On May 30 of this year, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign released the following statement, “As part of my plan to secure the border, on Day One of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.”
Trump continued, “My policy will choke off a major incentive for continued illegal immigration, deter more migrants from coming, and encourage many of the aliens Joe Biden has unlawfully let into our country to go back to their home countries.” You can read Trump’s full statement here.
This is an excellent statement from Trump. A critic may raise the point that Trump talked about this as part of his 2016 campaign, but never pursued the issue seriously during his term in office. That’s a fair criticism, one that I share. But his inaction during his first term in office doesn’t negate the truth of what he said in his press release. Further, as far as I’m aware, no other current Republican candidate has made a statement on birthright citizenship reform.
Under the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment, the children born on American soil to illegal aliens, birth tourists, foreign students, etc. are granted the status of American citizens, regardless of the citizenship or immigration status of their parents. In other words, it is foreigners, not the American people, who determine who becomes a citizen and who does not. This situation is entirely unacceptable to anyone who believes in the principles of Westphalian sovereignty established under the Peace of Westphalia, in which the nation-state was established as the highest form of government, where each nation-state was treated like a legal person in international law, and where the people of each nation-state could order their own internal affairs as it saw fit.
I’ve written on the issue of birthright citizenship (BRC) reform in the past, but it has been a while and the importance of the issue remains. For these reasons, I’ve decided to write a series on this topic. In this author’s opinion, reforming BRC to remove the nation-destroying incentives that encourage foreigners to violate American immigration law is the single most important legal step needed to end Rome’s illegal alien invasion of the United States. Note, I do not say that it’s the only legal step needed, but it is the most important one. It’s more important than building a wall, which was the primary immigration initiative of the first Trump administration. You could argue that reforming BRC is, in effect, a sort of internal, invisible, legal wall.
The logic of BRC reform is simple, if you remove a huge incentive for illegal immigration, you’re going to get less illegal immigration.
Lux Lucet 