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> The original constitutional principles do not change absent a constitutional amendment, but the relevant principles— both the rules and exceptions alike—must be faithfully applied not only to circumstances as they existed in 1787, 1791, and 1868, for example, but also to modern situations that were unknown or unanticipated by the Constitution’s Framers.
This, of course, doesn't include machine guns.
The justices actively debated what the historical equivalent of 24/7 digital tracking would look like in 1791. This prompted the famous hypothetical of an officer secretly squeezing into the trunk of a horse-drawn carriage to track someone's movements over several days.
The issue here is that there's no practical way to ever update the Bill of Rights in the 21st century. Bug or feature?
> In Second Amendment cases, this Court applies the Amendment to semi-automatic handguns even though those did not exist in 1791 or 1868.
"Shall not be infringed" apparently applies to unimaginably better weaponry, but they couldn't have anticipated immigrants being pregnant.
Edit: the scholar is Kate Shaw. She presents her arguments a lot more coherently than me, seeing as it’s her life’s work. I advise you read her scholarly work or watch her interviews especially on Originalism rather than try to squeeze an argument out of me.
By narrowly interpreting the text exactly as a WL18CWM would have interpreted it (e.g. black people are not people), they’re not leaving room for interpretations of the constitution that would provide equal rights to people who are not WL18CWM:
You are disenfranchised when your judicial branch interprets law in a way that disproportionately benefits only the people who are most similar to the authors.
Also, how wealthy are you? Why did you bring up your race instead of how much land you own? Why pull the culture war into this? Certain interpretations of the constitution disproportionately benefit people who own a lot of land.
Just the fact that originalism implies an ability to perfectly know what the dead from 1788 meant with each word in every situation. It's a ludicrous proposition.
AIUI, IANAL, US courts and law do not have jurisdiction over diplomats. When a diplomat the 'hosting' government agrees to immunity, so cannot be prosecuted. E.g.:
> The collision caused diplomatic tension between British and US officials. [Anne] Sacoolas fled Britain soon after the incident, and claimed diplomatic immunity with US support.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn
The 'source' country has to agree to remove the diplomatic coverage.
U.S. courts do have jurisdiction over diplomats for certain things, such as suits related to commercial activities.
You could potentially apply this to temporary tourists as well, but the linkage between them and the government of the country they are coming from is much weaker since their presence typically doesn't have them acting on behalf of the foreign government or with any special legal distinction.
I'd also pose the same question back to you, what's a reasonable definition of "subject to the jurisdiction" that excludes everyone except US citizens, as many conservatives want, or at least only extends to legal permanent residents?
Which is is fine, you can change the constitution, but thats for parliament to do.
In this case, I really doubt even the most conservative justices believe "birthright citizenship means whatever an Executive Order says it does." At a minimum, we know they aren't signing on to the reasoning the 5 in the majority used. And then we can learn whatever they feel like saying in the dissent, but a dissent is just an essay with no force of law.
Alito and Thomas straight up believe that the constitution does not provide birthright citizenship and the executive order is valid. Gorsuch mostly agrees but makes an exception if the parents plan to stay in the US. Kavanaugh agrees that birthright citizenship is not provided by the constitution, instead he argues its a federal statute that congress can overturn (but the president cannot)
https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...
> The Court today takes the extraordinary step of holding facially unconstitutional the President’s Order excluding from citizenship the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens.
> 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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Please point to the section where it says "this only applies if the parents are citizens".
The reading which the court affirmed is incredibly obvious. Republicans and xenophobes like to pretend it isn't, but the text is very simple.
To wit, if we read it as "subject to the laws of the land", then the invading army exception does not make sense, invading soldiers are subject to the laws of the United States and have been tried and convinced of violating them. Note, diplomat exception still makes sense, they _are not_ subject to the laws of the land.
So, how do you define jurisdiction in this amendment in a way that covers both invading soldiers and diplomats? I don't think it is super straightforward.
To put good faith on the table, I ultimately agree with your opinion here that birthright citizenship is settled and the vast majority of folks arguing against it are doing so in bad faith. But I also recognize the text of the amendment has holes to my eyes and could be updated for clarity.
