This specific element of illegal immigration has been with us for decades. 'Birthright citizenship' is total insanity, a wrongful interepretation of the 14th Amendment to The United States Constitution.

 

Trump’s efforts to reverse birthright citizenship may succeed with or without SCOTUS

Several bills, most notably the Birthright Citizenship Act in 2025, seek to end or sharply restrict automatic birthright citizenship by amending the Immigration and Nationality Act. Will it pass constitutional muster?

By Amanda Head  justthenews.com 6-30-26

The Supreme Court is expected to rule Tuesday in Trump v. Barbara, a high-stakes challenge to President Donald Trump's 2025 executive order that seeks to restrict automatic birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment for children of illegal immigrants and temporary visa holders. In the event the court rules against Trump, a number of Congressional Republicans have legislation pending that could practically accomplish what a different ruling would have done.

"American citizenship is a priceless privilege that must be protected, not exploited. We must restore integrity to our immigration system, uphold the rule of law, and protect the value of American citizenship for generations to come," Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, told Just The News. 

Several bills, most notably the Birthright Citizenship Act introduced by Babin and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one day after Trump's inauguration in 2025 (and similar versions in recent Congresses), seek to end or sharply restrict automatic birthright citizenship by amending the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). 

These measures would reinterpret the 14th Amendment’s “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause to grant citizenship at birth only to children with at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen, national, lawful permanent resident (LPR) residing in the U.S., or an LPR serving in the military. 

CIS: 225,000 to 250,000 births to illegal immigrants occurred in 2023

The exploitation of U.S. birthright citizenship through “anchor babies” involves pregnant illegal immigrants, predominantly from Latin America, giving birth to children in U.S. territory, and thus, automatically becoming citizens, which may later serve as a basis for family sponsorship or complicate deportation proceedings. 

The Center for Immigration Studies estimates 225,000 to 250,000 births to illegal immigrants occurred in 2023—nearly 7 percent of total U.S. births — with the large majority involving parents from Mexico and Central America who, in the aggregate, account for roughly 68 percent of the unauthorized population.   

While minor U.S.-citizen children cannot sponsor parents until age 21 (per 1976 amendments to immigration law), critics have argued that these births create long-term “anchors” for chain migration and mixed-status households, generating substantial taxpayer costs for education, healthcare and welfare while raising questions about enforcement priorities in families with citizen children. 

Estimates suggest millions of U.S.-born children of unauthorized Latin American immigrants now reside in the country.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The birthright citizenship bonanza

Birthright citizenship abuse via birth tourism, when foreign nationals travel to the United States on temporary visas specifically to give birth, is an issue that Trump addressed early in his second term.

Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer detailed this practice extensively in his 2026 book, "The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon," in which he described how China has industrialized the practice on a large scale through an organized industry. 

Chinese officials have estimated around 50,000 Chinese nationals per year give birth in the U.S. or territories like Saipan, while some scholars place the figure closer to 100,000 annually, according to Marketplace’s China.

Schweizer reports more than 1,000 birth tourism companies operate in China focused on the U.S., offering concierge packages costing up to $100,000 that include visa guidance, medical arrangements, and sometimes instructions on concealing pregnancies or claiming indigent to reduce hospital bills. 

China leads this activity by a wide margin, but Russia has also participated notably, with dedicated firms in South Florida like Miami Mama. South Florida NBC affiliate NBC6 reported that Miami Mama LLC was raided by the FBI in 2017 and has been operating in Miami since 2009. The company offers packages ranging from just under $20,000 to over $53,000 that include all the medicines and procedures that come along with childbirth. NBC also noted that the owner was never convicted of the business's operations.

Independent estimates from the Center for Immigration Studies suggest total U.S. birth tourism births range from about 20,000–36,000 annually in recent years (a small fraction of overall U.S. births), though precise official figures are unavailable because the U.S. does not systematically track parents’ nationalities or travel intent on birth certificates  

The CDC has reported roughly 9,600 births to foreign mothers listing addresses outside the U.S. and territories in 2024 as one limited proxy.

