US Should Stop Being One Of Only Two First-World Countries That Allows Anchor Babies
By: Mike Davis February 03, 2025 thefederalist.com
America is an outlier among developed nations in offering unrestricted birthright citizenship. Not a single European country does.
By any reasonable measure, unrestricted birthright citizenship, the practice of giving citizenship to almost anyone born in America, is an irrational policy. It abdicates the composition of the nation’s citizenry to chance, instead of bringing it within our control. It communicates a deep unseriousness about our sovereignty and national security to the rest of the world. Without it, we can continue to open our country to foreign talent and victims of genocide or state violence. Together, the president and Congress can choose to narrow or widen the pipeline of legal immigrants.
In 2025, America is an outlier among developed nations in offering unrestricted birthright citizenship. Corporate media outlets will remind you that we aren’t alone, that around 30 other countries do the same. But what they usually don’t report is that those countries are the likes of Grenada, Nicaragua, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados. Not a single European country follows our lead. Nor do Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and the list goes on. Only one country in the world with a per-capita GDP anywhere near the United States’ matches our policy — Canada. And Canada historically hasn’t had much to worry about on the illegal immigration front, because their only land border is shared with us.
More than that, the global trend is consonant with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order ending unrestricted birthright citizenship. The United Kingdom, which had birthright citizenship dating back to the “ancient common law,” did away with it in the 1980s. Ireland got rid of it in 2005. New Zealand a year later. Germany, which tried to grab the mantle of “leader of the free world” during President Trump’s first term, doesn’t grant citizenship to a child of foreign parents unless one parent possesses a permanent right of residence and has legally resided in the country for at least eight years.
But somehow President Trump is “cruel” for calling for the end of unrestricted birthright citizenship in our own nation? Why would a nation affirmatively choose to create an incentive for illegal immigration and prioritize illegal immigrants’ children over law-abiding immigrants who apply for citizenship and follow the legal process? If it were a one-for-one trade, would you rather bestow citizenship on someone we as a nation and a people deem worthy of it, or on the basis of their parents’ success in entering the U.S. illegally?
Naturalization
To be a citizen of the United States is an enormous privilege. It grants entry to the polity of the greatest government that the world has ever known. In our republic, the people are sovereign and citizens shape the course of the nation’s future. Critically, they may vote. They have access to a powerful passport and are entitled to the rights protected by our Constitution, including the right to bear arms as protected by the Second Amendment.
Naturalized citizens generally must be able to read, write, and speak English; be of “good moral character;” pass a civics exam; have been a permanent resident for a duration of years; and swear an oath of allegiance that they “will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Those who become citizens after this process have embedded themselves in American society and in our ways of life; the hope is that along the way they have acquired the habits of liberty.
Why go to such lengths to ensure naturalized citizens adhere to our laws and respect our constitutional ideals, if we then freely dole out citizenship to the children of those who have thumbed their noses at our immigration laws and at the ideals of democratic self-governance that brought them about? What message does that send to those who completed the heavy lift of securing legal citizenship by naturalization?
Historical Context of 14th Amendment
Opponents of President Trump’s order point to the 14th Amendment, ratified in the wake of the Civil War, that guarantees citizenship to those “born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” But even they concede that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause was intended to overrule the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott opinion and extend citizenship to newly freed slaves. At the time the amendment was ratified in 1868, there was no clear federal law defining who could and couldn’t enter the United States — and so no equivalent of the modern-era notion of an “illegal immigrant.” Simply put, the aims of the era’s constitutional amendments were far removed from the ideas that today’s liberals read into the text.
The figures at stake are vast. In 2018, the Pew Research Center reported that in the last decade or so, somewhere between 6 and 9 percent of babies born in this country were to illegal immigrant parents — meaning at times the figure was close to one out of every ten births. Even at the low end, the number of those births — around 250,000 in 2016 — was larger than the total number of births in any state other than California or Texas.
Others have detailed the practical benefits of ending birthright citizenship, including the grave national security risks of the practice as well as the enormous fiscal burden attending it. But more important still is that our nation’s survival depends on having a citizenry that understands its precious inheritance. We are a nation bound together by a common commitment to the rule of law and to a republic founded on enlightenment ideals. To sustain our nation, we must take basic minimum steps to guard the privilege of entry into our polity.
Every developed country other than Canada has gotten rid of birthright citizenship — if they ever had it in the first place. It’s long past time we joined their ranks.
Mike Davis is the founder and president of the Article III Project.