If opposing demographic change explicitly was allowed by the current moral programming (not accepted by the majority necessarily just an allowed opinion), I don’t think anyone would be arguing about the interpretation of this.
A lot of modern political issues follow this same pattern.
Every single court on the way to SCOTUS correctly said "the fuck?!"
> Federal judges in each of the district courts issued preliminary injunctions to block the order from taking effect anywhere in the country. Judge John C. Coughenour, presiding over Washington v. Trump, called the order "blatantly unconstitutional". Government appeals challenging the injunctions were rejected by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Barbara
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._CASA#Background
Including Clarence, whose "hilarious" dissent says that undocumented persons are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, which might be of note to ICE.
Isn't this statement aimed at citizenship tourism or whatever its called?
I used to live in a state where some new friends had told us about places that facilitated pregnant women's trips to the US solely for the purpose of staying and giving birth in the US so the child could become citizens. They then head home. I have no idea how prevalent this is.
But today's climate is so hostile to any kind of rational discussion about how to change laws. One faction just wants to deny citizenship right now to any people they seem not "american enough" while the other faction cannot possibly entertain any change to the current system or else It would concede something to the populist faction
As many as 26,000 mothers do it (birth tourism) every year.
CIS analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data to track the number of foreign-born mothers who gave birth in the United States. Researchers cross-referenced those births against federal figures of temporary visitors. They isolated foreign mothers who arrived on short-term visas, gave birth, and did not establish long-term residency in the U.S. CIS concluded that 20,000 to 26,000 births annually are attributable to women arriving on short-term tourist visas specifically to obtain citizenship for their children.
On the desirability side of things, it's been this way for the entire history of this country (the amendment just codified how things were already done) and it seems to have worked OK. But even if we were to decide that this is bad, it would need to be fixed with an amendment.
They can't pick and choose "oh no they are in jurisdiction of law A but not in law B". Jurisdiction is a fundamental concept, there's no middle ground.
As for whether people are really doing birth tourism: sure, there might be some cases, but well, they are using something that the legal system allows. If the country feels like it doesn't want that happening, it needs to amend the Constitution.
(Also, let's not kid ourselves that the birth tourism thing is what conservatives care about... People doing that kind of thing are usually rich. The real target are poor illegal immigrants giving birth in the country.)
Look at how quickly slavers used the federal government to uphold slavery, the fugitive slave act was one of the first things Congress signed and took zero time enforcing against the will of the people.
Look at how quickly business leaders fought against Americans trying to better their working conditions.
The US constitution was designed to impede societal progress by stripping power from the people. The "reverance" people have for the "founders" doesn't help either, acting like a document written to embolden slavers as sacrosanct is beyond pathetic.
You are saying this like there are other of nations that didn’t need to struggle for equal rights, workers’ right etc.
Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship. It creates perverse incentives.
Reminds me of legal abortion: practically everywhere in the world has it. If you are not in that vast majority you should be taking a very close look at yourself/things.
So yes, let's amend the constitution. It's been a while and we do it on average every ten years or so. I have personally not ever been involved in one.
Ironically, the same Court members who most often claim the plain text of the Constitution to support their ideas are the ones who put the most effort into finding a tortured reading of the 14th Amendment.
Every other amendment including the 1st, 2nd, etc even when explicitly spelled out the courts magically pull something out of their ass to "torture it." Yet the 14th amendment birthright citizenship, who's "history and tradition" was to right the wrongs of slavery, somehow has to be read absolutely in black and white.
Personally I am amenable to the plain text interpretation of the 14th, 1st, and 2nd, but lets not pretend that is the game SCOTUS or even most of government and society is playing. The constitution is referenced more as a religious document by all the above to mean whatever it is they say it means.
The term "birthright" means "a right that is derived from the circumstances of your birth". Virtually ALL countries grant citizenship by consequence of the circumstances of birth, but what circumstances they consider vary. For some countries, the circumstance is "birth happened in the soil of the country" (jus soli), for others, it's "birth was to parents who are citizens of our country".
