Birthright Citizenship Is A Pernicious Lie That’s Destroying America

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 14th 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 14the 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 illegal immigrants, or those here on a temporary basis, were not American citizens. That’s what the drafters of the 14^th Amendment said at the time and that’s how the Supreme Court understood it when ruling on 14^th Amendment-related cases in the decades following ratification.

On that point, actually, we’re going to be hearing a lot in the coming weeks and months about an 1898 Supreme Court case called United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Proponents of birthright citizenship point to this case as proof that the 14^thAmendment does indeed confer birthright citizenship, but they’re wrong. Wong Kim Ark involved a child born to parents who were lawfully present and permanently domiciled in the United States, not to illegal immigrants or temporary residents.

(Indeed, the Supreme Court has never held that children of illegal immigrants are entitled to citizenship simply because they were born in the United States. Maybe a majority of justices will rule that way if the cases challenging Trump’s executive order make it to the Supreme Court, but if so it will mean a break with previous court rulings.)

But beyond the legal arguments there is a pressing moral argument about citizenship and nationhood that lies at the heart of our current debates about the 14^th Amendment and birthright citizenship. The moral argument engages a different and arguably more important set of questions. What is an American? Who is America for? What is the purpose of immigration? What do immigrants or would-be immigrants owe to the native-born population?

For a long time, conservatives didn’t want to talk about these things because doing so risked being labeled a xenophobe or a racist. It was easier to take refuge in platitudes about how we should crack down on illegal immigration but expand legal immigration, as if we were all agreed that mass immigration was a net positive, we just need to make sure it’s orderly. It was easier to affirm the conventional wisdom that America was a “propositional nation,” an idea, and that anyone could be an American if they adopted our idea.

This was a mistake, and not just because it’s a lie. This way of thinking and speaking prevented us from getting beyond the platitudes and coming to terms with some hard truths, like the fact that America is not in fact a merely propositional country. Contrary to what has been drilled into most of us since grade school, not everyone can really become an American. Being an American means more than simply assenting to live by our laws and paying taxes, because America is more than an idea. (As others have noted, if America is just an idea we can write it down and send it overseas, and foreigners need not come here at all.)

Simply put, America is a nation. We have a common language and a shared history. We have a certain way of life and customs. We have a distinctly American identity. Our system of government is founded explicitly on Christian claims about God and man. For most of our history, Christian morality has been the basis of our civic life. We are bound together by family ties, by our connections to the land, by shared experience, by what Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address called the “mystic chords of memory.”

Every foreigner who comes here understands what this means as it applies to their own homeland. It has been a grave error that we have insisted for so long that none of it applies to us. Making a case against birthright citizenship will mean making a case against the pernicious ideology of multiculturalism, which we have been taught makes us strong but in reality makes us weaker and poorer.

It will also mean asserting that it’s not actually the case that someone whose parents emigrated to America from a foreign country, and whose family has only been here a single generation, is “just as American” as someone who traces their ancestry to the American Revolution. It will mean admitting that America would be much better off not only with zero illegal immigration but with only a very low level of legal immigration, which would help preserve our cultural and community cohesion, and encourage the complete assimilation of all newcomers.

We have to get comfortable saying these things and defending them. Yes, the legal and constitutional arguments against birthright citizenship are very strong, and they might in the end win the day. But regardless of the outcome of the legal battle over the 14^th Amendment, we have to insist, without apology, on a fuller understanding of the American nation and the American people. An American is not just someone who happens to be born here. For a foreign national to become an American, he has to thoroughly adopt our culture, language, and way of life — and resolve to pass all of those habits and customs onto his posterity, here in his adopted homeland. Nothing less than his complete allegiance and complete assimilation will do.

Why do I say this? Because America itself is first and foremost for native-born Americans. It’s the only homeland we will ever have or ever can have. As such, our immigration policy should exist solely to benefit us, the American people. Indeed, because the only legitimate purpose of immigration is to create new Americans, our immigration regime should be narrowly tailored to serve the interests of our people. Businesses, especially multinational corporations, should have no say in it whatsoever, nor should legal resident noncitizens or family members of immigrants, whether legal or illegal.

All of these arguments are not really about immigration policy, but about what a nation is and how to preserve it. They are also not economic arguments. We hear often these days about how mass immigration will increase the GDP, or how we need illegal immigrants to pick our vegetables, or how mass deportations will drive up the cost of groceries (Democrat politicians have been saying such things all week).

All of that misses the point, though. What good is a higher national GDP if it means native-born Americans are poorer and worse off? What good are more jobs in aggregate if they come at the cost of social and cultural cohesion? How does it help working-class Americans to force them to compete for wages against foreigners? 

A nation is more than GDP, more than an unemployment rate. For too long we have focused on those kinds of metrics instead of looking at what will best preserve the unique character of our nation, what will perpetuate our way of life for posterity, and what will secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for our people. Whatever happens with birthright citizenship, we had better start thinking about those things, and defending them, before it’s too late.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.