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Thomas A. Berry & Richard A. Epstein: Is Birthright Citizenship Guaranteed by the 14th Amendment?
00:35:27
On this episode of Future of Freedom, host Scot Bertram is joined by two guests with different viewpoints about the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship. First on the show is Thomas A. Berry, director of the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor in chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Later, we hear from Richard A. Epstein, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and author of the book The Myth of Birthright Citizenship: What the Fourteenth Amendment Really Says. You can find Thomas on X @Thomas_A_Berry and Richard at @RichardAEpstein.
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Foreign.
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Welcome to FUTURE of Freedom. I'm your host, Scott Bertram. Future of Freedom is a production of Franklin News Foundation. To support this show, go to franklinnews.org donate we bring you interviews today from different sides of the conversation over the meaning of the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship. In a little bit, we'll be joined by Richard Epstein, author of the Myth of birthright what the 14th amendment really says. He's also senior research fellow at Civitas Institute and Lawrence A. Tisch professor at New York University. First, we talk with Thomas A. Berry, director of the Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy center for Constitutional Studies. You can find more@cato.org Thomas thanks so much for joining us.
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C
Thanks for having me.
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B
Discussing today the case in front of the U.S. supreme Court concerning birthright citizenship, and at the center of this debate is a phrase, a phrase in the 14th amendment which is subject to the jurisdiction thereof. That's just a few words. Tell us about that phrase and why is it now so contested?
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C
Absolutely. So in a nutshell, it's contested because the scope of that phrase, the meaning of that phrase, is going to determine the legal status, the citizenship status status of literally tens of millions of Americans, both looking forward and potentially looking backwards as well. So that phrase is part of the 14th Amendment, which was one of the three reconstruction amendments enacted after the Civil War. The immediate and most pressing need for those amendments was to bring the newly freed former slaves into a position of social and political equality in the United States. So one of the main motivating factors that the framers of that amendment were looking to and wanted to overrule was the infamous Dred Scott decision from the Supreme Court, which it held that black people, even free black people, were not citizens of the US despite being born in the US So there's no doubt that one of the key purposes of that amendment was to overrule that decision. But the dispute is essentially to what extent did it create a new, broader rule of absolute birthright citizenship, and to what extent does it have exceptions, and how narrow or broad are those exceptions? The short version of the dispute is that the narrower reading of jurisdiction is that it simply means subject to the basic laws of the U.S. so nearly everyone on U.S. soil is subject to the laws of the U.S. but not everyone is. Most notably, ambassadors and their families have ambassadorial immunity. I live in D.C. and you see a lot of license plates that say diplomat on them, and you might see those cars double parked because they can get away with it, because they're immune from parking tickets and other basic laws of the U.S. other rare exceptions, literally invading armies, monarchs from another country visiting US Soil, and the uniquely American exception of people born to Indian tribes on Indian land. So that's a narrower view. The Trump administration is now urging a broader view that jurisdiction was really about not just being subject to criminal and civil control, but a broader notion of allegiance, primary allegiance to the United States as opposed to any other country. So in the Trump administration's view, subject to the jurisdiction thereof means at least one of your parents needs to be either a citizen or a lawful permanent resident of the United States, such that your family has established permanent ties that make their primary allegiance to the US as opposed to any other country. So on that reading, someone who is coming to the US On a student visa or a tourist visa or illegally would not be able to give their children citizenship, even if their children were born here.
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B
So, as you point out, the administration says that citizenship would require allegiance or permanent ties to the US So why do you think that that interpretation doesn't hold up historically?
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C
In a nutshell, it's not consistent with the English common law rule of birthright citizenship and the weight of the evidence. I think the better of the argument, the better of the evidence is that the 14th Amendment essentially was meant to codify and strengthen that traditionally understood English common law rul of birthright citizenship. So you can dig deep into the archives of commentary on the British rule, and you see a lot of examples of essentially saying as soon as you're on British soil, as soon as you're within the realm of the king, you owe an allegiance to the king, at least insofar as you have the obligation to obey the king's laws. And you can even be criminally punished for things like treason or trespass or things like that. But coming on the flip side of that coin, the benefit of that coin is that the instant you set foot on soil, you're entitled to certain protections, not just the protections of the law. If someone commits a crime against you, you have as much of a right as anyone else to take the benefit of the protections of the law, but also things like the protections of citizenship that can be passed down to any of your children who you have on English soil. So the best evidence is that that's what the framers were thinking of. And indeed, that Dred Scott was shocking because it created such a large and unusual exception to that. Understood. But the very reason Dred Scott was a case, the very reason people came in with the presumption, the rebuttable presumption that black people were citizens, that even slaves would be citizens, is because people understood that presumption, the general rule subject to only limited exceptions, that being born on the soil means you're a citizen of that country.