I said "virtually", because there is one SINGLE exception. The Vatican. Ok, there's the SMOM, but do they even count?
Offering birthright citizenship makes the US better than 95% of the other countries. Not worse.
This is actually just the first step - to propose an amendment.
To ratify it requires 3/4 of the state legislatures (or state “conventions”) to vote in favor.
https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution
I do agree with you that US success in the 19th century was due to many factors that are not relevant today.
(You'll probably want to avoid metrics like happiness indices and life expectancy though)
Obviously you can also say that the US is geopolitically successful because of its global military and diplomatic dominance, but I account zero value to this.
(Or at least, people wanted to come until the last couple of years...)
Roll forward a few hundred years and the context has changed, so it seems reasonable that the law should too? But I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this is no bueno for SCOTUS, which has an infinite hard-on for Originalism [0] - I certainly can't imagine the conservative justices are ruling based on humanitarian grounds.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism
I take it you are not British? The British Empire had birthright citizenship, and up until 1948 (except for Ireland) citizens of all Commonwealth countries were simply British subjects.
Afterward it was possible to be, for example, a Canadian citizen, but it was still the case that "Prior to the [the British Nationality Act 1981] coming into force, any person born in the United Kingdom or a colony (with limited exceptions such as children of diplomats and enemy aliens) was entitled to [Citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies] status" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Nationality_Act_1981
Closer to 82% actually, depending on how you count countries. Almost every country in the Western hemisphere has it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli
Of the remaining ones, two cancel each other out, and several others (including the most recent) are trivial. The Constitution has not been meaningfully amended in half a century, and it seems wildly unlikely that it ever can be.
I typically find that the people using this logic don't seem to apply it to laws like universal healthcare, parental leave, or paid-time off. The lack of those benefits creates perverse incentives to already living citizens, not hypothetical future citizens. Why not focus on them?
The map of which countries have jus soli is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli
>Jus soli is the predominant rule in the Americas; explanations for this geographical phenomenon include the establishment of lenient laws by past European colonial powers to entice immigrants from the Old World and displace native populations in the New World, along with the emergence of successful wars of independence movements that widened the definition and granting of citizenship, as a prerequisite to the abolishment of slavery since the 19th century.[5]
>There are 35 countries that provide citizenship unconditionally to anyone born within their national borders.
>
I can name ten countries off the top of my head that are better in every way that matters to me.
The USA ranks near the bottom of developed countries in every metric but the metrics related to money.
Perhaps advantageous, America has been the product of these incentives and still sits atop the world on most hegemon metrics. It amazes me how many people complain about the post-WW2 world order America built and benefits from more than any other country.
If you inherited it from your parents, how did they acquire it?
Usually strong opponents to birthright citizenship are just a few generations removed from someone who got theirs via birthright.
Under what moral rules do genocidaires get citizenship but not, say, refugees?
That three Justices chose to attempt to gaslight us about this is a disgrace. I'll never trust their judgement again.
If only because this would open up people born here to having their citizenship retroactively revoked.
The constitution is pretty clear. If you don't like it amend it.
If anything we need to expand it to include anyone who gives birth in this country. If you're willing to deal with our horrible maternity care system and help keep up our declining population, you deserve a blue passport.
Just look at the second amendment:
The "well regulated militia" phrase caused at least two very different opinions: United States v. Miller [1] in 1939 and District of Columbia v. Heller [2] in 2008, with very different results.Just as the second amendment has this "militia" phrase that provokes arguments, the fourteenth amendment starts with
and the phrase "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is vague enough to trigger discussions about whether it applies to illegal immigrants or not.Natural language is just bad in expressing rules.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Miller#Decisi...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller...
Roberts claims Jus Soli applies to the USA by looking at historical concept of the words in the constitution and the king's obligations to those on his soil. He cites historical statements by founders.
Thomas and Gorsuch rejects Jus Soli applies since it is a concept from feudal lords and serfdom which the USA did not inherit. The cite historical statements by founders.
Kavanaugh thinks congress gets to decide the meaning (within reason), so he rejects Jus Soli as well.