Aside from legislation to end birthright citizenship, there are other bills proposed to end the birth tourism industry. These bills would disrupt profit-driven networks arranging travel, housing, medical care and visas for pregnant foreigners seeking U.S. citizenship for their children. 

Key bills include Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s Ban Birth Tourism Act (S. 1812, 2025), which amends the INA to deem such visitors inadmissible on B visas, and Sen. John Cornyn’s BACK OFF Act (2026), which imposes criminal penalties on facilitators for fraud and organized schemes while creating a dedicated enforcement task force. 

Amanda Head is White House Correspondent for Just The News. You can follow her here. 

 

Definitely! Words have meaning and how they are used makes all the difference!

 

When Extremists Run the Government

Two can certainly play the “extremist” game.

J.B. Shurk | June 26, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

Politicians, government bureaucrats, central bankers, spy agencies, and mainstream news outlets lie to us every day.  For some people, the previous sentence is patently obvious.  For others, that sentence represents “fringe” thinking.  For certain law enforcement agencies in North America and Europe, that sentence reveals potentially dangerous “extremism.”  

“Extremism” is such a morally squishy word.  It means nothing.  It suggests that the average beliefs of the average person in the average part of an average town are, on average, correct.  Should a person’s beliefs move too far away from the “average,” then that person will eventually fall into the “extremist” abyss.  Of course, the average person long believed that the sun and planets revolved around the Earth.  The average person long believed that bloodletting cured disease. The average person long believed in magic.  Relativity, microbiology, atomic physics, and quantum mechanics belonged to the “extremists.” 

Defining “extremism” depends upon which populations are included when calculating an “average.”  To the average American, Islamic terrorism is religious extremism.  To the average jihadi in the Middle East, terrorism is part of the Islamic faith.  One man’s “extremist” is another man’s “religious cleric.”  Unsurprisingly, as more jihadists migrate to America, the more supportive of Islamic terrorism the Democrat Party becomes.  We now have several Hamas-supporting members of Congress who define Americans opposed to Islamic conquest as “extremists.”  For a decade, Americans were told to be on the lookout for Islamic terrorism: “If you see something, say something.”  Now, if you see something and say something, you will most likely be denounced as an “Islamophobic bigot.”  If the definition of “extremism” can shift 180 degrees since the Islamic terror attacks on September 11, 2001, then “extremism” is a nebulous political label.

In the United States, citizens overwhelmingly support federal legislation that would require photo ID, proof of citizenship, and other safeguards to ensure that elections across the country are free, fair, lawful, constitutional, and secure.  Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans in Congress prefer to maintain the current “on your honor” system that can be gamed to permit large-scale vote fraud and rigged elections.  By any polling measure, Congress’s point of view is far from that of the average American.  Members of Congress, in other words, are the extremists!  If you listen to the extremists in Congress, however, our elections have never been more secure.

In fact, when you look at some of the most important policy issues today, it becomes quite clear that Congress is ground zero for extremism.  Most Americans want Congress to stop spending more money than it receives in taxes; Congress has put us forty trillion dollars in debt.  Most Americans want secure borders and an end to illegal immigration; Congress has enabled an evil human trafficking system to exist for over fifty years that rewards criminals and has flooded the country with somewhere between fifty and a hundred million (nobody knows for sure!) illegal aliens.  Most Americans are concerned about lowering fuel and food prices; Congress has wasted trillions of dollars on “Green New Deal” scams that raise the household costs for fuel and food.  Most Americans believe that college admissions and job hiring should be based on a person’s merit, skill, character, knowledge, and hard work; Congress continues to divide Americans by the color of their skin and their sexual eccentricities.  Most Americans believe that men and women are biologically distinct; Congress pretends that biological sex is an imaginary social construct.  Most Americans believe that a dollar saved today should maintain the same value ten, fifty, or even a hundred years from now; Congress thinks printing and spending dollars, depreciating the U.S. currency, and artificially spiking the dollar-denominated valuation of stocks, homes, and other assets is the best way to fake a constantly “improving” economy.  Most Americans believe that we should refrain from military engagements overseas whenever possible; Congress can’t ever get enough of forever-wars.  Most Americans want their representatives to work for American citizens; Congress believes it should work on behalf of non-Americans all over the world.  Most Americans view their country as a nation; Congress views the United States as both a global empire and a home for every person on the planet.

