In debating birthright citizenship, and assuming based on the Supreme Court’s ruling, that the 14th Amendment was intended to speak to the issue, we have focused on the first sentence of the amendment:

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.

Patently, this had nothing to do with illegal aliens or their children. To repeat: There was no federal concept of “illegal alien” at the time. There would, moreover, have been no reason to amend the Constitution for the purpose of dictating the status of the children of aliens. Congress had that covered: Its Article I power to prescribe terms of citizenship for aliens had never been in dispute; as noted at the start of this essay, Congress had been exercising that power since shortly after the Constitution went into effect.

The status of children of aliens was not a national issue. Unlike slavery, over which the nation nearly dissolved, it was not a subject of such nationwide concern that it could drive the Constitution’s arduous amendment process. The rest of the 14th Amendment’s first clause makes crystal clear that the amendment had nothing to do with aliens trying to settle in the country; its objective was to prohibit several of the outrages that black people, in America for over two centuries, had been made to suffer…