The Constitution says that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are automatically U.S. citizens. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that this includes children of illegal immigrants, children of tourists, and children of people who took a wrong turn in Manitoba and gave birth in Minnesota.I don’t second-guess the court on this. Judging by the divisions on the court, the legal question seems pretty difficult, and my own reading of the text leaves the majority’s decision plausible.But this is obviously bad law. It makes no sense that every child born to an illegal immigrant is automatically a U.S. citizen. Our current policy is not that some children born to some illegal immigrants can become citizens. It’s automatic.
So if you sneak across the border to have a baby, that baby is a citizen. If a shady Chinese billionaire hires a dozen surrogates to have babies in Los Angeles, those babies are all citizens. If someone gets a tourist visa and times her visit for her due date, that baby is automatically a U.S. citizen. And in any of these cases, it seems there is nothing that Congress or ICE can do about it.It is totally reasonable that Congress should be allowed to pass laws declaring which illegal immigrants’ children and which tourists’ children get citizenship. To give Congress that power, we would, it is now clear, have to amend the Constitution.
