Steve Chapman: Repealing birthright citizenship would be a disaster

People from more than 100 countries, including, Amal Ahmed Abedl Rahman of Palestine, right, and her husband, Izzddin Al Zaghloul, raise their right hands as they take the oath to become U.S citizens on Dec. 7, 2022, as the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Illinois hosts the largest ever naturalization ceremony for people becoming U.S. citizens at Wintrust Arena in Chicago. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)
Some bad ideas just won’t die, and in today’s political environment, the worse the idea, the longer its life expectancy. One of the more harebrained is ending birthright citizenship, which is meant to penalize children born on U.S. soil to immigrants who are here illegally. Long a far-right obsession, it is now more or less the orthodox position in the Republican Party.
In 2015, Donald Trump endorsed the idea, and so did several of his rivals. If elected in 2024, he vows to use an executive order to abolish birthright citizenship, which he somehow failed to do during his presidency. Vivek Ramaswamy echoes Trump on most issues, this one included. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis agrees. No one in the GOP presidential field seems inclined to rally opposition.
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But opposition is in order. Some ideas are grievously wrong in principle, and some would be a hot mess in practice. This one is both.
The 14th Amendment, adopted 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.” It has long been understood to mean that anyone who emerges into life in this country automatically becomes an American — with the notable exception of children of foreign diplomats.
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Trump and others claim that the offspring of migrants here illegally don’t actually qualify, because they are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of our government. But they are: Unlike foreign diplomats, they enjoy no immunity from U.S. laws.
The congressional debate offers little support for upending the status quo. At the time the 14th Amendment was proposed, when one opponent fretted that it would mandate citizenship for the children of Chinese immigrants, a senator who supported it confirmed his fear. Back then, Chinese immigrants were not allowed to become citizens.
Decades before the era of liberal judicial activism, the Supreme Court interpreted the 14th Amendment as enshrining birthright citizenship. In 1898, it ruled that Wong Kim Ark, who was born here to Chinese parents but barred from reentering the country under the Chinese Exclusion Act, was a U.S. citizen and therefore entitled to admission. It wasn’t the last time the court has affirmed birthright citizenship.
To exclude the children of those here without authorization, you’d need a constitutional amendment, which for now is about as likely as glaciers in the Grand Canyon. The advocates probably realize as much. But a Republican president could issue an executive order and then blame the Supreme Court for striking it down — and proceed to crusade for an amendment without fear of the consequences if it actually came to pass.
But it bears noting how disastrous those consequences would be. You can’t deny birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants without denying it to all children born here. Right now, parents have a simple way to verify that their kids are citizens: a birth certificate. But under this plan, parents would first have to prove their own citizenship, which is not always easy.
Some Americans already have to bear the burden of proof, such as military service members whose kids are born overseas. Margaret Stock, a veteran immigration lawyer in Anchorage, Alaska, who handles such cases, notes that anyone seeking to qualify has to file a 15-page form and pay a fee of $1,170. Repealing birthright citizenship “would be a new birth tax on every child born in America,” she told me.
After paying it, families would pay a tax in patience. Here in Chicago, the typical time for processing these applications is nine months. In Nashville, it’s 17 months; in Phoenix, 21.5.
Those figures are for an agency that handles a few thousand such cases a year — not 3.66 million, which is how many births there are each year in the United States. A new army of federal employees would be needed to shuffle all the paper.
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While enduring these delays, parents wouldn’t be able to get Social Security numbers, insurance coverage or passports for their babies or claim them as dependents on tax forms. The lives of many families — maybe yours — would hang in bureaucratic limbo.
And what would be accomplished? Only one thing: the denial of basic rights to infants who have done nothing wrong. Instead of being integrated into American society, the children of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally would become a permanent underclass of stateless souls.
Anti-immigrant zealots may fantasize that these families will all pack up and leave. But men and women who trudged through jungles and crawled under concertina wire to find refuge here are not likely to give up so easily. If the adults stay, as millions do, why wouldn’t their kids?
In the book of Genesis, we read of Esau, who gave up his birthright for “a mess of pottage” — a bowl of lentil stew. Abolishing birthright citizenship would be an even worse bargain.
Steve Chapman was a member of the Tribune Editorial Board from 1981 to 2021. His columns, exclusive to the Tribune, appear the first Thursday of every month. He can be reached at [email protected].
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