On the most important issues, Congress is filled to the brim with extremists.  They should be put on official security lists and monitored whenever they travel more than fifty feet from their taxpayer-financed homes.  Instead, in the United States and throughout the West, the extremists run things.

That would explain why Christians are targeted for their beliefs.  That would explain why the governments of Europe and North America have flooded their countries with unassimilable malcontents from the third world.  That would explain why men are allowed into women’s restrooms and why pedophiles are accorded more respect than heterosexual married couples.  That would explain why Western governments have declared war on “climate change” when most people don’t care about elites’ obsession with the weather.  That would explain why so many European and North American politicians are willing to risk a nuclear war with the Russian Federation, while ordinary citizens have never been less willing to fight for the defense of their respective countries.

Perhaps the more that ordinary Westerners realize that it is the people running their governments, universities, and bureaucratic institutions who are most extreme, the less willing they become to do what those extremists say.  Six years ago, the extremists locked down the world because of COVID.  They closed churches, bankrupted businesses, disrupted childhood education, prevented family members from being together, and killed a lot of people with fake “vaccines.”  If public health extremists tried to pull another COVID today, would ordinary Westerners do what the politicians and bureaucrats say?  Or would Western citizens conclude that extremist governments endanger both their lives and liberties?

Two can certainly play the “extremist” game.  Two-hundred-fifty years ago, the British Empire believed the patriots of America’s thirteen colonies to be extremists.  The patriots disagreed.  They considered it extreme for members of Parliament to make decisions on their behalf while residing 3,500 miles away.  The two sets of “extremists” fought it out, and we American “extremists” now celebrate July 4 as Independence Day. 

My question is this: How much longer can the governments of Europe and North America continue to ignore the wishes of their national populations before we find ourselves in a situation where there is an explosion of public declarations of independence from the political and bureaucratic extremists who have ruined people’s lives?  For, as much as Western governments appear to be betting on mass surveillance, central bank digital currencies, censorship, propaganda, and technocratic oppression as weapons of control to help maintain power well into the future, there’s nothing so unpredictable as a fed-up populace ready for a little revolution.  When enough people recognize themselves as average representatives of the public will and their government officials as extremists representing only their own interests, things get interesting.  Being labeled an “extremist” by government extremists means nothing.

One might even ask: Isn’t globalism tantamount to extremism when a politician puts other nations’ interests ahead of his own?  Surely, when a government official undermines the nation he serves by championing open borders policies or wasting taxpayer dollars on “climate change” boondoggles at the U.N., that official deserves to be labeled an “extremist.”  Globalists certainly don’t represent the average North American or European citizen.  But they do represent the average cosmopolitan bureaucrat who sees no country as home.  

In a world of nations whose populations require different things, globalism is extremist.  In a world of varying cultures and competing beliefs, forced multiculturalism is extremist.  In a world where some people wish to be free, international government is extremist.  

Fighting for liberty is not extremist.  It is government tyranny that is extreme.

 

Thank Heaven for Texas! The U. S. Senate could, no should, no MUST take a lesson from Texas.

 

Republicans work the legal system, achieve victory in Texas

In a masterclass of legal jujitsu, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and America First Legal delivered a decisive blow to one of the Biden administration’s stealthiest immigration maneuvers.

Monty Donohew | June 25, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

In a masterclass of legal jujitsu, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and America First Legal delivered a decisive blow to one of the Biden administration’s stealthiest immigration maneuvers.  On the same day they filed suit in the Northern District of Texas, the Trump Justice Department relented and refused to oppose the suit.  U.S. district judge Reed O’Connor entered a final consent judgment vacating the 2024 Biden-era rule that expanded immigration judges’ authority to “administratively close” removal proceedings indefinitely.  The policy is dead nationwide. 

