Edward Erler, John Eastman, Ryan Williams, Michael Anton, and Linda Denno have made powerful constitutional cases for limiting birthright citizenship. However, it is easy to get lost in the legal minutiae and fail to see the larger stakes. Behind the birthright citizenship debate, as with all major constitutional debates, is a fundamental political question: Who should be an American citizen?
The Constitution implicitly answers this question, or at least provides the framework by which we should approach it. The Preamble speaks of securing the blessings of liberty “for ourselves and our posterity.” The future children of citizens will, of course, become citizens themselves—it is part of their inheritance and the natural means by which a regime perpetuates itself. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power “[t]o establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization.” Foreigners may also become American citizens—but only under the conditions set by current citizens through their lawmakers.
Ryan Williams has aptly pointed out that the American approach to citizenship and naturalization rests upon the principle of the consent of the governed. The Constitution itself is a social compact: “We the People” agree to form a government and live under its rule. Our posterity will inherit this constitutional arrangement and may adjust it through the amendment process. Any foreigners we invite to join our compact must do so on terms agreeable to us, that is, according to the laws we have created. Gouverneur Morris made this principle clear at the Constitutional Convention when he declared that “every Society from a great nation down to a club had the right of declaring the conditions on which new members should be admitted.”
Modern liberalism takes issue with the moral implications of the social compact. Why should the children of citizens get the privilege of American citizenship while the same privilege is denied to the children of illegal aliens? What gives us the right to exclude foreigners? As Vice President Vance clearly understands, the natural love of one’s own is good, and we should favor our own children, families, and fellow citizens over strangers.
Additionally, there are fundamental political reasons why citizenship should be generally limited to the children of citizens. Writing in response to President Jefferson’s push to reform naturalization requirements in 1801, Alexander Hamilton declared, “The safety of the republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.”
Hamilton recognized that republican government is not possible without a basic sense of civic solidarity and common agreement on the nature of justice. Birth, education, and family tie citizens to one another, and to the regime they share. Hamilton believed that the Democratic-Republican Party’s push to loosen naturalization laws was a cynical ploy to gain more votes from newly arriving French and Irish immigrants (one can guess why this little tidbit wasn’t mentioned in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical).
Other Founders, including Jefferson himself, believed that immigration and naturalization policy must be prudently crafted because of its regime-level implications.
In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson warned that mass immigration could destroy civic solidarity and open the door to ethnic factions. The United States, he explained, was unique among nations because it combined “the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason.” Emigrants from alien cultures may not understand or appreciate our peculiar type of regime. If too many unassimilated immigrants flood the nation, they will “transmit” their own “principles” and “language…to their children.” “They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.” Jefferson feared that without linguistic and cultural unity, the U.S. would lose its distinct character and forfeit its high principles for an ethnic spoils system.
Sound immigration policy also requires uniform enforcement. In his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Justice Joseph Story warned that “if aliens might be admitted indiscriminately to enjoy all the rights of citizens at the will of a single state, the Union might itself be endangered by an influx of foreigners, hostile to its institutions, ignorant of its powers, and incapable of a due estimates of its privileges.” When Story wrote of the need for uniform immigration laws in 1833, he had in mind the confusion caused by the lack of national naturalization requirements under the Articles of Confederation. He could not have imagined that an entire political party would wholeheartedly reject the enforcement of immigration laws for the sake of gaining an electoral edge.
In contrast to the clear-thinking and consent-based approach to immigration in the early republic, birthright citizenship incentivizes lawlessness and, by extension, violates the consent of the governed. Foreigners are more likely to illegally emigrate if they know that any children they beget on our soil will become American citizens. Birth tourism turns our inheritance into a commodity. No one voted for these loopholes in immigration law. Bad judicial rulings foisted them on us, which are affronts to our right to determine the qualifications for admitting new citizens. Revoking birthright citizenship is one important and economical means of disincentivizing criminal behavior.