Jackson worries about backsliding and using this to oppress people, unsure about her legal reasoning, but seems to guess at how authors of the amendment understood the words. I would still classify her as saying USA did not inherit Jus Soli, but later codified it via amendment.
You’re saying we need to look to the international meaning of some Latin phrase (“jus soli”). That sounds like a bunch of work, doesn’t it? Maybe we can do the work and come up with a correct answer, but the question is hardly as simple as people are making it out to be.
But after the Fourteenth Amendment and the long debates about incorporating the Bill of Rights against the states, well now we have a problem. A problem of the Court's own making, of course, as literal incorporation was a choice.
A "clear" law would likely not result in a 6:3 vote. There are enough cases in the Supreme Court that get 9:0, those can probably be called "clear".
Yet you rarely find anyone giving a shit about the American Samoans, you never hear about it.
----- re: below due to throttling---------
>American Samoans aren't citizens because American Samoa is a territory, not a state. Puerto Rico has a special status that was extended to it to grant its residents citizenship – this isn't a status that's automatically granted to all territories, it requires Federal approval which AS has never formally pushed for.
Unless you falsely believe PR or AS are not part of the United States, you are just agreeing with me with extra words regarding the jurisdictional differences. The only option for denying birthright citizenship would be not born in United States, or not subject to jurisdiction thereof.
See this excellent prior comment[] on why the difference between PR and AS is jurisdiction and not whether it is part of the US.
>This seems entirely subjective.
I'm not going to do a formal academic study with you, it's plainly obvious as of late you see far more headlines on hackernews (a search shows a single HN topic on AS citizenship in the history of HN, but full page+ of search results on the birthright citizenship issue at hand) and elsewhere regarding the birthright citizenship issue at hand and far more rarely the fact American Samoans don't get it.
[] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16700413
> Yet you rarely find anyone giving a shit about the American Samoans, you never hear about it.
This seems entirely subjective.
But statistically America lags behind most other nations of similar development levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_maternal_...
Not to mention the lack of maternity leave or real worker protections. A family member was fired for taking off time during a pregnancy. Everyone's fine now, but she definitely had a rough patch.
A big part of this comes down to the lack of any real safety net here.
Our what?
And, I mean, it's obviously hard to predict beyond that, but it doesn't seem like anyone has any real clear answer to the trend of steadily decreasing TFR right now.
The US fertility rate is already 1.6 births per woman[0], and the population is only not decreasing because it still receives far more immigration than, say, Japan or South Korea.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr038.pdf
The nuance is ~71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size. US working age population cohort has likely peaked. The future of the developed world is fighting over global skilled workers and young potential immigrants who would settle and start families in your jurisdiction.
Is the U.S. Labor Force Nearing Its Peak? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48726615 - June 2026
The Fertility Rate of Every Country in the World - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/fertility-rate-of-world-pop... - May 17th, 2026
U.S. Total Fertility Rate by State 2007 vs 2025 - https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1qt22ka/oc... - February 2026
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
Our World In Data: Population tool: How will populations across the world change in the 21st century? - https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool
("demography is destiny")
This is an observation and not a judgement. Take what you will with this information.
It is not just an American problem. It is slowly changing, at least here in the UK: I see a lot more dads taking kids around these days. I have still found people were surprised that my daughter lived with me rather than her mother after divorce though.
I think this is good; insofar as women have children, it should be because they want to, not because they're pushed into it.
I'll say - it also wouldn't kill us to have slightly fewer people on the planet. We're already taxing much of our systems/ecosystems past their breaking points. Smarter people than me, entire groups of scientists, are saying that what we're doing now is badly unsustainable and we're heading for trouble.
If you believed this, would you be against sterilizing third world populations to limit the overall population growth ( given those are the populations which continue to grow in this environment ) ? If not sterilizing - what about propagandizing their younger population to not reproduce? Would that be a net-good?
If not, why not?
