Americans don’t agree on whether being born here should make you a citizen. That’s not new.
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On the first day of Donald Trump’s second presidential term, he signed an executive order about an old American rule: that with very few exceptions, anyone born here is a citizen. Trump’s order stated that the rule, which comes from the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, should no longer apply to the children of those in the United States illegally or temporarily. Within a few weeks that order had been blocked by multiple federal judges — but it was a temporary resolution, with the ultimate outcome yet to be determined, probably by the Supreme Court.
The US is far from the only country in the world that offers unconditional birthright citizenship. While it’s uncommon in Europe, Asia, and Africa, it’s very common among Western Hemisphere countries, partly because of their history as colonies populated mostly by settlers. But of the many countries with birthright citizenship in the world, the US is by far the largest, with hundreds of thousands of baby citizens born here every year to noncitizen parents. Those numbers naturally raise the question: Is this what birthright citizenship was meant for? And why do we have birthright citizenship in the first place?
The short answer is that birthright citizenship in the US came about as a way of granting citizenship after the American Civil War to the large population of formerly enslaved Black people. But that raises a different question: How did a law intended for Black Americans end up creating hundreds of thousands of new US citizens born to immigrant parents every year? In this video we trace that history, answer that question, and look at a few of the times that the US has actually had this argument before. Today’s concerns over birthright citizenship may feel specific to our particular immigration debate. They’re actually not.
00:00 A rule
2:23 Jus soli
3:13 Dred Scott
4:46 The 14th Amendment
8:02 Wong Kim Ark
10:30 Another look at the 14th Amendment
Sources and further reading:
Garrett Epps’s law review article about the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment has everything you’ll ever need to know about the history of birthright citizenship in the US: https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1607u0026context=aulr
The Library of Congress has a great map showing which countries of the world offer unconditional birthright citizenship like the US: https://maint.loc.gov/law/help/birthright-citizenship/birthright-citizenship-map.pdf
The 1861 map of the US we use a few times in the piece is itself a strikingly rich document that I could stare at forever: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701sm.gct00482/?sp=33
Some other original documents we use in the piece:
Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-01-29/pdf/2025-02007.pdf
The Ipsos poll containing the question about support for ending birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f548560f100205ef/e656ddda-full.pdf
The Dred Scott decision: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep060/usrep060393a/usrep060393a.pdf
President Andrew Johnson’s letter vetoing the 1866 Civil Rights Act: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/veto-message-438
Congress’s debates over the 14th Amendment (we quoted from page 498): https://www.congress.gov/congressional-globe/congress-39-session-1-part-1.pdf
The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-04239_00_00-022-0291-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-04239_00_00-022-0291-0000.pdf
The Wong Kim Ark decision: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep169/usrep169649/usrep169649.pdf
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