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B
There is a century of precedent surrounding this question, including some Supreme Court cases on birthright citizenship. How much weight should that long precedent carry in the deliberations about this case?
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C
It's an interesting question because this case is very much being fought on the grounds of originalism. Originalism is the theory that the text and meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed at the time of its enactment and cannot be changed just because circumstances or political winds might change in the future. That the only way to change a provision is to lawfully amend it. There is some tension between originalism, the other value of so called stare decisis, which is the idea that precedents in general should stand so that people have settled expectations and settled understandings of what the law is and what the rules are. Originalists disagree. To what extent should courts accommodate precedents that may or may not be correct on an originalist ground? When they find tension between those here? However, I don't think it's a problem for originalists because I think that precedent you refer to, most importantly the Wong Kim Ark case from the very late 1800s. I think in fact that got it right as an originalist matter. So I don't think this case presents a conflict where you have a precedent on one side and the correct originalist answer on the other side. Wong Kim Ark essentially dug into this history, the same history we're talking about now. There's some dispute about how to read the opinion. There's some dispute about how broad its holding was. Certainly the opinion does mention several times that the person in question, who the court found to be a citizen, it does mention that both of his parents were domiciled in the US But I think if you read the best good faith reading of the opinion overall is that it's going through this common law history and saying the reason Wong Kim Ark was a citizen, the reason he couldn't lose his citizenship, is because he didn't fall into the narrow exceptions to birthright citizenship, the narrow exceptions to jurisdiction like ambassadors or foreign armies.
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Thomas There was a recent New York Times story, and it is just a story, but it's a story about an illegal alien who is illegally reentered the United States after a previous deportation, wanted to make sure she gave birth to a child in the United States or the child would be an American citizen. It is a story. But in that particular case, is there an argument made that the intent, the original intent of the amendment would be that that child would have American citizenship?
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C
Well, it's important to note that that was possible to have happened even at the time it was drafted. This isn't a new concern or a new problem suddenly only arisen in the 20th and 21st century. The solicitor General to the United States during oral argument, suggested that it's more common now because we have air travel. We have the ability to fly across the country and fly back within a day. He said, it's a new world. But the Chief justice of the United States, John Roberts, replied, it's a new world. It's the same Constitution. And I think that's the right answer, that ultimately this was a concern that would have been considered at the time. And indeed, if you go back and look at the debates, there are members of Congress debating the 14th Amendment who said, yes, this would apply using the terms of their time. We wouldn't say this now, but they said, yes, this would apply to gypsies traveling through the U.S. yes, it would apply to Chinese immigrants. And I think the best reading of it is that they said whether or not they liked that outcome, they simply settled. They decided it was better to have a hard, simple, bright line rule that applied to everyone rather than try to carve out policy based exceptions because they might not like the outcome in a particular case.
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B
Thomas, to the best of our understanding, what would actually change if the Supreme Court sided with the administration in this case on the question of birthright citizenship both in the present and into the future?
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C
It's a good question and a somewhat uncertain question because at this point, the Trump administration is claiming they are only caring about prospective changes in the law. So the executive order that President Trump tried to issue before it was blocked on his first day in office, said, this is only going to apply TO People born 30 days or more after this order goes into effect. We're not gonna try to strip citizenship from people already born, people who might be adults in the US and live their whole lives under the understanding that they're citizens. We're not gonna try to upset that apple cart. But as some justices noted in the oral argument, if they rule in the Trump administration's favor, nothing really holds the Trump administration to that promise. Indeed, if they rule in the Trump administration's favor, then as a legal matter, as a Constitution, they would hold that everyone who's currently an adult who was not born to a US Citizen or permanent resident is not rightly a US Citizen, and that to the extent they get citizenship, it's only by the grace or the favor of the current government. So I don't think people should rest secure that the Trump administration's assurances will be followed through or can be trusted going into the future. And obviously it would be a huge change if a large chunk of people, even just going forward, were no longer US Citizens. It would mean that they're not entitled to Social Security. It would change their relation to the US it would change their ties to the US in all sorts of ways. In my view, it would really stunt the process of assimilation that birthright citizenship has done a lot to help, that within one or two generations, you have people who have much firmer legal ties to the United States and are much more likely to stay here to learn English and so forth. It would really change what, to my mind, has been one of the major factors that has led the US to be one of the most popular spots for immigration and assimilation over the last 200 years.