Individual lawlessness is only one part of the problem. Birthright citizenship also provides a political incentive to eschew immigration laws. We must remember why this debate over birthright citizenship is taking place. Millions of illegal aliens have invaded the United States, aided and abetted by the Democratic Party’s failure to enforce the law.
President Trump’s executive order curbing birthright citizenship is a reaction to a decades-long conspiracy by the Left to import millions of new voters and circumvent the foundational principle of the Constitution. Consent of the governed means that the people are supposed to choose the government. But if the Left has its way, the government will choose the people by overwhelming our country with their preferred constituency.
Birthright citizenship is the means by which the Left has skirted the need to secure the consent of the governed. It is thus at odds with the very principle the Constitution is meant to enshrine.
The Democratic Party has operated under the assumption that the demographic shifts caused by mass immigration will secure their long-term electoral dominance. The legacy media openly celebrates the replacement of native citizens—and calls you a racist for noticing! Illegal aliens cannot vote, but the Democratic Party holds out hope that a future blanket amnesty will turn them into loyal electoral clients. Even without amnesty, they are still useful for the Democratic Party’s prospects. Under the birthright citizenship regime, the American-born children of illegal aliens can become a powerful voting bloc.
There is a perverse logic to the Democratic Party’s strategy. Democratic politicians know that their agenda is deeply unpopular with native-born citizens and have decided that it is easier to simply import a more pliant voting population than win over current citizens.
Immigrants vote sharply to the left of the native-born population. This has been the case for over a century. The early 20th-century immigration boom provided the backbone for FDR’s New Deal coalition and dramatically swung American politics to the left. Even socially conservative groups such as New York Italians often voted for radical politicians out of a sense of ethnic solidarity. The children of illegal aliens have even more reason to vote for left-wing politicians who promise amnesty for their parents.
Newcomers may not recognize the dangers of radical change or care for American traditions. By contrast, families that have settled in the United States for several generations are more attached to our distinct traditions, customs, habits, history, principles, and government. Their children, by virtue of birth, education, and family, are more likely to be strongly attached to the American way of life and wary of radical change.
Although the children of illegals born here are technically citizens under the birthright citizenship regime, their cultural allegiance often lies with their parents’ homeland. Their parents often pass down their cultural identity to their children, breaking the natural connection between birth, family, education, and patriotism. The children of illegal aliens thus pose a mounting political problem.
In the two weeks since President Trump took office, protests against immigration enforcement have erupted across the country. At these protests, illegal aliens and their sympathizers gleefully wave foreign flags. Protestors in Phoenix shouted, “Viva la raza! (long live the race)” as they flew Mexican flags.
Two years ago in Canyon County, Idaho—a deep red county in a deep red state—high school students walked out of class in a “Brown Pride” protest, waving Mexican flags and carrying signs with slogans such as “We refuse to lose and let our culture die” written in the colors of the Mexican flag. Canyon County voted overwhelmingly for President Trump in the last three elections, yet Latino street gangs hold more cultural cachet there than traditional symbols of American patriotism. As Jefferson feared would happen, ethnic factions have emerged that threaten the viability of republican government.
Illegal immigration and birthright citizenship also threaten the possibility of national sovereignty. The left-wing media wields the children of illegal immigrants as pawns to sow doubt about the legitimacy of deportations. Inevitably, pictures of crying children will be cynically deployed over the next several months as moral blackmail against Americans who want a sovereign nation that enforces its own laws. This problem will only grow if it is not countered by decisive immigration enforcement coupled with ending the birthright citizenship scheme.
Ending unrestricted birthright citizenship is a moderate, common-sense solution to the Left’s conspiracy against basic constitutional principles.
A majority of nations reject unrestricted birthright citizenship. Of the handful that do not, we alone face a protracted illegal immigration crisis. If President Trump’s executive order becomes law, it will bring our citizenship policies closer to the historic and global norm. It will undercut attempts to sidestep the consent of the governed and open space for the American people to seriously deliberate on what grounds foreigners should qualify for citizenship.