On Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional Executive Order aimed at curbing birthright citizenship.
“At issue in this case is whether the Constitution guarantees citizenship to children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States,” begins the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts.
The key portion of the Constitution is this brief line from the 14th Amendment: “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.”
While President Trump sought to argue that illegal immigrants and legal foreign visitors are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore their children born in the United States are not citizens, that’s clearly false even on a plain reading of the text of the Constitution.
“Jurisdiction” was not an unknown word or concept at the time of the 14th Amendment’s drafting and ratification, as noted by the majority opinion. “The Citizenship Clause uses jurisdiction in its ordinary sense — referring to the power of the United States to govern those within its territory.”
Because unauthorized immigrants and authorized visitors alike must obey American laws, they are undeniably subject to U.S. jurisdiction — and by extension, so are their children.
“Those children are thus subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” the court ruled. “They satisfy both elements of the Citizenship Clause: they are ‘born … in the United States’ and ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth.”
If this sounds obvious, that’s because it always has been.
The language of the Constitution has been perfectly clear and no amount of frustration about American-born children to people from abroad will change that reality.
“The constitutional foundations of birthright citizenship have been locked in concrete for more than a century: the plain language of the Constitution, the public statements of the Reconstruction Amendments’ architects, and the on-point precedent made the outcome of Trump v. Barbara quite predictable,” commented Dan Greenberg of the Cato Institute.
With the court’s ruling in Trump v. Barbara, Americans of good faith should consider this matter settled and move on to more productive uses of their energies.