This could make for an interesting court case.
We need look no further than
United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
Birthright citizenship has never even been ruled on. There's never been a judgement rendered on whether the birthright citizenship clause covers the children born to undocumented immigrants.
It's only ever been assumed. Incorrectly, to be clear. It's never even been questioned in a court.
Not only that, but "subject to the jurisdiction of" does not apply to undocumented immigrants since the U.S. never authorized their entry in the first place.
So. Go to court, present that question, and there has to be a ruling. There's never been a ruling on birthright citizenship at all.
It does apply because illegals are subject to the jurisdiction of the county, city, state and country. I would suggest you look at Plyler vs Doe from 1982.
"Use of the phrase "within its jurisdiction" thus does not detract from, but rather confirms, the understanding that the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment extends to anyone, citizen or stranger, who
is subject to the laws of a State, and reaches into every corner of a State's territory. That a person's initial entry into a State, or into the United States, was unlawful, and that he may for that reason be expelled, cannot negate the simple fact of his presence within the State's territorial perimeter. Given such presence, he is subject to the full range of obligations imposed by the State's civil and criminal laws. And until he leaves the jurisdiction -- either voluntarily, or involuntarily in accordance with the Constitution and laws of the United States -- he is entitled to the equal protection of the laws that a State may choose to establish."
Plyler v. Doe
Birthright Citizenship: A Fundamental Misunderstanding of the 14th Amendment
The 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens. It says that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens. That second, critical, conditional phrase is conveniently ignored or misinterpreted by advocates of “birthright” citizenship.
Critics erroneously believe that anyone present in the United States has “subjected” himself “to the jurisdiction” of the United States, which would extend citizenship to the children of tourists, diplomats, and illegal aliens alike.
But that is not what that qualifying phrase means. Its original meaning refers to the political allegiance of an individual and the jurisdiction that a foreign government has over that individual.
The fact that a tourist or illegal alien is subject to our laws and our courts if they violate our laws does not place them within the political “jurisdiction” of the United States as that phrase was defined by the framers of the 14th Amendment.
This amendment’s language was derived from the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which provided that “[a]ll persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power” would be considered citizens.
Sen. Lyman Trumbull, a key figure in the adoption of the 14th Amendment, said that “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. included not owing allegiance to any other country.
As John Eastman, former dean of the Chapman School of Law, has said, many do not seem to understand “the distinction between partial, territorial jurisdiction, which subjects all who are present within the territory of a sovereign to the jurisdiction of that sovereign’s laws, and complete political jurisdiction, which requires allegiance to the sovereign as well.”
In the famous Slaughter-House cases of 1872, the Supreme Court stated that this qualifying phrase was intended to exclude “children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.” This was confirmed in 1884 in another case, Elk vs. Wilkins, when citizenship was denied to an American Indian because he “owed immediate allegiance to” his tribe and not the United States.
American Indians and their children did not become citizens until Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. There would have been no need to pass such legislation if the 14th Amendment extended citizenship to every person born in America, no matter what the circumstances of their birth, and no matter who their parents are.
Even in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 case most often cited by “birthright” supporters due to its overbroad language, the court only held that a child born of lawful, permanent residents was a U.S. citizen. That is a far cry from saying that a child born of individuals who are here illegally must be considered a U.S. citizen.
You are so much bullshit. The Amendment is in plain English. It doesn't matter what they think it was for. A plain reading of it confirms the conventional wisdom.
"This is not a definition of allegiance to the sovereign within one’s jurisdiction that depends on having been legally admitted to the country. Which is not surprising: while the right to exclude aliens from the jurisdiction is an ancient attribute of sovereignty, most of human history has
not been characterized by airtight borders, enforced by vetting and documentation of new entrants. Laws have always assumed that anyone found in the land should be subject to the authority of the sovereign, regardless of how they got there. That rule applied unless there was some good reason – diplomatic immunity, being a lawful foreign combatant, being a member of a separately sovereign internal group like Native American tribes – to be outside the ordinary reach of the law. This is the legal backdrop that led Edward Bates, President Lincoln’s Attorney General, to write just a few years before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment:
I am quite clear in the opinion that children born in the United States of alien parents, who have never been naturalized, are native-born citizens of the United States, and, of course, do not require the formality of naturalization to entitle them to the rights and privileges of such citizenship.
The Fourteenth Amendment, which incorporated Senator Howard’s language, is properly understood to have codified Attorney General Bates’ contemporary understanding. That is what it meant when it was adopted in 1868, and no amount of current political controversy about illegal immigration should lead conservative critics of birthright citizenship to abandon that original understanding."
Constitutional Originalism Requires Birthright Citizenship | National Review
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