Tampering With Citizenship

Efforts to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants fly in the face of the 14th Amendment and a century of legal precedent.

Los Angeles Times: Legislators from five states have unveiled model legislation with complicated provisions but a simple and pernicious premise: that children born in this country aren't citizens if their parents are illegal immigrants. That assertion, however, is no match for more than 100 years of Supreme Court precedent holding that anyone born in the United States is an American citizen. If the states enact laws disregarding that principle, the court should resoundingly reaffirm its interpretation of the 14th Amendment. The amendment, ratified after the Civil War, says: "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." The natural reading of that language is that it covers any person born in the United States, who by definition is subject to American law. But the legislators opposed to so-called birthright citizenship offer a different interpretation of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." They argue that a child is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States unless he or she has "at least one parent who owes no allegiance to any foreign sovereignty, or [is] a child without citizenship or nationality in any foreign country." The legislators lack the authority to change the definition of citizenship, something they hope Congress will do. But they hope to lay the groundwork for a two-tiered system with two proposals based on the idea that birthright citizenship is invalid.