As usual, Riley is spot on.
Trump’s Misguided Attack on Birthright Citizenship
He almost certainly lacks the power to end it, and doing so would swell the illegal population.
By Jason L. Riley, WSJ
Dec. 10, 2024 5:28 pm ET
In an interview with NBC News that aired Sunday, Donald Trump said he wanted to work with Democrats in Congress to “do something” about the legal limbo of so-called Dreamers, the name given to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and have lived most of their lives here.
“Republicans are very open to the Dreamers,” Mr. Trump said. “Many years ago, they were brought into this country. . . . Some of them are no longer young people. And in many cases, they’ve become successful. They have great jobs. In some cases, they have small businesses. Some cases they might have large businesses.” The president-elect said that he wants them to stay here. “I want to be able to work something out, and . . . I think we can work with the Democrats and work something out.”
It isn’t the first time that Mr. Trump has voiced sympathy for this blameless subset of our illegal-immigrant population, who number an estimated 600,000. During his first presidential term, he said that Dreamers “shouldn’t be very worried about being deported,” and he publicly supported putting them on a multiyear glide path to citizenship. “We’re going to morph into it—it’s going to happen,” he told reporters at the White House in 2018. “It’s a nice thing to have the incentive after a period of years, being able to become a citizen.”
Polling shows that voters of all political stripes tend to side with Mr. Trump on the issue. Even as support for lower levels of overall immigration increased as the U.S. experienced record levels of illegal border crossings during the Biden administration, most Americans continue to make an exception for the Dreamers. According to a Gallup survey from July, “Majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents support three policies: hiring more border patrol agents, allowing the executive branch to suspend asylum claims when the border is overwhelmed, and allowing immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children the chance to stay and become citizens.”
Like many supporters of the Dreamers, Mr. Trump believes that it would be unjust to make children pay for the illegal acts of their parents. He has a point, yet it’s curious that such reasoning doesn’t extend to some other aspects of his immigration agenda. In the same NBC News interview, Mr. Trump vowed to ban birthright citizenship by executive order on his first day back in office. Birthright citizenship is a principle enshrined in the 14th Amendment that grants American citizenship to almost anyone born on U.S. soil. “We’re the only country that has it, you know,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re going to end that because it’s ridiculous.”
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Mr. Trump’s insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, more than 30 other countries, including Canada and Mexico, also honor birthright citizenship. More important, it’s doubtful that the policy can be altered by executive order rather than through a constitutional amendment or act of Congress. Critics of birthright citizenship say it doesn’t apply to the children of illegal-alien parents, but that’s not explicit in the text of the amendment, which states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the state wherein they reside.”
Conservative and liberal legal scholars have argued that even before the 14th Amendment was added in 1868 to grant citizenship to former slaves, it was clear that people born here were considered citizens. Walter Dellinger, a former head of the White House Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton administration, said the framers believed that “every child born within the territory of alien parents was a natural-born subject, with the exception of children born of foreign ambassadors, of alien enemies during hostile occupation, and of aliens on a foreign vessel.” Judge James C. Ho of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, has written that birthright citizenship “is protected no less for children of undocumented persons than for descendants of Mayflower passengers.”
Mr. Trump campaigned successfully on a promise to reduce the size of the country’s illegal population, and prioritizing the removal of foreign nationals with criminal histories is popular and makes sense. But ending birthright citizenship would almost certainly be at cross-purposes with his larger goal. Children who automatically become citizens would be counted going forward as illegal, like their parents, and the size of the illegal population would swell by the millions.
There’s also a moral case for leaving birthright citizenship in place, including for the offspring of undocumented parents, and it’s similar to the case that Mr. Trump has made for accommodating the Dreamers. Why punish children for the sins of their parents?
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