The Supreme Court Made American Citizenship Meaningless
American citizenship was meant to be a priceless inheritance. The Supreme Court turned it into a cheap commodity.
If you’ve been wondering why America’s 250th feels so hollow, the Supreme Court’s June 30th ruling on birthright citizenship should provide ample clarity.
If anyone, from anywhere in the world, can travel to America and give birth to an ‘American’ citizen, then American citizenship is meaningless.
And make no mistake, this is exactly what a majority of unelected Supreme Court justices just decreed.
Incredibly, mere days before the anniversary of America’s declared independence from the British Crown, our misguided Supreme Court has essentially negated everything the Founders pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to reject and, in its place, has resurrected a form of medieval English feudal rule.
As Justice Samuel Alito noted in his dissent, this system of “soil and servitude” was emphatically rejected by our Founders in the Declaration of Independence. Yet, the Court has once again saddled our nation with this ancient understanding, effectively declaring that our borders and sovereignty are secondary concerns to an empty technicality of mere physical presence at the time of birth.
The Fourteenth Amendment was drafted to ensure that freed slaves were recognized as full citizens, given that, as Justice Clarence Thomas argues in his dissent, freed slaves “had no other homeland” and were “liable to be called upon to defend [America] in time of war.”
Under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause demands that one not only be born in the United States but also be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
Legal scholars who reject universal birthright citizenship under consent theory argue that full jurisdiction requires mutual political consent.
According to this view, a tourist or illegal immigrant is not fully “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States merely by being physically present. Instead, the United States, as a sovereign nation, must affirmatively consent to the person’s permanent presence and membership within its borders and political community.
Senator Lyman Trumbull, a principal architect of Reconstruction-era legislation, explained that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant “not owing allegiance to anybody else” and “subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States.”
Without that consent, children born on American soil under these circumstances lack the jurisdictional relationship the Fourteenth Amendment requires for automatic birthright citizenship.
To this point, Justice Clarence Thomas explained in his dissent that this jurisdictional requirement was historically understood as demanding a legal domicile, meaning a permanent home, rather than a fleeting visit to our shores.
This conclusion stands in direct contrast to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s “universalist” vision of citizenship.
In our modern context, visitors such as tourists, temporary foreign workers, and illegal aliens clearly remain subject to the political jurisdiction and allegiance of their home nations.
The author of the Citizenship Clause, Senator Jacob Howard, stated during the Senate debates over the 14th Amendment that automatic birthright citizenship would not “include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.”
The Supreme Court majority’s response to Howard’s assertion is to argue over commas, insisting ‘foreigners’ and ‘aliens’ merely describe diplomat families. But if diplomat families are foreigners by definition, why even list foreigners and aliens separately? Should birthright citizenship truly rest on grammatical semantics?
By ignoring the plain words of the Amendment’s own authors, the Court’s majority has relegated citizenship to mere happenstance of birth.
For decades, open-borders advocates have repeatedly told the American public that this debate was permanently settled in 1898 by the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark because this understanding benefits the left demographically and electorally.
When the children of illegal aliens and birth tourists turn 18, they are eligible to vote in our elections. When they turn 21, they unlock the power of chain migration, allowing them to sponsor their foreign parents for legal permanent residency.
One only needs to look at the wave of Democratic Socialist victories in recent municipal elections, driven by rapidly shifting urban demographics, to see where this leads.
But the current understanding of Wong Kim Ark is wrong, and the dissenting opinions take direct aim at this lie.
As Justice Alito thoroughly explained, the holding in Wong Kim Ark was explicitly limited to children whose non-citizen parents had established a “permanent domicil and residence” in the United States.
Because the legal category “lawful permanent resident” did not exist in 1898, Wong’s parents were considered “lawfully domiciled” in the U.S. under common law because there was no statute making their presence unlawful. Additionally, being Chinese, they could not apply for naturalization.
They had done, as Justice Alito stated, “everything within their power to express their desire and intent to become Americans.” As such, they were fully part of the national community to the extent that the law allowed at the time.
The real-world consequences of this decision represent nothing short of an existential threat to our national sovereignty.
The promise of American citizenship remains a massive incentive for illegal immigration, while the subversive ‘birth tourism’ industry will continue to profit openly from the Court’s refusal to defend the nation.
In 2023 alone, mothers who were unauthorized immigrants or held only temporary legal status accounted for an astounding 320,000 births in the United States, representing nine percent of all U.S. births. If the restrictions of President Trump’s executive order had been properly upheld, roughly 260,000 of those children would not have qualified for automatic citizenship.
Even more alarming is the strategic weaponization of this loophole by adversarial nations such as China. As Peter Schweizer has documented in his book, The Invisible Coup, we are currently facing what he terms “civilizational warfare”.
Wealthy Chinese nationals, sometimes with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, exploit visa loopholes in U.S. territories like Saipan, turning them into tropical maternity wards.
A sophisticated industry charging upwards of $45,000 coaches these birth tourists on how to deceive customs officials so they can deliver their children on American soil and instantly secure a U.S. passport.
In some horrifying instances, this pipeline has shifted into the literal manufacturing of citizens through commercial surrogacy pipelines, viewed by adversarial elites as a cold, strategic acquisition of ‘American’ citizens.
The result is the creation of what Schweizer calls a “Manchurian Generation”.
There are an estimated 750,000 to 1.5 million of these “American citizens” currently being raised and indoctrinated in mainland China, taught to hate America and Western Civilization as a whole.
As Justice Alito warned, this ruling continues to allow a person whose only connection to this country is a brief stay on American soil at birth to travel the world on a U.S. passport, enter our country freely, vote in our elections, run for political office, and retain citizenship even if they harbor deep hatred for America or actively plot to harm it.
If an adversarial government can effectively manufacture U.S. citizens at will through birth tourism, then birthright citizenship needs to be seen as the massive national security threat that it is.
The American Revolution itself was premised on the idea that governments derive just powers from the consent of the governed, which means citizenship and government must be considered a two-way relationship.
True citizenship requires mutual political consent between the individual and the sovereign nation. Without it, a person may be physically present on our soil, but they unequivocally remain legally and philosophically outside our political community.
As Justice Alito pointed out, while Congress holds the power to confer citizenship on others by statute, the Constitution itself does not mandate the degradation of American citizenship for everyone who happens to cross our borders.
Birthright citizenship was never intended to serve as a constitutional loophole for trespassers, temporary tourists, or hostile foreign powers.
American citizenship is a priceless inheritance, not a cheap commodity to be harvested by those who wish us harm.
No sovereign nation can survive if it abandons the right to decide who belongs to its national family.
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