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Is the court asked here to simply decide a question about immigration policy, about constitutional interpretation, or is there also a question in front of them on the use of executive power when it comes to this case?
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C
Yeah, it's a great question. And certainly here at Cato, we're concerned about the use of executive power in many situations, unilateral presidential decisions to to take action when Congress is not willing to go along. In this case, though, I think this is really about constitutional interpretation. If the Trump administration is right on their theory of the Constitution, then they probably would be justified in doing this, even by executive order. They're essentially just trying to tee up a test case to get the Supreme Court to rule on the merits. There is one wrinkle, though, that's worth at least flagging for readers, which is that this case isn't just about constitutional text. There's also a statute and immigration statute passed in the 1940s and then reenacted in the 1950s that copies the same language from the 14th Amendment. And I think there's a good argument that even if the meaning of subject to the jurisdiction thereof was uncertain in the 1860s, it was a lot more certain in the 1940s and 50s after that Wong Kim ARC decision. And Congress has there's a lot of evidence that Congress understood it to have that broader meaning when they enacted it then. And Congress has never decided to go back and amend that statute. So I think it's unlikely that the Supreme Court will rest its holding on the statute as opposed to the Constitution as opposed to the 14th Amendment. But that is something to flag that Congress, if majorities of Congress had wanted a narrower view of immigration and had wanted to tee this up, they've had 70 years when they could have gone back and amended that statute. But they've never there's never been a majority willing to do so.
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If the Court were to again rule in favor of the administration narrow the idea of birthright citizenship, would that signal in your mind a shift in how we would interpret constitutional guarantees, other constitutional guarantees moving forward?
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C
I'm concerned it might. I'm particularly concerned of history repeating itself with respect to the privileges or immunities clause of the 14th Amendment. This is unfortunately an obscure provision that not many listeners might know about. It's much less famous than the Due Process Clause or the Equal Protection Clause. And the reason it's not very famous is that in a case called the slaughterhouse cases in the 1870s, the Supreme Court almost entirely read this clause out of the 14th Amendment, narrowed its scope and its power down to a few very rare and not that consequential circumstances, when in fact most of the evidence is that it was supposed to be the most important provision and was supposed to enshrine, among other things, the right to economic liberty and the right to apply one's trade without protectionist laws keeping in place entrenched economic majorities, very relevant and very important when the newly freed former slaves were trying to establish themselves in the economy of the American south on an equal footing with white competitors. So in that slaughterhouse case, the Supreme Court I think all too narrowly said, oh, the purpose of the 14th amendment was just to end slavery and bring people to political equality. And they didn't look more broadly at some of the other purposes, such as economic liberty. Here, too, it would be a mistake for the Supreme Court to say, oh, the purpose of the birthright citizenship clause was simply to overturn Dred Scott. It only cared about black people. We shouldn't extend it to people here on temporary visas, people who have entered the country illegally, et cetera. I think that would be looking too narrowly at immediate purpose and not at the breadth of the actual text, which, of course, is the only thing that Congress agreed on.
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Thomas A. Berry is director of the Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy center for Constitutional Studies. You can find more at Cato. Thomas, thanks so much for joining us today on Future of Freedom.
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Happy to.
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C
Thanks for having me.
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Now to hear another side of the conversation about birthright citizenship, we talk with Richard Epstein. He's Lawrence A. Tisch, professor at New York University, a senior fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas, Austin, and senior lecturer and professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, also the author of the new book the Myth of Birthright citizenship. What the 14th Amendment really says. Richard, thanks so much for joining us.
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It's always my pleasure.
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I want to begin by asking, why do you think this idea of birthright citizenship became so widely accepted? If, as in your view, it rests on this mistaken interpretation? In short, how did we get here?
