A (17:32)
The convergence of that many independent institutional voices across Congress, law enforcement, intelligence, diplomacy, and national security is not the hallmark of a fringe concern. It's the hallmark of a recognized and documented structural vulnerability that the current legal framework was never designed to address. Then there's what critics refer to as the pull factor. So this argument's pretty straightforward. The 14th Amendment, as currently interpreted, functions as a legal magnet because it grants immediate, automatic and irreversible citizenship to any child born on US Soil, regardless of how their parents got here, regardless of how long they've been here, or whether they have any legal right to be here at all. That child doesn't just receive a passport. They become, in the language of a critic, a legal anchor for the entire family unit. Which brings us to the term anchor baby, which is exceptionally politically incorrect and it's considered by many to be dehumanizing. Mainstream style guys and news organizations have largely abandoned that term. But it persists in the political conversation because it captures with brutal efficiency the legal mechanism that critics are describing. So the theory is a child born on US Soil to undocumented parents becomes a US Citizen at birth. That kid cannot be deported. Deporting the parents of a US Citizen child, while legally possible, becomes politically toxic and practically complicated. And at 21, that kid can sponsor their parents for legal permanent residency, triggering what's known as chain migration, which is a pathway which one birth can eventually confer legal status on an entire extended family, regardless of how that family originally entered the country. So the child is not the destination, the child is the mechanism. And critics argue that this creates a calculable incentive. Right? So if the reward for reaching US Soil while pregnant is a US Citizen child, a permanent barrier to family deportation and and an eventual pathway to legal Residency, then the 14th Amendment isn't just a citizenship guarantee. It's in effect, an immigration policy. And it's one that was never debated, never voted on, and never intended to function that way. And the data on what that incentive has produced is not speculative. It's documented in city budgets, hospital records, and school districts across America. For example, New York City has spent over 2.6 billion on immigrant related costs, forcing cuts to libraries, sanitation, and core municipal services that legal taxpaying residents depend on. Denver spent 356 million in 2024 and 2025 alone, approximately 8% of its entire municipal budget on immigrant response. And that same city was forced to absorb over 16,000 new immigrant students and in a matter of months. So this was an emergency that was largely unfunded and created a surge in staffing and physical crossroom space that didn't exist. School districts across the country are legally bound by the supreme court's ruling in Plyler vs Doe to educate all kids regardless of immigration status. And they're diverting funds from special education and advanced placement programs to meet the immediate demand. So critics are calling it fiscal cannibalism, right? The systematic gutting of existing educational infrastructure to absorb an unplanned and unbudgeted population surge. Okay, everybody knows that I am an animal person, a dog person in particular. And that's because our dogs are our best friends. But when it comes to their food, we're always forced to compromise between fresh and healthy or easy to store and serve. Well, not anymore, because with sundaes for dogs, you get both and your dog gets the best. 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That's 50% off your first order at Sundays for dogs.com Jillian 50 Sundays for dogs.com forward slash Jillian50 or use the code Jillian50 at checkout. And the healthcare picture is equally stark. Federal law requires hospitals to stabilize and treat anyone who arrives in labor, regardless of their ability to pay or their immigration status. So emergency rooms were never designed to function as primary care clinics for a global population, and they're now reporting record deficits. In early 2026, municipal hospitals in multiple states reported a 30% spike in emergency room births by non residents. The uncompensated care runs into the hundreds of millions annually in individual cities alone. Nationally, the figure runs into the billions and that's before accounting for the broader fiscal footprint, welfare programs that are accessed by mixed status families, the near total paralysis of an immigration court system that's backlogged by years and, and the ballooning costs of detention facilities that just can't keep pace with the volume that they're being asked to process. Independent analysis and state level estimates now place the total annual cost of services consumed by undocumented immigrants and their citizen children in the tens of billions of dollars nationwide. Now, additionally, critics raise what they call the constitutional distortion argument. So, as mentioned, the 14th amendment was a reconstruction era remedy drafted in 1868 with a specific and deliberate purpose to overturn Dred Scott, to constitutionalize the Civil Rights act of 1866, and to guarantee that formerly enslaved people could never again be stripped of citizenship by a hostile government. That was the problem that it was designed to solve. That was the wrong it was written to correct. It was not written to establish a finders keepers citizenship rule for anyone who reaches American soil. It was not written to create a legal mechanism by which a single birth could anchor an entire foreman family to permanent residency in America. And it was not written with any contemplation of a world in which 8 billion people are, as the Solicitor General noted before the Supreme Court, a single plan right away from a US Maternity ward, applying a Reconstruction era constitutional remedy to a 21st century global immigration pattern and treating the result as settled or untouchable law, as, in the view of critics, not fidelity to the Constitution, it's a distortion of its original intent. And it's one they argue is costing the country not just billions of dollars, but the foundational principle that American citizenship is a civic