Birthright citizenship has become a subject of debate after the United States president, Donald Trump, announced his plans to terminate the right to citizenship for babies born on US soil to non-citizens.
Interestingly every few years, the common law concept of birthright citizenship or ‘jus soli’ comes back into the news.
While Trump said during an interview with Axios on a new HBO series, “We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits,” there are more than 30 countries, including Canada and Mexico, that have similar policies.
In the United States, Birthright citizenship may be conferred by jus soli or jus sanguinis.
Pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), U.S. citizenship is automatically granted to any person born within and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, Wikipedia reports.
Here are three things you need to know about Birthright citizenship:
1. It is in the US Constitution
The issue of citizenship was brought into focus by a Supreme Court ruling in 1857 that declared that blacks — even the daughters and sons of freed slaves — were not U.S. citizens.
In 1868, the U.S. ratified the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The first sentence reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
2. Birthright citizenship is a New World philosophy
A San Diego sociologist John Skrentny told NPR in 2010, the U.S. is an anomaly in the world when it comes to this issue.
Most of the rest of the world, for example, give people citizenship based on a concept known as jus sanguinis, literally “by right of blood.”
“The idea here is that the nation, the people are bonded together through ancestry,” Skrentny said.
“The other notion of nationhood is generally understood as a civic notion of nationhood. And this is the idea that folks are bonded together by where they are, by locality and by the ideas that they might share. And that’s what we have in the United States. There are folks who say that you know, to be an American is to embrace an idea.”
It is, Skrentny added, a philosophy that works well for countries made up of immigrants, such as the U.S. and Canada.
3. The existing rule of unrestricted birthright citizenship has a number of advantages. But it also opens the door to some practices that may not be favourable for especially the various forms of “birth tourism” as well as create perverse incentives for illegal entrants and overstays.
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