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Try to think about it. If you start going at the period after Wang Kim Ho, which was the major case study that defended it back in 1898, it was pretty much a pitched battle. Some people said it took liberties with the text and other people who said not. But as the American Congress and the people became more progressive, the idea of universal citizenship seemed to become more attractive. And what happens is if you start reading people who are talking about it, the ACLU and people like Aquila Mott, they almost burst into tears about saying, the universality of American citizenship is something that is so sacred that we should be pleased and honored to extend it to all of those who are born within our shores. And if you then ask whether or not there's a kind of a deep intellectual examination of what's going on, the answer to that question is no. If you look at the ACL brief and the similar situations, they take this very complicated language of the 14th Amendment, drafted by professionals, and they say the meaning is perfectly clear. The plain meaning of the statute is anybody who's born in the United States is a citizen of the United States, the United States. And I remember thinking about that. And so when you started hearing the idea that illegal people get citizenships, there is a famous maxim of the Roman law which says, nobody shall be able to profit from his own wrong. And then you look at that maxim, and it's like every other max, it basically has a series of analogous extensions. And one of those extensions that everybody makes is that if you try to profit, profit by getting benefits for your child, it's like profit by getting benefits for yourself. And so if somebody says you come in the country and you're illegal and then you are trying to profit your child, you run afoul of that particular maxim. And that's the way I started my inquiry into this, and it was just too much optimism. And then you start looking a little bit further, and actually what happens is you realize that it's not just birthright citizen, but virtually all the Major Americans. American scholarship associated with the 14th Amendment is celebratory, whether you're talking about the right or the left. And I start reading these cases, and nothing seems to match up. Well, what goes on then? I said, look, I just don't like this stuff. And then I wrote a couple of short columns, and I realized to myself, you know, this is a little bit irresponsible on your point. It's such a hard question. You have to read more.
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Richard, how should we consider or think about this term naturalized or naturalization when it comes to the 14th? And how did you begin thinking about that?
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So one day I decided to do something which nobody else had done, which is I looked at the text of the 14th Amendment, which is any person born or naturalized. I said, what's this stuff about naturalization? Which never appeared in a systematic fashion in the recent Supreme Court court debate in the Barbicane. And so I said, I better check the statute. And I nearly fell off my chair. Because what the first statute on naturalization said, and there is no power over immigration under the original system of enumerated powers. But what the first text begins, any free white person may apply to become a citizen of the United States, that is to become naturalized. But there was a prohibition against anybody of African descent or anybody of Asian descent from becoming a citizen of the states. Now most people look at this and say, well, where do they get that language? And this is another stunner. It turns out before we had a national government, states had their own statutes on naturalization. And Virginia included those words in its statute when they had been penned by none other than Thomas Jefferson himself. And so you're sitting there trying to think, what is going on here? When you have somebody who writes, all men are created equal and endowed with their creator with certain unalienable rights, saying black people need not apply. Well, it's a contradiction sort of right.
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Yes.
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Well, you then have to figure out what's going on.
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B
Richard, as you continue examining the text of the 14th Amendment, what else are you flagging?
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So when you start looking at this text of the 14th Amendment, it says these persons are citizens of the United States. Then you get three clauses, and they're all a little bit different. One of them is a clause which says, all citizens shall have the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the several states, and that's the privileges and immunities because it's only given to citizenship. And then there is a clause about due process and equal protection, and that's given to all people. So you know that that last half cannot be concerned with voting in cases like Boca and car, because there was no, no sentiment whatsoever at the time for making aliens citizen as a right. And so it had to be due to concern with other rights. And it was, and it was a very important provision. The Equal Protection clause contained the words within the jurisdiction. The due process clause did not. This is not an accident. These guys knew what they were doing. And the reason they put it in the first clause is they tried to figure out what the appropriate range for comparison is. If you're different from somebody else, can you say, well, you're different from somebody else in France or in England or in China. That doesn't cut it. So it has to be different from other people in the jurisdiction where obviously the racial differences are the things that they're trying to neutralize. And they did. But they're not basically granting you citizenship because that has to be done under the subject of the jurisdiction thereof. And these clause applies to people who are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. So then what are they? Well, you have to go back to Blackstone again and he has a very clear distinction between people who are subjects of the Crown, subject to the jurisdiction. And remember, in England they did not talk about citizens, they talked about subject. And so when they said that subject to the jurisdiction thereof, they meant in effect that he was somebody who owed loyalty to the Crown and the Crown in turn owed a duty to try to protect them within the jurisdiction had a completely different meaning. It's so that if you come to visit it, you can't evade the local laws on paying taxation on movie tickets or avoiding parking fines or obeying the traffic laws. You have to do what everybody else does. But Blackstone was very clear and everybody elsewhere was clear. You come and you go. You leave no trace behind you. And certainly no person who ever came in under the so called local allegiances, either in England or the United States was ever eligible citizenship. And now the 14th amendment comes along and people use that phrase as substitute for subject thereof and say all of a sudden everybody's a citizen and this is a complete sleight of hand. There's absolutely no authority for it in the original document.
