By Ernesto Castañeda

American University

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon announce its ruling on Birthright Citizenship. If it sides with the Trump administration, it will revoke the practice of automatically obtaining citizenship by birth in U.S. territories. The outcome of this case has the potential not only to change how immigration law functions but also how citizenship is defined for everyone in the United States. Doing away with it would permanently damage the Supreme Court’s reputation.

Birthright Citizenship is part of the 14th Amendment and has been a right guaranteed to anyone born within the country since 1868. The amendment was originally implemented to guarantee citizenship to formerly enslaved people and means that anyone born on American soil is an American citizen, regardless of their parents’ citizenship at birth. Slaves were not considered citizens nor had the same political rights, and their status was inherited through maternal lines and thus also affected the children slave-owners had with enslaved mothers.

Revoking Birthright Citizenship would immediately bring into question the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of children born each year, both to citizens and to undocumented or temporary residents with permission to work and study in the United States, and not officially representing a foreign country.  It would reinstate the inheritance of status that existed during slavery, where a mother’s status, in this case, documentation, would be passed down to her children, possibly for generations. It would create a group of people in the U.S. with no rights, greatly deepening inequality and democratic erosion.

Previous court decisions have upheld Birthright Citizenship regardless of the parents’ immigration status. There is a strong precedent for birthright citizenship. Even during previous periods of immigration restriction in the US, like during the years following the Chinese Exclusion Act, the U.S.-born children of undocumented Chinese parents were American citizens. Changes to birthright citizenship would directly impact newborns from undocumented parents as well as the children of foreign workers with permission to reside in the country. Systems like this have existed before in countries like Germany, but were abandoned due to their impracticality and the enduring inequalities they created.

A small group is fighting to end birthright citizenship. Most Americans do not have a problem with birthright citizenship; 64% of Americans support it. The widespread impact of ending birthright citizenship would be felt not just by everyday people but also by foreign-born CEOs, scientists, healthcare professionals, and, yes, agricultural and service workers. It would impact U.S. innovation for decades to come. It would deter people from immigrating and bringing new ideas and approaches to common problems. The U.S. would no longer be the main global hub of intellectual exchange and creativity that it has been for decades.

Ernesto Castañeda is a political, social, and cultural analyst.