President Trump told the press on Wednesday that he and his team were looking into the subject of birthright citizenship “very seriously”.
“We’re looking at that very seriously,” the President said, when asked as to whether he was considering removing birthright citizenship via executive order. “Where you have a baby on our land, you walk over the border and have a baby, “congratulations, your baby is now a US citizen, we’re looking at that very, very seriously,” he continued. “It’s frankly ridiculous.”
Trump says he's "very seriously" looking at trying to change the Constitution by executive order.
"We're looking at that very seriously — birthright citizenship. Where you have a baby on our land … 'congratulations the baby is now a US citizen' … it's, frankly, ridiculous." pic.twitter.com/5IBNOcMXE9
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 21, 2019
The President has expressed a desire to end birthright citizenship before. In October 2018, he told Axios that he would remove it through an executive order. No such order was put in place.
If the President were to do so, he would certainly face a challenge – the media and apparent experts claim that the 14th Amendment grants the right of citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” Even some conservative sites argue that a constitutional amendment is necessary to stop it. Courtney Kirchoff, of Louder with Crowder, wrote in an article at the time of Trump’s previous statement that, “one cannot just wave the Executive order wand to change the Constitution”:
The amendment is very clear on how those born in the United States are citizens. So ending birthright citizenship is going to take a lot more than a pen stroke.
In order for Trump… to end birthright citizenship, a Constitutional amendment would need to be passed by two thirds of the House AND Senate, then ratified by 38 states.
However, this line of argument is often paddled out by leftists as a way to shame those on the right from actually trying to do something to stop the wave of mass migration coming into the country. Those same leftists don’t give a damn about whether something is unconstitutional when wanting to take away your right to bear arms or deprive you of your freedom of speech! In fact, it is not at all clear whether the 14th Amendment truly requires anyone born on US soil to immediately be given citizenship.
Ken Klukowski wrote in Breitbart that the 14th Amendment requires the person in question to be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” of the United States, and that it does not just mean “within the jurisdiction of the United States”:
A person who is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States is a person who is “not subject to any foreign power”—that is, a person who was entirely native to the United States, not the citizen or subject of any foreign government…
In 1884, the Supreme Court in Elk v. Wilkins… reasoned that if a person is a foreign citizen, then their children are likewise not constitutionally under the jurisdiction of the United States, and therefore not entitled to citizenship…
That is why Congress can specify that the children of foreign diplomats and foreign soldiers are not Americans by birth. They’re not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Congress’s INA does not grant them citizenship; federal law never has…Congress has absolute power to make laws for immigration and for granting citizenship to foreigners… [and currently] is far more generous than the Constitution requires.
Hopefully the President will listen to people like Mr Klukowski, and not the RINO nay-sayers who wish to tie his hands behind his back and keep immigration flowing.
