Birthright Citizenship is About Human Rights
Ending it will open a Pandora’s box it’s in nobody’s interest to unseal
Donald Trump now appears convinced the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment is no barrier to ending birthright citizenship in the United States. In a recent interview with Axios, President Trump declared that though “It was always told to me [Trump] that you needed a constitutional amendment [to end birthright citizenship]. Guess what? You don’t.”
If Trump thinks he can end birthright citizenship via executive order, he’s probably going to — and he’s probably going to do it before the midterms in an effort to further energize his base. Since, according to the president, the United States is “the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States … with all of those benefits,” he’s already making the case there’s nothing but upside for the US if he decides to end the practice.
But the US isn’t the only country with birthright citizenship. In fact, 30 of the Western Hemisphere’s 35 sovereign countries offer birthright citizenship. Mexico and Canada offer it, as does every single Central and South American country with the exception of Colombia and Suriname. But since when has Donald Trump been one to allow the truth to get in the way of bad policy?
More troubling than Trump’s proposed end run around the Constitution, or the lies about America’s allegedly unique position in the world as the only country allowing those born on its soil to enjoy the benefits of citizenship, is the human rights consequences that will almost certainly follow from ending the practice. Eliminating the right to citizenship for those born in the United States will only be the latest in an already lengthy list of words and deeds used by this administration and its supporters to dehumanize immigrants.
If successful, it won’t be long before those who received citizenship as their birthright prior to Trump’s executive order become the target. Having thrown out the rule of law to end birthright citizenship proactively, what’s to stop this administration from throwing it out again to make the executive order retroactive? After all, if we are to follow this xenophobic line of thinking to its logical conclusion the legitimacy of minority immigrants who received their citizenship through parents or grandparents born on US soil must also be suspect, right?
Stripping people of their human rights begins with stripping them of their citizenship. Before a government can begin to systemically persecute any group it’s necessary to convince a sufficient cross-section of the public that group isn’t entitled to the protections citizenship provides. Then, having denied them their constitutional shield, virtually anything goes. Just ask the survivors of the Japanese internment camps or the victims of Jim Crow.
Every time a country turns its back on its principles that turning has been a prelude to the abuse of one group or another. Whether it’s a state’s indigenous population or some other minority that has suffered, the denial of equal protection under the law has never produced a chapter in any nation’s history that it can be proud of. If Trump succeeds in ending America’s long-standing practice of birthright citizenship, future generations will look back in horror at what followed as a consequence.
