legal win<\/span><\/a> for the Trump administration \u2014 but the broader debate placed a spotlight on a flaw the Founders and post-Civil War Congress never contemplated: the deliberate weaponization of birthright citizenship by adversarial nations.<\/p>\nOne slice of the problem reveals the amendment\u2019s most cynical exploitation: birth tourism, especially by China.<\/p>\n
This is an organized, for-profit industry that treats American passports as a commodity. Author and political consultant Peter Schweizer recently documented what he describes as a \u201cmassive effort\u201d by Chinese nationals \u2014 many with Communist Party ties \u2014 to secure U.S. citizenship for children raised entirely in China. He estimates that between 750,000 and 1.5 million Chinese-born U.S. citizens are currently being educated under CCP indoctrination.<\/p>\n
The business model is brazen. Chinese companies advertise packages costing $40,000 to $80,000. Pregnant women fly in, stay at maternity hotels \u2014 often in California \u2014 deliver in American hospitals, obtain U.S. birth certificates and passports, and return home. Federal prosecutors have worked to dismantle high-profile rings: in one Southern California case, operators of USA Happy Baby and similar outfits were convicted of conspiracy and money laundering for running maternity houses that served thousands of Chinese clients. The U.S. government has identified hundreds of such firms operating inside China with the sole purpose of gaming our immigration system.<\/p>\n
Birth tourism is not the numerical majority \u2014 illegal residents produce far more births \u2014 but it\u2019s uniquely corrosive. These children are raised abroad with zero lived connection to America. At 21, they gain full voting rights, access to classified jobs, and the power to sponsor their parents for green cards. It is demographic arbitrage. Beijing is cultivating a reserve of future \u201canchor citizens\u201d capable of influencing American elections and policy from within, while owing their primary loyalty elsewhere.<\/p>\n
The clause that has long been glossed over \u2014 \u201csubject to the jurisdiction thereof\u201d \u2014 will be central to the administration in oral arguments. The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 to overturn the Dred Scott<\/i> decision and secure citizenship for the children of freed slaves. Its authors understood \u201cjurisdiction\u201d to mean full political allegiance, not mere physical presence. Diplomats\u2019 children, children of invading armies, and those whose parents owed no permanent duty to the United States were explicitly excluded<\/i>.<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court\u2019s 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark<\/i> decision granted citizenship to the child of legal, domiciled<\/i> Chinese immigrants, but nothing about illegal entrants or short-term visitors. Illegal immigration on today\u2019s scale and the jet-age business of birth tourism simply did not exist.<\/p>\n
As Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro<\/span> has argued, the phrase \u201csubject to the jurisdiction thereof\u201d means you are NOT subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign nation. He makes the point \u2014 if an illegal immigrant from Mexico gives birth on U.S. soil, that child remains a Mexican citizen under Mexican law \u2014 the child is NOT solely subject to American jurisdiction.<\/p>\nAs of 2023, the Pew Research Center estimates roughly 320,000 children are born each year to unauthorized or temporary-migrant mothers, meaning approximately 1 in 10 children born in the United States is born to an illegal immigrant mother.<\/p>\n
The vast majority of these children are born to parents who intend to stay and raise them here. Those children receive the same benefits as any other American citizen, and they can eventually sponsor their parents for legal residency \u2014 a process commonly known as chain migration. In the meantime, 59% of non-citizen households use one or more major federal welfare programs, compared to 33% of native-born households. It is these citizen children \u2014 not their illegal parents, who are often eligible for direct benefits \u2014 who strain schools, hospitals, and education services.<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court may rule that the executive branch cannot, for now, rewrite 150 years of precedent. But the debate itself has been clarifying. The 14th Amendment was not written to hand foreign nationals a backdoor into American democracy nor to grant them a nine-month maternity vacation.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s long past time to unravel that mystery.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first sentence of Section I of the 14th Amendment \u2014 a small piece in our grand Constitutional puzzle\u00a0 \u2014 has left Justice Samuel Alito and his colleagues considering it a puzzle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mystery \u2014 along with the rest of America. It reads: \u201cAll persons born or naturalized in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22670,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22669","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-current-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}