The Case Against Birthright Citizenship
Trump’s executive order stands on a firmer footing than its vocal critics acknowledge.
One of Trump’s most daring executive orders now declares that citizenship rights should be denied to children whose mother under current law was “unlawfully present in the United States” or whose presence in the United States was “lawful but temporary,” but only if that person’s father “was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.” That general command was subject to two key qualifications. The first is that it did not take effect until 30 days after the order, which grandfathered out of the E.O. all individuals who became birthright citizens as the children of both illegal aliens and sojourners into the U.S. The E.O. rightly did nothing to undo the current status whereby the children of lawful permanent residents were entitled to obtain the documents needed to certify their citizenship.