commitment, not a geographical location. And then there's the question that, that rarely gets asked in polite company, but sits underneath all the fiscal arguments and all the legal debates and all of the national security concerns. And that's the question of assimilation. Critics argue that the pull factor created by birthright citizenship has not just increased the volume of immigration into the United States, it's fundamentally altered the nature of it. So there's a meaningful difference between controlled legal immigration, where individuals are vetted and processed, and they arrive with at least a basic framework for integration and the rapid, unvetted, unplanned population movement that Critics argue the 14th Amendment's current interpretation has helped accelerate. And that difference matters enormously when you start talking about whether immigrants are able to successfully assimilate into American civic and cultural life. Assimilation is not a dirty word. It's not a demand for cultural erasure. It's, it's the process by which immigrants, as generations of them have done throughout American history, gradually adopt the language, the civic values, the legal norms and a shared cultural identity of their new country, while contributing their own traditions and perspectives to it. And that process has always been the engine of American national identity. It's why the children and the grandchildren of immigrants from all over the world became, over time, simply American. The melting pot is not a myth. It's a documented historical process. But it requires time and it requires infrastructure and it requires a pace of arrival that host communities can actually absorb. So what the critics argue is happening now is something different. When thousands of people arrive in a single city in a matter of months, as we've seen happen in Denver, New York, Chicago and cities across the country, the infrastructure required for successful assimilation does not exist at that scale or at that speed. All right, now on the other side, let's look at the data. So there's a widespread image in this debate of a pregnant woman crossing the border to give birth and then leave. But research from the Urban Institute found that over 70% of undocumented immigrants who had a US born child live in the United States and had for at least five years before that birth. So most of the people having babies here aren't birthed tourists. There are people who have been here for years. They have jobs, communities and families. The birth tourism concern is statistically less typical. And they point to what's happened in Europe as having created an assimilation crisis. So they've got the flip side perspective to this argument where in countries like Germany and France that have traditionally used blood based citizenship, which is just sanguinese, they claim the result has been multi generational immigrant communities with no citizenship, no vote, and no stake in the system. And some scholars think that this leads to higher rates of alienation, social exclusion, and in some cases radicalization. America's birthright citizenship system is arguably one of the reasons that American immigrants integrate better than European ones. And when your kid's born an American, you got skin in the game. Now, personally, I see this differently because in America, typically we get more economic immigrants from Central or South America who have a very different worldview than many of the refugees from war torn countries like Afghanistan that Europe has taken in, who've been raised to hate the west and for that reason, amongst others, will likely struggle to assimilate. But maybe that's just me. And then there's what might be the most important legal argument of all, and arguably the nail in the coffin for the Trump administration's case, and this is the separation of powers. So even if you think birthright citizenship is bad, even if you want to end it, an executive order is not the right tool. The Constitution requires a constitutional amendment to change a constitutional guarantee. And that means that two thirds of Congress and 3/4 of states have to agree. That's how the founders designed it. And they made it hard on purpose because they didn't want the definition of who's an American to change every time a new president takes office. Office. Now, let's talk about what actually happened inside the courtroom, because it seemingly did not go well for the Trump administration. The government's lawyer is Solicitor General D. John Sauer. And his argument had two main parts. So, first, the legal argument. He said the phrase subject to the jurisdiction thereof in the 14th amendment requires more than just physical presence. He argued that it requires political allegiance, a genuine loyalty and connection to the United States. Undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders, he said, don't have that allegiance, so their children shouldn't automatically get citizenship. Second, the policy argument, he said, everything I just outlined that birthright citizenship has created a massive industry of birth tourism, which acts as a pull factor for illegal immigration and is being exploited in the ways the Founding Fathers and Reconstruction era Congress never intended. Now let me walk you through some of the key exchanges between the lawyers and the justices. Chief Justice John Roberts, who's a conservative that was appointed by George W. Bush, pushed back hard on the government's logic. Sauer was trying to argue that certain existing exceptions to birthright citizenship, like children of diplomats or children of invading enemy soldiers, showed that the 14th Amendment was never meant to be absolute. And Roberts said to Sauer, the examples you give to support that strike me as very quirky. You know, children of ambassadors, children of enemies during a hostile invasion, children on warships, and then you expand it to a whole class of illegal aliens who are here in the country. I'm not quite sure how you can get to that big group from such a tiny and sort of idiosyncratic group, translation, the chief justice was essentially saying, your exceptions are these tiny, unusual historical edge cases, and you're trying to use them to deny millions of people citizenship. And when Sauer tried to frame the argument as necessary for a new world where global travel makes birth tourism easy, Roberts wasn't having that either. And he said, well, it's a new world with the same Constitution. So that did not seem to go well. I've been doing a little spring reset with my closet lately, focusing on quality over quantity. And I'm building a wardrobe of pieces that are well made, versatile and easy. Easy to reach for every day. And that's why I keep coming back to Quince. 