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B
Yeah, let me ask one of the top line questions, which is just the very beginning of the amendment and the phrase subject to the jurisdiction thereof, there's big debate over exactly what that phrase is means. Based on your research, what did that mean to the people who actually wrote the 14th amendment?
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A
Well, they were clear in their commentary. It meant that you were a citizen. That's our word. And you owed a duty of loyalty to the government and it owed a duty of care to you. And there was a case called Minor and Happerstadt brought by a woman in 1874. And she said, hey, privileges and immunity is women that have the right to vote. And she lost nine nothing in a very angry opinion by the chief justice who said, look, women in every part of the world have been citizens and they've never had the right to vote. In England, there are all sorts of times when men were citizens who could not vote. Voting is no so part of the citizenship packing. And you look at all the modern accounts of equal protection and they all talk about democratic government. And democratic omens are defined by their ability to have election in which people vote on choosing their situation. So it was clear that they did not want that system at all. And they didn't. And of course, it has devastating consequences. And did people believe what they said with women? They did. Now why is that? Because women get the vote only by the 19th amendment. Nobody saw fit to say minor and habits. That was wrong and should be overturned. Now, it also applied to black persons person. And they never got citizenship by an amendment. But the complications are there. And so one of the complications that you have, which you always have to deal with when you're trying to work your way through this, is the 15th amendment. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. Weary does the 15th Amendment overruled the 14th Amendment by granting the vote to black? In a case called Yarborough decided in 1880, the Supreme Court made it crystal clear that the answer is no. Well, what does it mean? Becomes much fuzzier. They said, what it means is there's an independent source of authority under the federal government when it runs those elections under its authority. Then this prohibition against racial discrimination applied. You go back to Myron Haberstadt. There is no specific, specific federal authority that's involved in that case. It's just the 14th amendment and the citizenship clause. And so it turns out the two things that are consoleable by the time you get to the 1940s and you follow this through, it's the usual American doctrinal mass. By this time, they were utterly fed up with southern segregation in a big way because it had involved white primaries and the stuff in Texas and so forth forth. And they're looking at all of this. And they don't care about the history. They really find it just utterly impermissible. And so they kind of just go the other way around. Start relying on the 15th amendment. They quoted the earlier cases with approval, ostensibly. And then by 1946 or 47, it's all gone. Everything just disappeared. In America, you can overrule a case case by ignoring it as well as by overruling it. And it would have been very tricky to overrule a case that had such long standing situation. And so neglected indecision took over. This is just the whole pattern of this Constitution has all of these kinds of reflections associated with it. So you get to the Supreme Court and they're trying to figure out what to do with this case. And they do not want to confront this racial history. And I know they don't want to confront it because I wrote a brief with my friend Ben Clowers, now nominated for the 6th Circuit. Excellent, superb, fabulous lawyer. And we laid this whole history out, or at least enough of it. And nobody talked about it, including the government. They wanted to do a different strategy.
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B
Richard Epstein with us, author of the book the Myth of birthright. What the 14th amendment really says. Richard, this big Supreme Court case that is often cited in these discussions, the Wong Kim Ark case, tell us your read on that.
