Trump’s plan to end birthright draws ire

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s proposal to end birthright citizenship left a wide swath of Connecticut political figures and experts scratching their heads, wondering whether the idea of depriving citizens’ rights to children of undocumented immigrants born in the U.S. is little more than a pre-election political ploy.

“This is just pure politics,” said Gary Rose, a political scientist at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield. “This is once again Donald Trump mobilizing his base, stirring up passions on immigration.”

In an interview with the website Axios, Trump said the U.S. is “the only country in the world” that grants citizenship to anyone born within its boundaries, regardless of whether the parents are here legally. “It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”

While most countries of Western Europe do not have birthright citizenship, Mexico and Canada do.

Although it is the subject of some debate in legal circles, the Constitution’s 14th Amendment — drafted in 1868 to assure citizenship to freed slaves — appears to leave little doubt that those born in the U.S. are citizens, regardless of parentage.

It 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.”

Trump insisted to Axios that he was advised he could order the change without running afoul of the Constitution.

“You can definitely do it with an act of Congress,” he said. “But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.”

A different take

But Richard Kay, a retired University of Connecticut constitutional law professor, said that even conservative Supreme Court justices and lower court judges would find it difficult to rule in Trump’s favor when the plain language of the amendment says otherwise.

“This is something where you can’t count on standard conserve jurisprudence to come to his side,” he said. “It would be hard to find a judge who would come out in favor of this.”

Trump’s plan comes at a time when both Democrats and Republicans are seesawing in the momentum game with next week’s midterm elections. Trump and Republicans appeared to be on the rise earlier in the month, but the pendulum seemed to swing back the other way after the Pittsburgh synagogue mass shooting and the arrest of a bomber targeting prominent Trump opponents.

For Trump, the birthright-citizenship card is just one he’s playing in the immigration realm. He has said without proof that the caravan of illegal immigrants wending its way northward to the U.S. includes terrorists from the Middle East. He’s also ordered U.S. troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to halt it.

Although Connecticut is distant from the border and most congressional races appear to be solidly in Democrats’ hands, the gubernatorial contest between Democrat Ned Lamont, Republican Bob Stefanowski and independent Oz Griebel is neck-and-neck. A relative handful of voters motivated by immigration or some other issue could well make a difference in the outcome.

Democratic opposition

For Democratic lawmakers, objection to the Trump plan was less about politics or legalities than it was the morality of denying citizenship to those born here.

“The president’s announcement that he will unilaterally seek to revoke long-established birthright citizenship is as unacceptable as it is unsurprising,” said Rep. Elizabeth Esty, D-Conn. “Stirring up anger and ethnic hatred in order to win an election is shameful and it is wrong. We have a Constitution and a Congress for a reason.”

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, DConn., called the Trump plan “preposterous.”

“Just in the past few weeks we have seen the effects of the poisoned political environment he has helped create — from pipe bombs being sent to Democratic leaders around the country to the vicious mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh,” she said. “We cannot go on like this. We desperately need moral leadership from our public officials at this painful time, not personal attacks on people and groups.”

Nationally, there are about 4 million children under 18 with one parent who is undocumented, according to calculations based on U.S. Census data prepared by the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute.

Of those, approximately 20,200 live in Connecticut — 4,600 in households where both parents are illegal and 5,400 living with one parent who is in the country illegally.

In the 2016 election, Trump railed against “anchor babies” — U.S.-born children of illegal parents who ultimately hope to use the citizenship link as the basis for gaining legal status.

Concerns also have been raised about “birth tourism” — prospective parents with visas entering the U.S. in order to bear children who then become U.S. citizens. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group favoring immigration limits, estimated that 36,000 births annually are the result of “birth tourism.”

Trump supporters who favor taking away citizenship from children of illegal immigrants base their argument on the 14th Amendment’s phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

“The framers of the 14th Amendment added the ‘jurisdiction’ clause precisely to distinguish between people to whom the United States owes citizenship and those to whom it does not,” wrote former Trump White House official Michael Anton in a Washington Post op-ed last July. “Freed slaves definitely qualified. The children of immigrants who came here illegally clearly don’t.”

But Kay of UConn doubts the phrase was intended as a way of picking and choosing who is a citizen and who is not, as long as the individual is born on U.S. soil.

“There is some dispute about this but a substantial majority of legal scholars say ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ simply means the laws of the state” or federal government, he said.