America cannot survive unlimited birthright citizenship
The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment was never intended to reward transient foreigners,
diplomats, or invaders who enter without consent.
The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment was never intended to reward transient foreigners, diplomats, or invaders who enter without consent.
www.americanthinker.com
15 Apr 2026 ~~ By Brian Lonergan
As the Supreme Court weighs challenges to President Trump’s executive order limiting automatic citizenship for children of illegal aliens and temporary visa holders, America stands at a constitutional crossroads. If sanity and common sense prevail, the justices will recognize what generations of anti-borders advocates have obscured: birthright citizenship, as currently practiced, was never meant to be a global entitlement.
The 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause was a surgical remedy for the unique injustice inflicted on freed black slaves and their descendants — not a blank check for the world’s opportunists. Unless the Court restores its original meaning, this misapplied policy will accelerate the erosion of everything that makes America worth defending.
The historical record is unambiguous. Ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment’s first sentence — “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens” — was drafted to overturn the Supreme Court’s odious
Dred Scott decision, which had declared Black Americans non-citizens.
The clause was drafted to protect a specific group fully subject to American sovereignty — freed slaves who had lived their entire lives under the Constitution’s authority, owed it allegiance, and possessed no competing loyalties to other countries. It was never intended to reward transient foreigners, diplomats, or invaders who enter without consent. The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was the escape hatch precisely to exclude those whose primary allegiance lay elsewhere.
~Snip~
Modern
birth tourism and illegal alien births represent a grotesque perversion of that narrow precedent. Wealthy Chinese, Russian, and Middle Eastern elites pay up to $50,000 for “maternity hotel” packages that include apartments, private doctors, and airport shuttles. Their American-born infants receive passports they treat as luxury accessories, while the parents return home to enjoy the strategic option of future U.S. sponsorship, education subsidies, and welfare access.
This exploitation is a moral insult to the legacy of freed slaves. The 14th Amendment was purchased with the blood of 360,000 Union dead and the sweat of four million emancipated Americans who had been denied every right of citizenship under
Dred Scott. Their descendants fought for generations to make that promise real — through Jim Crow, lynchings, and civil rights marches.
~Snip~
Most dangerously, birthright citizenship erodes American exceptionalism itself. The United States has always defined citizenship by consent and allegiance, not blood or soil alone. We are a propositional nation whose strength rests on the rule of law, individual liberty, and the deliberate choice to fully participate in American society. Granting citizenship automatically to the offspring of those who reject that choice — illegal entrants or short-term visitors — turns sovereignty into a birthright for foreigners and renders citizenship meaningless.
The Supreme Court now has the chance — and the duty — to correct a century of misinterpretation. Overturning the expansive reading of birthright citizenship is not radical. It honors the freed slaves whose struggle birthed the clause, halts the birth-tourism scam that insults their memory, and reasserts that American citizenship is a privilege of the sovereign people. Failure to act will not preserve some abstract ideal of openness. It will speed the transformation of the last best hope of earth into just another crowded, factionalized, overburdened state that is culturally unrecognizable and fiscally bankrupt. In other words, no longer exceptional. We owe future generations more than that.
Commentary:
President Trump's Executive Order 14160 Is Constitutional and Legal and it restores the meaning of the 14th Amendment. Illegal Immigrants are not U.S. Citizens, their children are not U.S. Citizens.
The word "Birthright Citizenship" is not in the Constitution. and was never implied
If we don’t accept “Illegal Immigrants are not U.S. citizens, their children are not U.S. citizens”, then let's abolish the U.S. Borders. Open the U.S. Borders welcoming everybody regardless of culture, ethnic, religion, politics, ideology, income.
Biden and his criminal appointee Alejandro Mayorkas attempted to impose upon America by opening our borders.
Regretfully, the Roberts led SCOTUS will defer to Congress to rectify this aberration because they have no common sense. They focus so narrowly on precedence and not on original intent that they are basically stupid. Congress is so dysfunctional and with Democrats in favor of birthright, we are doomed! The next generation of Chinese birthrights will be enough to change an election for POTUS!
"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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
"Bona fide citizen: A U.S. citizen who meets the IRS’s bona fide residence test for a foreign country.
imprimis.hillsdale.edu