Parts of the world have reached 1.0 kids per woman, which is a halving of the population per generation, which will put a massive strain on our resources
Teen birth rates hit another historical low in 2025, CDC says - https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5777587/teen-birth-rate... - April 9th, 2026
No, that's not how laws work
Applying laws retroactively is much less common than a "simple" rule change
The executive order that prompted this was only aimed at babies born after it went into effect, but I see no reason it would have to be that way.
???
That's exactly what this ruling affirms; no expansion necessary: it already included "anyone who gives birth in this country".
It’s really not, as the opinion in this case shows: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf
The problem is that there’s accepted exceptions to birthright citizenship that aren’t apparent from the wording of the constitution. For example, everyone agrees children of ambassadors are not citizens at birth. Where does that exception come from? It doesn’t say anything about diplomats in the 14th amendment. It seems to come from the requirement that children be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US at birth. But what does that mean? Jurisdiction is a broad concept that means different things in different contexts.
If they have, I'd love to see exactly where a prior SC decided that it's constitutional.
If you are an originalist, textualist, or even just standard jurisprudence believer then it's crystal clear what the 14th meant. The only reason for any question about it is because a large portion of people hate the fact that someone can get citizenship by being born here.
The dissents violate the supposed judicial theory of these justices. It shows naked partisanship.
It makes sense to me to say that they do not fall under US laws and US jurisdiction, and their children likewise.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf
News:
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-birthright-citizens...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/30/us-supreme-c...
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/30/scotus-rejects-trumps-birth...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/supreme-court-rule-...
https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow...
Related:
Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42776131 - January 2025 (34 comments)
1. An artificially whipped-up "question".
2. Conservative bias in the media.
Depending on how you count, something like 96%, 94%, 65% or 87% of mainstream media employees lean left. Of course this matters less and less as customers tune out and their influence wanes.
https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Do_97_percent_of_journali...
- 4 justices in this decision rejected the plain text reading of the Citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, which would've overturned over a century of precedent;
- They invented the "Major Questions Doctrine" that basically allows the Supreme Court to overrule the will of the executive and legislative branches if they deem the decision sufficiently weighty. It was invented and used to block significant legislation under the Biden administration;
- They invented the History and Traditions Test under the Biden administration to overturn Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs decision. This was in spite of abortion being not only legal but essentially unregulated at the founding. Famously, Ben Franklin published an at-home recipe for abortion [1];
- They have lied about the facts of cases to push a particular decision. One of the more notable cases was Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that allowed school prayer. The lie? That the coach was "quietly" praying. This was not true and was documented, including photos to the contrary;
- There are now essentially zero limits on campaign spending by anyone after today's decisions on PAC and campaign coordination and of course Citizens United;
- They decided that independent agencies set up by Congress are unconstitutional despite almost a century of precedent because of the separation of powers but this doesn't apply to the Federal Reserve for some reason;
- They overturneed 40 years of precedent of Chevron deference, a case that Gorsuch should've recused himself from since he was essentially avenging his mother's sacking as EPA administrator under Reagan in a case that became Chevron. 40 years of Congress and 7 presidents of both parties have written and signed laws with Chevron deference in mind;
- They invented presidential immunity out of whole cloth in a country that was founded rejecting monarchs who were above the law. All the insider trading and pardon selling of the current administration is a direct and foreseeable result of that decision;
- They decided that Federal regulations could essentially be challenged at any time instead of the previous six-year rule (ie Corner Post). This essentially allows you to challenge a 100 year old rule by setting up a situation where you're "harmed";
- Roberts has almost singlehandedly gutted the Voting Rights Act over several decisions. Previously he got rid of federal preclearance because of a history states had with discrimination and voter suppression. They immediately went back to discrimination and voter suppression. And then this year the court basically allowed racially-discriminated redistricting under the guise that it was "partisan" not "racist" unless you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's racist;
The inability of this court to see obvious racism harkens back to a famous decision called Cruikshank that decided private individuals couldn't be punished for civil rights violations (notably, hate crimes) in a response to the Colfax massacre. Additionally, Cruikshank stated that the Bill of Rights didn't apply to state governments. This was slowly dismantled by various opinions over the next century.
