“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.”
Those are the first 28 words of the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, essentially bestowing what is known as birthright citizenship on anyone who is born when his or her mother is inside the borders of the United States.
I’m like a lot of people in that I always interpreted that sentence literally.
You’re born here? You’re an American.
Even if I had never thought about it one way or the other, if you told me Donald Trump was opposed to birthright citizenship, I would be strongly inclined to be for it. In fact, I have a grandchild who has birthright citizenship in a country other than the United States.
When my youngest grandchild Albanie was borh in October 2014, her mother was serving a three-year term as a Foreign Service officer at the embassy in Kingston, Jamaica. Jamaica has birthright citizenship, but being born there made Albanie part of a tiny minority.
Jamaica’s population is 99 percent black.
I actually have another grandchild born outside the U.S. Artemis is our first granddaughter, and she was born in September 2008 in Beijing, but the People’s Republic of China does not have birthright citizenship.
Our own birthright citizenship dates back to the years right after the Civil War and was primarily intended to address the question of African Americans who had been slaves.
It deemed necessary because of Dred Scott v Sandford, the 1857 case that is almost universally regarded as the most disgraceful Supreme Court decision ever. In a 7-2 decision, the court ruled that African-Americans, slave or free, were never intended to be citizens and thus had none of the rights of citizens.
The 14th Amendment was intended primarily to negate Dred Scott and to guarantee freed slaves and other African Americans would have all the rights of citizens.
I kind of doubt much of anything else was considered at the time. If someone came into the country illegally but wanted to work hard and get ahead, more power to him. But sneak across the border and have a baby? Why would anyone do that?
Of course times change. In the 1860s, most of the people coming to North America were European and there was a lot of western land to be stolen from Native Americans. The immigrants might have been of many ethnic varieties, but at least most of them were white.
Where it started getting complicated was when Chinese workers were recruited to build the western part of the transcontinental. For all the times Americans described the country as a melting pot, what they really meant was a melting pot of white people from different cultures.
Japanese immigrants in the 20th century were treated atrociously both before and during World War II. And all of them were here legally. The fact is, just about any immigrants who weren’t white were treated like crap.
But that isn’t the point. We aren’t talking about immigrants, tourist or visitors. It might be that Trump would like to bar all those cases too, but it seems reasonable to say that if a woman is in the United States illegally gives birth to a baby, that baby should not automatically be an American citizen.
Certainly worth considering, even if it does mean Trump is right.