The rule sounded technical.  In practice, it turned immigration courts into parking lots.  Cases were paused without resolution, allowing hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens to remain in the United States, obtain work authorization, and access benefits while their removal proceedings sat dormant.  It was de facto relief, backdoor amnesty by administrative fiat, without congressional approval or merits adjudication.  The American people were not consulted or advised, and of course they did not consent.

The immigration court backlog had already ballooned past 3.5 million cases under Biden policies.  Administrative closures rose sharply, from roughly 278,000 in 2021 to nearly 392,000 by 2025.  Many claims that would fail on the merits simply disappeared into indefinite limbo.  This is how one party that lectures the other on “democracy” dictates rather than legislates open borders. 

Texas and America First Legal correctly argued that the Department of Justice and Executive Office for Immigration Review lacked statutory authority to create such broad, open-ended amnesty.  The Immigration and Nationality Act and Administrative Procedure Act do not empower executive agencies to engineer nationwide stays through docket manipulation.  Judge O’Connor agreed.  The Trump DOJ, under acting attorney general Todd Blanche, did not defend the prior administration’s overreach.  It consented.  The result: a permanent nationwide injunction ending the practice.

What makes this victory especially satisfying is the strategy.  Democrats and their aligned advocacy groups perfected the art of suing a friendly (or their own) administration in a friendly jurisdiction to lock in policy wins via consent decrees or judgments.  Blue-state attorneys general, environmental groups, and immigration advocates have long filed in districts with sympathetic judges, often securing settlements that entrench expansive interpretations of law, block enforcement, or create new entitlements. 

These decrees are hard to unwind later, even when administrations change, because they carry the force of court order.  The tactic is realism in objective (achieve concrete law enforcement) and disruptive in execution (bypass legislative gridlock and hostile forums through venue shopping and rapid settlement).

Texas simply applied realism and disruption in reverse.  Paxton sued in a Texas federal court with a proven conservative-leaning judge.  The objective was straightforward: Kill a rule that undermined enforcement and rewarded unlawful presence.  The tactic was equally direct: File, obtain consent from the new administration committed to sovereignty, and secure a binding judgment the same day.  No years of appeals.  No endless discovery.  Just swift restoration of the principle that removal proceedings should resolve cases on the merits or lead to actual removal.

This is effective counter-strategy.  It’s not hypocrisy because it restores norms and supports existing law rather than denigrating it.  For years, the left used courts as an auxiliary Legislature when Congress would not deliver preferred outcomes on immigration, environment, or regulation.  Conservatives are now demonstrating that the same tools can serve the national interest when wielded with discipline.  The difference lies in the objective: One side sought to dilute sovereignty and create parallel systems of relief; Texas sought to restore it.

In the broader context, Biden-era policies drove record encounters, exploded the backlog, and expanded non-merits outcomes (dismissals, terminations, and closures).  Asylum grant rates remained low for adjudicated cases, yet hundreds of thousands effectively gained indefinite presence through administrative maneuvering.  The tactic helped create the migrant predation funnel the administration only recently exposed.  The consent decree does not magically clear millions of cases, but it removes a deliberate tool that made the problem worse.  It forces future resolutions toward substance rather than perpetual pause.

Critics will complain about the speed or the use of consent.  They should direct that complaint to the years of precedent set by the other side.  When one faction treats courts as policy weapons, the other side eventually learns to wield them, too.  Texas chose a realistic goal, ending a specific abuse that functioned as amnesty, and executed it with disruptive efficiency.

Court after court has dismantled Biden immigration initiatives, from parole expansions to family unity programs.  Each reversal chips away at the prior regime’s architecture of non-enforcement.  The administrative closure rule was one more pillar.  It is now gone.

Sovereignty is not restored by rhetoric alone.  It requires consistent, realistic action that disrupts failed policies and replaces them with enforceable ones.  Texas delivered both.  The left’s own playbook, turned against the policies it once protected, produced a clear result: Removal proceedings must mean something again.  That is realism achieved through smart, disruptive tactics.  More, please! 

 

This outstanding summary is by far one of the most important posts I have ever presented! It represents an urgent alert for every American!

