The Absurdities of Birthright Citizenship

ast week, our friends at The Federalist ran a couple of pieces — one by Brianna Lyman and the other by John Daniel Davidson — on the opportunity currently before the U.S. Supreme Court with respect to birthright citizenship and the legal absurdities our current practice encompasses.

If you’re familiar at all with the history of this highly unusual practice, you know that it emanates from the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, which reads…

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.

This was written in an effort to guarantee that states wouldn’t write laws abusing the citizenship rights of former slaves in the Southern states after the Civil War.

Honestly, we would do ourselves a lot of good if we repealed the 14th Amendment and started over with a fresher and better-written statement of the laudable goals its framers sought to achieve. But that’s a whole other column.

Anyway, the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” part in the Citizenship Clause was written in language that was plain at the time but has been badly obfuscated since.