There were other cases of the Redeemer era (notably Plessy v. Ferguson that legalized segregation) where the court was completely unable to see racism and went out of its way to limit any effort to combat it. We're in one of those eras now (IMHO).
All of this is incremental too. So today two cases were decided that essentially allowed states to ban trans athletes. The next step here is that trans athlets must be banned. Those cases are already percolating through lower courts and we'll see them in the next term most likely.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-frank...
He got dang close. He's only one justice replacement away from making it doable.
Gods, we are not as far from ripping up the Constitution as we'd like to think.
The rule of courts of law is to interpret the law, not to pick new creative meanings out of them. That's the role of the legislative power - otherwise what's stopping a court to reinterpret the meaning of any word in any legal text and allow the executive to rule by decree
Which is gods-damned crazy. We are that close to overturning major civil rights.
This would create chaos. Not to mention the tens of millions of citizens retroactively turned into stateless people!
Thats a tautology. “What the constitution says” is the thing in question.
There's plenty in the US constitution which is vaguely worded, but you have to twist its words an awful lot to deny birthright citizenship.
"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."
It's the second part that is in dispute and is not clear from the constitution's text what exactly it means and who it excludes. And yes, it has always excluded some people born within the borders, it is not a meaningless statement.
> A well regulated Militia
POV: you're about to hear the dumbest takes on the internet.
/s
Seriously though, were the founding fathers just master ragebaiters or what? More ink has been spilled over these two lines than any other in modern history.
After that bit of logic, nothing the supreme Court decides would surprise me
https://fortune.com/article/chinese-billionaire-xu-bo-father... might be an outlier, but it's still weird, especially since the US is the only country that has this.
I see this said in real life as well, but it's just false. Plenty of countries in North America do this, including Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli#North_America
> Canada: Subsection 3(2) of the Citizenship Act states that Canadian citizenship by birth in Canada – including Canadian airspace and territorial waters – is granted to a child born in Canada even if neither parent was a Canadian citizen or permanent resident except if either parent was a diplomat, in service to a diplomat, or employed by an international agency of equal status to a diplomat. However, if neither parent was a diplomat, the nationality or immigration status of the parents does not matter.
Except it's not.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/31/us-style-...
It's a minority of countries that have rules like the US, but the US is not unique in this regard and there's no reason to keep repeating that lie.
Beyond that, if you're a billionaire you can just fast track a path to citizenship with a gold card.
If the problem is 'birth tourism' and subsequent immigration visas for relatives of the US national child, changing the immigration policies seems like a better fix. Something like requiring a sponsoring citizen to reside in the US for a period before sponsorship. A citizen sponsoring a visa for a parent already has to be 21.
I'm not sure I can be that upset by people who want to immigrate, so they put a plan in motion that takes 21+ years to reach fruition. Although that does jump the line if you were eligible for F3 or F4 and your country of origin is Mexico... the priority date on those is currently 2001. [1]
I want more people in the US who can do long term planning, not less. :p
[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...
I think there would be a real problem with creating a class of people who live here their entire lives and aren't citizens. And then their children also live here and aren't citizens, and their grandchildren, etc.
It's not that birthright citizenship is ideal, but it prevents some other, bigger problems.
This case (placed alongside many others in recent memory) demonstrates that no matter how clear and unequivocal a legal text you write, the textualists can find a way to overturn it.
So what specific legal text for this amendment of yours do you believe is immune from that degree of sophistry?
So you are suggesting abrogating rights based on an event that occurs with minuscule probability. Get a grip.
E.G.: "US guns are stolen and exported to foreign gangs. Therefore, the text of the 2nd Amendment is entirely null and void and should be 'corrected' by the Supreme Court"
It is not be the job of the Supreme Court to "correct" Constitutional amendments!
its easy to fix by making legal immigration cheap and reliable. its also great for the economy, a lot of undocumented immigrants work illegally dont pay taxes because they cant work normal jobs without getting deported.
legalizing their stay means more tax revenue, less crime and labor violations, lower costs for business and i would also say its kind of morally wrong for a rich country to buy cheap stuff made by workers in mexico or china and give none of the profits back. closed borders are glboal injustice.