CHANGING LAWS ON CITIZENSHIP

President Donald Trump said in a recently released interview for “Axios on HBO” that he plans to sign an executive order ending automatic citizenship for babies born to non-citizens on United States soil.

We understand his motivation because of what the concept has wrought, especially in the last 35 years — millions of people slipping into the country illegally in order for future children to be born here as U.S. citizens, become eligible for government benefits and then become the “anchor” that keeps their illegal immigrant parents here.

Once born here, those children — often called “anchor babies” — are eligible for Medicaid, subsidized housing, WIC, free or reduced-cost school lunches, food stamps, disability benefits and, in some cases, cash assistance. And at 21, the now-grown citizens can sponsor their illegal parents and siblings to become citizens, though such an approval process can be lengthy.

Government figures indicate more than 350,000 such children are born here annually, somewhere between one in 12 and one in 10 U.S. births.

Our preference, instead of ending what has been called birth citizenship, would be for the country to enforce current immigration laws, better secure the borders, change how people apply for asylum at ports of entry, end chain migration, limit illegal immigrant benefits and institute a more effective tracking system of those given temporary visas. If those are done, U.S. births to illegal mothers would drop drastically.

Unfortunately, Congress — especially Democrats in Congress — has been loathe to do any of the above. So Trump has dusted off the idea he first raised shortly after he became a candidate for president in 2015.

For the record, no less than former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and current Republican Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, when he was in Congress, among others, have proposed bills that would do the same thing. They’ve all gone nowhere.

At issue is whether Trump could do such a thing by executive order. Scholars on one side say he can, and scholars on the other say he can’t. If he in fact signs such an order, it appears it is bound for the courts.

The document that is considered crucial to the argument is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1868, and its interpretation. The so-called Citizenship Clause of the amendment says, “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.”

In essence, it nullified the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision — often called the worst in the high court’s history — that declared that persons descended from slaves could not be citizens.

However, the optimum clause to those who take Trump’s side is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The argument is that the clause in question applies to children of legal immigrants and that since illegal immigrants are subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign nation and are here without permission, their children are not eligible.

Babies born to foreign diplomats, to cite one instance, are not granted automatic citizenship because their parents are considered still under the jurisdiction of their home governments.

John Eastman, director of Chapman University’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and a constitutional scholar, told “Axios on HBO” that until the 1960s, the 14th Amendment was never applied to illegal or temporary immigrants.

While the Supreme Court has ruled children born to immigrants with legal permanent residence have citizenship, and in several decisions involving the 14th Amendment has assumed babies born to illegal immigrant mothers are U.S. citizens from birth, it has never specifically ruled squarely on a case involving illegal immigrants or those with a temporary legal status.

Trump, as is his wont, went overboard in the Axios interview, saying the U.S. 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.”

While no other country probably matches the benefits the U.S. offers, some 30 countries, mostly in the Americas, have birthright citizenship, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. Elsewhere, it is rare.

“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment,” Trump said of changing the law. “Guess what? You don’t.”

That’s not a promise we’re about to take to the bank. Instead, we hope both major political parties would understand continued unchecked illegal immigration is not fiscally sustainable for the United States, would work on measures to help prevent more of it and would rewrite immigration laws that can and will be enforced.