Vox explains 'Why the US has birthright citizenship'

Today's evergreen entry worth sharing in April features Vox explaining Why the US has birthright citizenship.

Americans don’t agree on whether being born here should make you a citizen. That’s not new.
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On the first day of Donald Trump’s second presidential term, he signed an executive order about an old American rule: that with very few exceptions, anyone born here is a citizen. Trump’s order stated that the rule, which comes from the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, should no longer apply to the children of those in the United States illegally or temporarily. Within a few weeks that order had been blocked by multiple federal judges — but it was a temporary resolution, with the ultimate outcome yet to be determined, probably by the Supreme Court.

The US is far from the only country in the world that offers unconditional birthright citizenship. While it’s uncommon in Europe, Asia, and Africa, it’s very common among Western Hemisphere countries, partly because of their history as colonies populated mostly by settlers. But of the many countries with birthright citizenship in the world, the US is by far the largest, with hundreds of thousands of baby citizens born here every year to noncitizen parents. Those numbers naturally raise the question: Is this what birthright citizenship was meant for? And why do we have birthright citizenship in the first place?

The short answer is that birthright citizenship in the US came about as a way of granting citizenship after the American Civil War to the large population of formerly enslaved Black people. But that raises a different question: How did a law intended for Black Americans end up creating hundreds of thousands of new US citizens born to immigrant parents every year? In this video we trace that history, answer that question, and look at a few of the times that the US has actually had this argument before. Today’s concerns over birthright citizenship may feel specific to our particular immigration debate. They’re actually not.

As Vox points out, this is an old debate, one that goes back to the adoption of the 14th Amendment and it always turns out the same way; people born here, other than children of diplomats, residents of American Samoa, and formerly Native Americans — I don't know if we've ever had children of enemy aliens occupying American soil other than Japanese in the Philippines, and I don't know if the Filipinos were American citizens back then — are citizens.* Just the same, that didn't stop The Heritage Foundation from proposing ending birthright citizenship in Project 2025. Here's the list of proposed actions from that document Digby embedded in Incomplete Cheat Sheet. "End birth right citizenship" is fourth from the bottom.


Look at the list and notice how many of these Hoover Cleveland is already trying to enact. It's not as if people like Digby and me didn't do our best to warn Americans!

Enough serious business. Stay tuned for Purim and Holi, kicking off a string of holidays.

*Residents of American Samoa are American nationals, but not citizens; they do not automatically become full U.S. citizens when moving to the U.S. like residents of Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories.