Birthright citizenship

Independent, UK -   If the Supreme Court were to uphold President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, it could render thousands of children stateless and force any parent to prove their citizenship to ensure their child has access to healthcare, social services, education and other basic social services....

Legal experts and advocates alike have warned of the far-reaching implications if the Supreme Court backs Trump that would first impact immigrants and their children, increasing the population of undocumented immigrants and revoking essential healthcare from pregnant women and babies.

“It would mean, essentially, the creation of second-class residents of the United States, people who can never become fully part of the American community – something that was promised as part of the 14th Amendment,” Noah Baron, the assistant director of litigation at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, told The Independent.

But it would extend to those who are already U.S. citizens, forcing people to prove their legitimacy with copies of their parents' birth certificates or risk losing access to key services.

At the Supreme Court, Justice Gorsuch asked the government's lawyer point blank: are Native Americans born today birthright citizens?  The Solicitor General's answer: "I have to think that through."

Moira Donegan, The Guardian -  To deny citizenship to those born to parents in the country illegally, as the Trump administration aims to do, would create a permanent underclass in the US – people who live their entire lives in America, but are not entitled to call themselves Americans, people who must support themselves here but largely cannot do so in the formal economy, people who are subjected to this nation’s laws for their entire lives but who have no say in electing the representatives who make them. It would create a class of persons excluded from the American community and the American dream by virtue of their heredity. Critics of the Trump administration’s policy point out that ending birthright citizenship would create bureaucratic chaos and potentially cripple the American economy – all legitimate concerns.

But the true danger of the Trump regime’s attack on the birthright citizenship clause is not financial, but moral. It would change what it means to be an American, and in so doing it would change what America means. Ending birthright citizenship would effectively end the United States’ experiment in striving to be a creedal nation that delivers democracy to a vast and diverse population of equals. It would make us instead something more vulgar, more common, and less special: a nation defined by ethnicity and heredity, those banal accidents that carry no righteous vision or moral aspiration, but only meaningless inheritance; a nation defined not by the hopes for its people’s future but by the unchangeable facts of their past.