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A
An 1898 case in which there is a Chinese citizen traveling under a Chinese passport whose parents are permanent legal aliens in the United States. And he goes abroad and then he comes back and they want to keep him out. Because. Because the rule is that when you're dealing with Chinese, you could keep anybody out. And the rule was also given the earlier Chinese exclusion cases, you could keep them out even if you promised to let them back in when they left. That's the kind of sovereign prerogative. I regard this as an atrocious set of decisions. But it was well established at the time and probably is pretty close to what the law is even today. Sovereign power is not to be messed with by imposition of damaged kinds of remedies that could alter the way in which the government works is the basic thing. So you then look at the case and what do you discover? You discover that he's a Chinese person. Well, that means he's not allowed in under the Naturalization act because Chinese naturalization was only allowed formally a good deal after. In stages, say after 1900 on this. And he is still carrying a Chinese passport, which means he hasn't renounced his loyalty to China. So that ends the case. If you're Just being a lawyer. But the chief justice, rather, Justice Gray, he has a different agenda and I understand what it is. But he misunderstood the problem. He said, look, there are a lot of people who came to this country after 1800, and they settled in this country, they have children in this country, they think themselves citizen. But not a single one of these, many, many people actually got themselves naturalized. It's a big ceremony now and a routine practice. But you think it was that way in 1818 or 1844? Probably not, as I don't want these people stranded. That's what he said. And so he said, if they're born in this country, we're going to do it. But notice, these are people who are eligible to become citizens, and they just take the right formality. And you know what a common law marriage is. People living together, have children, no ceremony. We protect them. That's exactly what he wanted to do, and that's what he said he wanted to do.
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B
And then, Richard, based on your analysis and perspective, where does the argument go wrong? From there?
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A
What happens is this was the argument that Saur wanted to make in his brief. He's a clever man. He said, I'm going to prove that the Chinese tourists are not permanent, and I'm going to prove that the various immigrants coming in on our shores by boats and whatever, they're not lawful. And the only thing that Wong Kim Ho protects are permanent legal residents. Therefore, I win. But he didn't read the general language and understand the power that the tradition to many people has, including the State Department, about Juan Kema. So we actually try to read how this case is treated and the authority for it in the government bureaus. Everything is just wrong. I mean, they don't state it right, but nobody cares about it. It's kind of like another form of prescription. And, well, at this particular point, you now realize that if you looked at the naturalization statutes, they have a sentence which comports with all standard international law doctrines, which says the nationality and naturalization of a minor is determined by the naturalization of its parents. And if they're not naturalized, you're not naturalized. Well, you apply that to Wong Kim, ok? And it's all over, right? Parents weren't naturalized, you can't become naturalized, and there's the block. So when he says no, we start looking at the child. And this is where Judge Barrett and Judge Gatanji Jackson start to go. They said, no, we're not caring about this old parent stuff. They ignore the statute. We want to look at the kid. Well, they keep using the word domicile. It's not in the statute, by the way. It's just residents. And there's a big difference between them because domicile protects a particular legal home and resident just means you're wandering around the United States. And so they start looking at this and said, what about the child? Then they have the intent question. And so you hear Justice Barrett saying, well, how does a 14 day old child form an intention to have a jurisdiction when they can't even figure out who estranged from it? And they go on and on about all this, but they never read the international law and they never read the naturalization statute. International law always said the domicile of a child is determined by the domicile of its parent. Okay, so you apply that in Wong Kim Wak. This kid is domicile in New York for the purposes of state law, but if you then look at his federal statutes, he has exactly the same status as his parents. He's a legal non resident in the United States and not a citizen. That's the correct analysis. Unless you think that sovereign immunity means when anybody, whether native born or admitted that's naturalized, leaves the United States, they could be excluded by the United States no matter what their sacred word had been on the question. So I'm sitting there saying, what can you do about this? Well, I wrote this book. It will be out there, it will be read by some people, agreed with by even more and ignored, I think in the courts. I mean, the one thing that emerges now afterward is what percentage of the children born in the United States are basically anchored babies, birthright citizens, tourists, children and so forth. What do you think the number is hazardous?
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B
I would about 15%.
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A
Well, you're high, but not by much. It's a little bit over 10%.
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B
Okay.
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A
300,000 births a year, mainly from China. And these are not people just wandering onto our shores. They're basically companies that organize and pay for the way and do everything. So what's going to happen is this battle is not over.
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B
Richard Epstein is a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute. Lawrence A. Tisch professor at New York University, senior lecturer and Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, and his new book is the Myth of birthright what the 14th amendment really says. Richard A. Epstein, thanks so much for joining us on Future of Freedom.
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A
Well, it's very nice to be there and thank you for listening to me.
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B
We thank both of our guests for joining us. Thomas A. Berry, Director of the Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy center for Constitutional studies. More@cato.org and Richard Epstein, Lawrence A. Tisch professor at New York University, senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, and author of the Myth of Birthright Citizenship. To find additional episodes of Future of Freedom, go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your audio. Thank you for listening to Future of Freedom, a production of Franklin News Foundation.