If you’ve been wondering why America’s 250th feels so hollow, the Supreme Court’s June 30 ruling on birthright citizenship should provide ample clarity. If anyone, from anywhere in the world, can travel to America and give birth to an “American” citizen, then American citizenship is meaningless and based purely on the happenstance of birth.
As Justice Samuel Alito noted in his dissent, this system of “soil and servitude” was emphatically rejected by our Founders in the Declaration of Independence. Yet, the Court has once again saddled our nation with this ancient understanding, negating everything the Founders pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to reject, and resurrected a form of medieval English feudal rule.
At the center of this debate is the 14th Amendment, which was drafted to ensure that freed slaves were recognized as full citizens, given that, as Justice Clarence Thomas argues in his dissent, freed slaves “had no other homeland” and were “liable to be called upon to defend [America] in time of war.”
The Constitution’s Citizenship Clause demands that one not only be born in the United States but also be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Legal scholars who reject universal birthright citizenship under consent theory argue that full jurisdiction requires mutual political consent.
Sen. Lyman Trumbull, a principal architect of Reconstruction-era legislation, explained that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant “not owing allegiance to anybody else” and “subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States.”
To this point, Justice Thomas explained in his dissent that this jurisdictional requirement was historically understood as demanding a legal domicile, meaning a permanent home, rather than a fleeting visit to our shores by tourists, temporary foreign workers, or illegal aliens.
This conclusion stands in direct contrast to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s “universalist” vision of citizenship.
The author of the Citizenship Clause, Sen. Jacob Howard, stated during the Senate debates over the 14th Amendment that automatic birthright citizenship would not “include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.”
The Supreme Court majority’s response to Howard’s assertion is to argue over commas, insisting “foreigners” and “aliens” merely describe diplomat families. But if diplomat families are foreigners by definition, why even list foreigners and aliens separately? Should birthright citizenship truly rest on grammatical semantics?
By ignoring the plain words of the amendment’s own authors, the court’s majority has enshrined a historical lie. For decades, open-borders advocates have repeatedly told the American public that this debate was permanently settled in 1898 by the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark because this understanding benefits the left demographically and electorally.
When the children of illegal aliens and birth tourists turn 18, they are eligible to vote in our elections. When they turn 21, they unlock the power of chain migration, allowing them to sponsor their foreign parents for legal permanent residency. One only needs to look at the wave of Democratic Socialist victories in recent municipal elections, driven by rapidly shifting urban demographics, to see where this leads.
But the current understanding of Wong Kim Ark is wrong, and the dissenting opinions take direct aim at this lie. As Justice Alito thoroughly explained, the holding in Wong Kim Ark was explicitly limited to children whose non-citizen parents had established a “permanent domicil and residence” in the United States.
Because the legal category “lawful permanent resident” did not exist in 1898, Wong’s parents were considered “lawfully domiciled” in the U.S. under common law because there was no statute making their presence unlawful. Additionally, being Chinese, they could not apply for naturalization.
They had done, as Justice Alito stated, “everything within their power to express their desire and intent to become Americans.” As such, they were fully part of the national community to the extent that the law allowed at the time.
The promise of American citizenship remains a massive incentive for illegal immigration, while the subversive “birth tourism” industry will continue to profit openly from the Court’s refusal to defend the nation.
In 2023 alone, mothers who were unauthorized immigrants or held only temporary legal status accounted for an astounding 320,000 births in the United States, representing 9 percent of all U.S. births. If the restrictions of President Trump’s executive order had been properly upheld, roughly 260,000 of those children would not have qualified for automatic citizenship.
Even more alarming is the strategic weaponization of this loophole by adversarial nations such as China. As Peter Schweizer has documented in his book, The Invisible Coup, we are currently facing what he terms “civilizational warfare.”
Wealthy Chinese nationals, sometimes with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, exploit visa loopholes in U.S. territories like Saipan, turning them into tropical maternity wards.
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