only be born “in the United States”—i.e., the geographical region over which the laws of the United States apply—but also be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” To fully qualify for citizenship, a person born within the United States must owe no allegiance to any other sovereign—he or she must, in other words, exclusively qualify under the laws of the United States alone.