The Other Case for Birthright Citizenship

Supreme Court during oral argument this April in the birthright-citizenship case Trump v. Barbara, “where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.” Chief Justice John Roberts quickly shot him down, replying, “Well, it’s a new world,” but it’s “the same Constitution.”Roberts’s quip foreshadowed his opinion on behalf of the Court holding that near-universal birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the text of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause. His opinion is a meticulous rendition of U.S. history up to the 1868 ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, drawing on abundant evidence that the citizenship clause was intended to apply to nearly everyone born in the United States. The decision was a major defeat for one of President Trump’s signature policy initiatives. Notably absent from Roberts’s opinion, however, was any discussion of whether birthright citizenship is a good idea in 21st-century America.And that’s a pity, because birthright citizenship brings many practical benefits to the United States today—arguments that the nation needs to hear, given the campaign being mounted against it. By contrast, the three dissenting justices did not hold back, devoting many pages to claims that birthright citizenship is destructive and even dangerous in our modern, mobile world—assertions that are almost entirely unsupported and yet that went unrefuted. Defenders of birthright citizenship have made strong legal arguments in its favor; they need to start making the policy case for it as well.It’s an easy case to make. The children of immigrants are about 10 percent of the total U.S. population. They power the U.S. economy and serve in significant numbers in the government and the military. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants and their children, more than 10 percent of the current members of Congress are children of immigrants,