Birthright Citizenship Explained

The latest issue of Imprimis has a great article on birthright citizenship. ‘

It ought to be required reading for all the Supreme Court justices who are about to rule on the matter. While they doubtless have been inundated with legal briefs to digest, this is a reasonably succinct, historically accurate explanation of the entire concept. We need to know the original meaning of the Constitution to understand what was intended.

You can find it here.

A couple of excerpts:

We have somehow come today to believe that anyone born within the geographical limits of the U.S. is automatically subject to its jurisdiction. But this renders the jurisdiction clause utterly superfluous and without force. If this had been the intention of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, they would simply have said that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are thereby citizens. Furthermore, the principal supporters of the Fourteenth Amendment were explicit about the meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction”: it meant owing exclusive allegiance to the U.S. and none to any other country….

The citizenship clause was a late addition to the Fourteenth Amendment. The first draft merely stated that citizens were “persons born in the U.S. or naturalized by the laws thereof.” This language was referred to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which reported back the language that became the citizenship clause. It is evident that the Joint Committee placed importance on the jurisdiction clause, which meant, at a minimum, that not all persons born in the U.S. were automatically citizens…

Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and principal architect of the Thirteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, joined (Senator Jacob) Howard in agreeing that the “law of the land” meant that “subject to the jurisdiction” connoted “complete jurisdiction”—in other words, not owing allegiance to anyone else…

Jurisdiction understood as allegiance, Howard pointed out, excluded not only Indians but “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, [or] who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.” Thus “subject to the jurisdiction” does not simply mean, as is commonly thought today, subject to American laws or American courts. It means owing exclusive political allegiance to the U.S.