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Go to Q U I n c e.com Jillian for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/Jillian. Then Justice Brett Kavanaugh, another Trump appointee, raised what might be the government's biggest legal problem. So even if you think the 14th Amendment is ambiguous, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality act of 1952, which wrote Birthright citizenship into federal statutes. So even if a president could somehow reinterpret the Constitution by executive order, which is itself a massive stretch, he would still be overriding a law passed by Congress. And executive orders cannot override federal law. That's Separation of Powers 101. But the real lead balloon moment came from Justice Neil Gorsuch. So Gorsuch, who's a staunch defender of tribal sovereignty, trapped the government in a logical corner. He asked Sauer point blank, would Native Americans be citizens under your standards? Because under the government's theory that you need exclusive political allegiance to be a citizen, Native Americans who often owe their allegiance to their tribes might not qualify. And Sauer's response was a disaster. He hesitated and said, I gotta think that through, but that's my reaction. And as you can imagine, Gorsuch was unimpressed by Solicitor General, who hadn't thought through how his rule affected the original inhabitants of the continent. And he dryly quipped, I'll take the yes, that's all right. Honestly. It was a devastating exchange, and it showed that the government's theory wasn't just a challenge to illegal immigration. It was a legal mess that could accidentally strip citizenship from groups the law has protected for a century. The liberal Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson were even more aggressive. So Justice Katanji Brown Jackson asked almost incredulously, are we bringing pregnant women in for depositions? Meaning are we going to subpoena women in labor to prove their immigration status before their baby gets a birth certificate? Justice Sotomayor asked whether the government planned to retroactively strip citizenship from people already born under the current rule. And Sarah said, no, the order only applies going forward. The ACLU's lawyer is Cecilia Wang, and she's worth knowing about because her personal story is directly relevant. So she was born in Oregon to parents from Taiwan who were on student visas at the time, and she is herself a birthright citizen, exactly the kind of person that Trump's Executive Order would have denied citizenship to if it had been in effect when she was born. And, and she argued before the nine justices that the rule has been clear for 150 years and that the Executive Order would immediately cause thousands of babies to lose their citizenship. And if the government's theory is accepted, it could put the citizenship of millions of past and future Americans in question. So after the arguments wrapped up, most legal observers and journalists who watched them concluded the same thing. The government's probably going to lose this one badly. And the Court, including Trump's own appointees, seemed just deeply skeptical. So where does this go? Right, because the Justices are now in private deliberation, and based on the oral arguments, based on the questions from Roberts, Barrett, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, most legal analysts think that the Court is going to rule against the Executive Order. The question is how they rule, Right? There are essentially three paths. So option one, the Court strikes down the Executive Order on narrow statutory grounds, meaning they say the order conflicts with the Immigration and Nationality act of 1952, which Congress passed. And under this ruling, they wouldn't even need to touch the 14th Amendment. It's the surgical option, right? The least controversial. Now, option two, the Court rules broadly that the Executive order violates the 14th Amendment and reaffirms the 128 year old Wong Kim Ork precedent explicitly. This would be a more sweeping rule that settles the constitutional question definitively. Option three, the Court upholds the order, and that would mean immediately that hundreds of thousands of babies born in America each year won't receive citizenship. Now, most legal experts consider this unlikely given the oral arguments, but it's a possibility. So Let me leave you with this. The people challenging the principle argue that the world has changed. The global travel, birth tourism, mass migration have created situations the Reconstruction Congress never imagined. And they're right. The world has changed. But Chief Justice Roberts made his thoughts on that argument pretty clear when he said, it's a new world. It's the same Constitution. So that certainly seems like an uphill battle. The Constitution can be amended. It's been done 27 times. If a true majority of Americans and their representatives believe birthright citizenship should end, there's a process for that. It's called a constitutional amendment. What there isn't a process for, what the Constitution does not allow, is for the president to handle this with an executive order. And frustratingly, that's what this case is also really about. Not just who gets a birth certificate, but whether or not the current occupant of the White House can decide what it means. So the Supreme Court's going to answer that question by July 2026. And when they do, we're going to be here to break it all down for you in detail. All right, team, that was a long one. You got a lot to think about. If you found this helpful, please do me a solid and subscribe. We do this every week. Drop a comment below. Let us know what you think. Should birthright citizenship end should stay? Let's talk about it. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed the podcast, please like comment, subscribe and share. And make sure to let me know what guests you want to see on in the future.
