Don’t end birthright citizenship
In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, Michael Anton, a former national security official in the Trump administration, suggested we have been deliberately misreading the 14th Amendment to the Constitution — the one that says that anyone born or naturalized in the U.S. is considered a citizen. He calls this “an absurdity — historically, constitutionally, philosophically and practically.”
This is the sort of bluster you might expect from someone who proudly claims credit for coining the term “Trumpism.” But it’s probably not a position you’d anticipate from a person who claims Greek, Italian and Lebanese ancestry.
After all, Anton’s push for President Trump to simply issue an executive order to “specify ... that the children of noncitizens are not citizens” could backfire.
But what can you expect from people who put too much stock in their own exceptionalism and not enough in the simple fact that every single person who is born in the U.S. is privileged? And that’s because they were lucky, not because they are better than others or because someone in their family got into the country the “right” way.
So take the pleas to stop foreigners from taking “advantage of our foolishness ... [and] continue to allow our laws to be flouted and our citizenship debased” with a grain of salt.
When nativists start talking about revamping the Constitution to keep certain people out, we don’t hear enough about what a mess it would be to end birthright citizenship.
The last time this harebrained idea was seriously floated, it was 2012 — about a year after Donald Trump told multiple outlets that he was skeptical of President Obama’s citizenship. Some prominent conservatives, anti-immigration groups, and even an adviser on immigration issues to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney proposed ending birthright citizenship in the months leading up to the election.
In response, the nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy released a policy brief analyzing the issue. It found that changing the 14th Amendment would “cost new parents in the United States approximately $600 in government fees to prove the citizenship status of each baby and likely an additional $600 to $1,000 in legal fees. This represents a ‘tax’ of $1,200 to $1,600 on each baby born in the United States, while at the same time doing little to deter illegal entry to the United States. Direct fees to the federal government would reach $2.4 billion a year, based on current [2012] estimates.”
Conservative hero Grover Norquist was part of the NFAP’s press conference on this policy brief at the time. He said any proposals to end birthright citizenship would create “huge problems from a freemarket, limited-government” perspective.”
Listen to proponents of small government and everyone else who doesn’t want our immigration system to get even more complex and difficult to navigate: Stuff the idea of ending birthright citizenship in the trash bin of history once and for all.