Cit­i­zen­ship Fol­lies

The admin­is­tra­tion was nev­er going to win the birthright cit­i­zen­ship case before the Supreme Court. Chang­ing some­thing as fun­da­men­tal as our cur­rent prac­tices regard­ing mem­ber­ship in the nation­al com­mu­ni­ty shouldn’t be changed by exec­u­tive order.
But the real losers from Tuesday’s deci­sion are the Amer­i­can peo­ple.
That’s because the high court didn’t just strike down Trump’s Jan­u­ary 2025 exec­u­tive order on “Pro­tect­ing the Mean­ing and Val­ue of Amer­i­can Cit­i­zen­ship.” Rather, by a 5–4 vote, it said that Con­gress did not have the author­i­ty to change our cur­rent prac­tice of grant­i­ng U.S. cit­i­zen­ship to almost every­one born here, even chil­dren born to tourists, for­eign stu­dents, visa work­ers, or ille­gal alie …