The Attack on Birthright Citizenship

THE ATTACK ON BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

Presidential candidates DeSantis, Haley, Ramaswamy and Trump all reject the concept of birthright citizenship embodied in the 14 th Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1868: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.”

The 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War, was meant to overturn the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision that said Black people, slave or free, could not be US citizens. The postwar Congress decided that US citizenship must be explicitly defined and in the widest and most inclusive manner possible. The citizenship clause was upheld in the 1898 Supreme Court decision in US v. Wong Kim Ark. This case involved a Chinese man born in the US who was excluded from the US under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 after visiting China: he took the case to court and won, due to the concept of birthright citizenship.

Without birthright citizenship the US would be creating a whole class of second-tier residents with few legal rights and subject to exploitation. We cannot allow a few politicians to take away our fundamental rights. 

Sources: The Washington Post, 3/28/23, The Guardian, 5/31/23, and Mother Jones, 7/26/23