Will Congress Act to Stop Birthright Citizenship?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns birthright citizenship. President-elect Donald Trump wants to stop the unrestricted birthright citizenship that many illegal immigrants use as a backdoor to gain citizenship for themselves.

On December 8, 2024, Trump was on NBC’s “Meet the Press” with Kristen Welker. Part of the wide-ranging interview addressed birthright citizenship. When Welker asked her question about the doctrine found in the Fourteenth Amendment, she left out six crucial words when reciting the amendment.

The first sentence of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Synonyms for jurisdiction include authority, control, power, dominion, rule, administration, command, and sovereignty.

Welker failed to recite the crucial six emphasized words stating that a person must be born on U.S. soil AND be subject to U.S. government. If a person comes into the U.S. illegally, they are NOT subject to the government of the United States. They are subject to the laws of Mexico or China or Russia or whatever country they left, not the United States.

Too many people have ignored the crucial words and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

They also ignore the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment was written and became law because Democrats in the Southern States wanted to prevent African Americans – born in the United States – from becoming citizens. The ratification of the amendment had nothing to do with immigrant – legal or illegal.

Legal scholars claim that nothing can be done about the problem without another amendment to the Constitution. However, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) disagrees. 

Nothing in the 14^th Amendment stops Congress from enacting legislation that limits birthright citizenship along the lines of what Harry Reid proposed in 1993.

Those words matter. [Those crucial six words.]

Congress has the power to define what it means to be born in the United States “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Current law contains no such restriction, but Congress can make one, excluding prospectively from birthright citizenship individuals born in the U.S. to illegal aliens.

This is an idea that has attracted lawmakers of both political parties.

In fact, one of the first bills (at least in recent memory) that attempted to impose statutory limits on automatic birthright citizenship was introduced in 1993 by Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who later became the Democrats’ leader in the Senate.

Senator Reid’s bill was called the Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993. Title X of that bill would have limited automatic birthright citizenship to children born in the United States to mothers who were either U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents at the time. The fact that federal law doesn’t currently impose such a restriction doesn’t mean that it couldn’t, and that’s why Reid proposed that change.

Nothing in the 14^th Amendment stops Congress from enacting legislation that limits birthright citizenship along the lines of what Reid proposed in 1993….

Moreover, the very lawmakers who drafted the 14^th Amendment did not consider it to confer automatic citizenship upon anyone born within its geographic borders – such a suggestion was considered absurd at the time.

Senator Jacob Howard, who served on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that drafted the 14^th Amendment, said of the citizenship clause:

This will not, of course, 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.

Senator Lyman Trumbull, a staunch abolitionist who drafted the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which presaged the 14^th Amendment, also understood “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to mean “not owing allegiance to anybody else and being subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States.

These policies were explicitly crafted to normalize the citizenship of newly freed slaves following the Civil War, and everyone at the time knew it….