Becoming American: What Will It Take?

On June 30, the Supreme Court handed President Trump a decisive loss on one of the central goals of his immigration agenda. In a 6-3 decision, the Court struck down his attempt to restrict birthright citizenship, reaffirming that the Fourteenth Amendment protects citizenship for nearly everyone born on American soil. Just over a month later, Trump tried again.

On August 6, the administration issued two new executive orders aimed at narrowing birthright citizenship in specific cases and cracking down on “birth tourism,” the practice of traveling to the United States to give birth so that a child receives American citizenship. The new orders, though narrower in scope than Trump’s original attempt, continue the same project. Advocacy groups have already returned to court to challenge them.

Trump’s persistence raises a larger question than whether these particular orders will survive another round of litigation. Birthright citizenship determines who becomes American without first having to prove that they deserve to be. Changing that principle would alter one of the United States' oldest answers to a basic question: who belongs here?

The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War. Its Citizenship Clause declares that anyone born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction is an American citizen. The provision directly rejected the logic of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the infamous Supreme Court decision that denied citizenship to African Americans. Citizenship would no longer depend on whether a government considered a particular class of people worthy of membership in the country.

The principle eventually became much broader than its Reconstruction-era context. In United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898, the Supreme Court affirmed the citizenship of a man born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents. For more than a century since, birth on American soil has generally been enough. The exceptions have remained extremely narrow.

Trump has repeatedly challenged that understanding since returning to office. His first executive order argued that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes certain children whose parents are undocumented or only temporarily present in the country. His administration has also emphasized birth tourism, arguing that foreign nationals can exploit American citizenship by deliberately traveling to the United States to give birth. The latest orders attempt to pursue those concerns within what the administration says are exceptions recognized by the Supreme Court.

Granted, part of that argument has an intuitive appeal. Someone who travels to the United States solely to give birth may appear to be taking advantage of a generous system. Illegal immigration remains a legitimate policy problem, and governments have every reason to enforce immigration laws.

A child, however, does not choose the circumstances of their arrival.

That distinction is part of what has made birthright citizenship so consequential. Someone can be born to parents who arrived in the country yesterday and possess the same citizenship as someone whose family has lived here for generations. The law does not ask what language their parents speak at home or how long they have been here. The child is born here, so the child is American — end of story.

This notion carries particular weight for a country like the United States. Most nations have some combination of ancestry, ethnicity, language, religion, and more at the center of their national identity. America has always had a harder time defining itself that way. Its population came from virtually everywhere, often through migration and under circumstances far from voluntary.

The United States has hardly lived up to an ideal of universal belonging throughout its history. Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and countless others were formally or informally excluded from American life at different points. Nevertheless, citizenship law after the Civil War established that American identity did not have to remain hereditary.

Restricting birthright citizenship pushes in the opposite direction. It makes the status of an American-born child depend more heavily on the status and conduct of their parents. Even if the current effort begins with limited categories, the broader political argument is already clear: birth in the United States should not necessarily be enough.

Therefore, this is an unusual position for a movement fixated on restoring “traditional” America.

“Make America Great Again” is explicitly nostalgic. Trump’s political project regularly invokes a country whose older values have supposedly been weakened by immigration, globalization, and cultural change. Birthright citizenship, however, is hardly a recent progressive experiment. Its constitutional foundation dates to 1868, and its modern interpretation has survived for well over a century.

If anything, narrowing it represents a revision of the very American identity that MAGA claims to defend.

The disagreement, therefore, goes beyond immigration policy; it concerns the type of national identity the United States wants to preserve. One vision treats citizenship as an open civic status, capable of absorbing generations of newcomers into the same political community. Another places greater emphasis on the circumstances through which a person became connected to the country in the first place.

Trump may continue testing how far the latter vision can go. His first attempt failed at the Supreme Court, while his new orders have already reopened the legal battle. Regardless of the final results, the debate should not be treated as a technical dispute over one sentence in the Fourteenth Amendment.

The United States has never had a single ancestry to fall back on. For millions of Americans, the national story begins with someone arriving from somewhere else and their children becoming unquestionably American. Once that certainty starts to disappear, the meaning of American citizenship — and the very meaning of “American” — disappears with it.