 

The Decline Of Academia

A defense of Western meritocracy against the academically destructive DEI incursion.

Lars Møller | June 25, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

In The Decline of the West (1918–1922), Oswald Spengler introduces a biological metaphor, comparing Western civilization to a living organism. Within this concept, Judeo-Christian ethics forms the pulsating heart—the wellspring of compassion, human dignity, and the moral imperative to see the face of the other. Yet it is the brain—cold, discerning, hierarchical, and relentlessly oriented towards truth—that has propelled the West to unparalleled heights of inquiry, innovation, and ordered liberty. That brain is the academy, predicated on uncompromising meritocracy. When this cerebral faculty falters, the body politic convulses into senescence.

In these years, prominent universities of the West—Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale—find themselves infected with a deadly ideological pathogen: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Reaching far beyond administrative reform, this is the substitution of social activism for academic excellence, racial quotas for individual achievement, and therapeutic empathy for rigorous judgment. The consequences are as predictable as they are devastating. Instead of delivering “justice delayed,” legislators and administrators are destroying an incomparable “culture of knowledge” that has taken centuries to build. Meanwhile, the public will have to pay the price for a slow-motion euthanasia of Western civilization itself.

The greatness of the Western university was never accidental. From the medieval foundations of Bologna and Oxford, through the Renaissance revival of classical learning, to the Enlightenment citadels of empirical science and humanistic scholarship, these institutions embodied the Socratic pursuit of arete—excellence—and the Aristotelian conviction that the polity flourishes when the best rule. Standardized examinations, peer-reviewed publication, and the disinterested quest for truth created a crucible in which talent, disciplined by intellect, could transcend accidents of birth. 

Fluid class mobility followed: the son of a Yorkshire miner or a New England tradesman could, through demonstrated capacity, ascend to influence. This was meritocracy as the practical expression of Western individualism, from the Homeric hero to the Lockean rights-bearer to the Humboldtian ideal of Bildung. It presupposed that reality is knowable, hierarchies are natural, and justice resides in matching deserts to outcomes, not in engineering proportional representation.

The high academic standards that made Western universities the envy of the world rested on this foundation. Admissions and appointments turned on objective metrics: entrance examinations, SAT scores, publication records, citation indices. Excellence was color-blind because truth is color-blind. One did not need to consult ancestral grievance to evaluate a proof in mathematics or a textual emendation in philology. The system was imperfect—wealth and cultural capital conferred advantages—but its logic was sound: reward demonstrated ability, and society reaps the harvest of genius. As Thomas Sowell and others have documented, such systems produced the scientific and technological revolutions that lifted billions from poverty, precisely because they were selected for competence over kinship or political reliability. 

Then DEI enters as an infectious disease in a healthy organism. Cloaked in the language of compassion and redress, it demands that universities lower standards to achieve demographic parity. However, quotas favoring applicants on the basis of racial affiliation are not justice; they are racial discrimination rebranded with therapeutic euphemism. To discriminate against the more qualified Asian or White applicant in favor of the less qualified Black or Hispanic one is not to heal historical wounds but to inflict new ones—on the integrity of knowledge itself and on the innocent individuals denied their due.

Past injustice, however real, cannot justify present injustice against discrete persons who bear no personal guilt. This is the elementary logic of Western jurisprudence, from Roman aequitas to Kantian deontology: individuals are ends, not means to collective racial balancing. The alternative—treating living applicants as avatars of ancestral groups—revives a tribalism that the West transcended centuries ago. It echoes the blood-and-soil obsessions of pre-modern societies and the crude racialism that the academy once repudiated.

When social activism supplants academic excellence, the consequences cascade with Spenglerian inevitability. Research quality declines as hiring and promotion prioritize identity over scholarly output. Curricula fragment into grievance studies, where ideological conformity trumps evidence. Grade inflation and the erosion of rigorous gatekeeping produce graduates less competent in the unforgiving domains of medicine, engineering, and governance. Airlines, hospitals, and laboratories cannot run on sentiment; bridges collapse and patients die when competence is subordinated to representation. The “mismatch” thesis, empirically validated by scholars like Richard Sander, reveals how affirmative action places students in environments where they are doomed to underperform, breeding resentment rather than achievement. Empathy, weaponized, becomes the solvent of standards.

