The Supreme Court’s recent birthright citizenship decision has reignited a vigorous national debate over one of the Constitution’s oldest guarantees. Much of that debate has focused on original intent, constitutional text and judicial power. But there is another question that deserves equal attention. What kind of America would we have become if birthright citizenship had never existed?
This is not an argument about whether America should secure its borders or enforce its immigration laws. Every sovereign nation has both the right and the obligation to do that. Nor is it an argument that birthright citizenship solves every challenge posed by modern immigration. It does not. It is, instead, an argument that we should be extraordinarily cautious before dismantling one of the constitutional principles that helped make the United States unlike any other nation in history.
America’s rise to become the world’s leading economic and military power was never inevitable. Geography, abundant resources and a constitutional system that encouraged innovation all mattered. But those advantages alone do not explain why the United States surpassed so many nations blessed with similar opportunities. One of America’s greatest competitive advantages was something remarkably simple: it didn’t merely welcome immigrants, it made their children Americans.
Birthright citizenship forged one American people
The Fourteenth Amendment transformed millions of children born to Irish laborers, Italian masons, Jewish refugees, Chinese railroad workers, Mexican farmworkers, Vietnamese refugees, Indian engineers and countless others into Americans from the moment they were born. That constitutional promise changed incentives. Parents invested in education because their children had a future here. Families built businesses because they knew they could pass them to American sons and daughters. Young men and women served in our armed forces because they were defending their own country. Each generation grew up knowing it belonged.
The Fourteenth Amendment answered with remarkable clarity: if you are born here, you are an American.
America accomplished one of history’s greatest acts of nation-building. It repeatedly transformed newcomers into patriots, not by changing where the parents were born, but by embracing where their children were. That history is personal to me. Historians estimate that roughly one-third of Utah’s pioneers were born outside the United States. Many of my own ancestors crossed the Atlantic from England, Wales and Ireland before crossing the plains to build new lives in the American West. Without birthright citizenship, their children might never have become fully American. My own story, and the stories of millions of other Americans, might have been very different.
Now imagine another America. Imagine millions of children born in New York, Texas, California or Utah who remained legal foreigners because of their parents’ citizenship. They would be educated here, work here, pay taxes here, yet never fully belong here. Instead of forging one American people, we likely would have created hereditary classes of citizens and noncitizens. History suggests that nations defining citizenship primarily by ancestry often struggle with divided loyalties, parallel societies and endless political conflict over who belongs. America largely escaped that fate, not by accident, but by constitutional design.
The drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment were responding to one of the Supreme Court’s darkest decisions. In Dred Scott, the court held that people born on American soil could nevertheless be denied citizenship because of their ancestry. The Fourteenth Amendment answered with remarkable clarity: if you are born here, you are an American. That principle did more than confer legal status. It removed citizenship itself from ordinary politics. It prevented future legislatures from redefining who belonged based on race, ancestry, ethnicity or the passions of the moment.
Birthright citizenship did not simply determine who was an American. It helped create America.
Reasonable people can disagree about border security, asylum policy, legal immigration and enforcement. Those are legitimate policy debates. Birthright citizenship is something different. It is a declaration about the kind of nation we choose to be.
Today’s critics often speak of restoring America’s greatness. Yet there is a profound irony in that argument. They celebrate the United States as the most prosperous, innovative and powerful nation in history while proposing to dismantle one of the constitutional principles that helped produce those very results. Before abandoning that principle, they should answer one question: If birthright citizenship was such a historic mistake, where is the great nation that became the world’s dominant economic, military, scientific and democratic power without it? They cannot point to one.
As Ronald Reagan observed shortly before leaving office, “If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.” Birthright citizenship did not simply determine who was an American.
It helped create America.