This confusion of meritocracy with empathy heralds something darker: the introduction of “soft totalitarianism.” Western meritocracy, for all its stratification, enabled genuine social mobility through open competition and credentialism tied to open markets. Individuals rose or fell based on demonstrated ability, fostering innovation and accountability. Contrast this with the Soviet model, where education served as a tool of central planning. Admissions and elite advancement depended on Party loyalty and nomenklatura connections. The rhetoric of classless egalitarianism masked nepotism and ideological litmus tests; rewards were artificially compressed, stifling excellence.

The West is replicating ideological pathology under new banners. DEI bureaucracies function as latter-day commissariats, enforcing political reliability through mandatory trainings, bias reporting, and diversity statements that function as loyalty oaths. Institutional autonomy withers as universities become instruments of social engineering rather than independent knowledge production. The “winners and losers” of meritocracy, however imperfect, reflected real differences in talent and effort. The enforced uniformity of equity produces universal mediocrity and seething underground resentments.

Comparisons with academic systems elsewhere illuminate the stakes. In much of the Arab world, admissions to competitive programs rely on high-stakes exams like the Tawjihi, preserving a formal meritocratic shell, though private wealth often circumvents it. In Sub-Saharan Africa, standardized exams coexist uneasily with affirmative action and regional quotas designed to address colonial legacies and socioeconomic gaps. Unsurprisingly, UNESCO critiques note that “pure” merit can mask unequal preparation. 

Yet these regions have not produced the sustained civilizational dynamism of the post-Enlightenment West precisely because their meritocracies are frequently diluted by patronage, political interference, and brain drain. The West’s unique achievement was elevating objective standards while mitigating background disadvantages through universal basic education and competition—not by abandoning the standards themselves. To import equity-driven dilutions is to converge downwards towards the very inefficiencies that have hampered development elsewhere.

As meritocracy erodes, Western civilization loses its cognitive edge. Innovation stagnates; institutions become hollowed-out husks performing rituals of inclusion while reality rebels. The brain of the West atrophies, and the heart—Judeo-Christian compassion—itself becomes corrupted into a masochistic self-flagellation that excuses every failure of the “marginalized” while punishing the competent. Totalitarianism does not always arrive in jackboots; it can creep in through Human Resources offices and faculty senates, enforcing speech codes, viewpoint discrimination, and the slow strangulation of academic freedom. The end is civilizational decline: a Spenglerian winter in which pseudointellectuals preside over ruins, chanting slogans of equity as the lights of inquiry dim.

To defend academic excellence is therefore to defend both sanity and justice. Sanity, because a society that denies biological, cognitive, and cultural realities in the name of equity will collide with those realities catastrophically. Justice, because true justice is individual and proportional—rendering to each according to his gifts and efforts, as the parable of the talents insists. The classical liberal tradition, from Mill’s marketplace of ideas to Hayek’s spontaneous order, understood that progress emerges from competition under rules, not from central imposition of outcomes. The Hebrew prophets demanded righteousness, not engineered equality of result; the Greek philosophers exalted the life of the mind; the Christian tradition affirmed the infinite worth of the person while recognizing natural inequalities in vocation and capacity.

Venerable institutions, once beacons to the world, are now becoming cautionary tales of ideological capture. Restoring meritocracy demands intellectual courage: dismantling DEI apparatuses, reaffirming color-blind standards, protecting dissenting voices, and recommitting to the arduous pursuit of truth over the narcotic of belonging. Hesitation is failure, inviting the tragic suicide of a civilization that conquered famine, disease, and ignorance precisely by honoring excellence.

The brain must be preserved, or the body will perish. Western man’s Faustian spirit—restless, hierarchical, truth-seeking—is currently being challenged. To abandon merit is to abandon ourselves.

Related Topics: Academia, Western Civilization, History