Trumping Birthright Citizenship
One of the first executive orders Trump signed last week was a controversial action to abolish “birth right citizenship.” I would dare say most Americans never heard the phrase “birthright citizenship” prior to Trump making it a priority political issue.
I must admit I was an older man before I learned birthright citizen ship is rooted in the 14th amendment. I first learned of this obscure con stitutional loophole from a second generation Cuban coworker several years ago. I didn’t believe it because it didn’t seem logical, and I had never heard about it previously. When I researched it, I found it to be true. I wrote a column about birthright citizenship that year.
For those that do not know what I’m talking about—imagine a pregnant woman from Niagara Falls, Canada crossed the border to go shop ping, she suddenly goes into labor inside a Niagara Falls U.S.A mall and delivers the baby in the local U.S hospital. That baby is automatically an American citizen with all the right and privileges that goes with that. America is the only nation in the world where this is true.
The reasoning for the 14th Amendment enactment came after the civil war, implemented to grant the newly freed slaves’ and their descendants’
citizenship, ensuring they were rec ognized as full citizens of the United States in perpetuity. This action was necessary to overturn the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, which had declared that African Americans could not be citizens. Trump is deter mined to end birthright citizenship because it is being abused by many foreigners that take advantage of the outdated constitutional loophole.
But it’s not going to be easy to override a constitutional mandate. I’m no lawyer but I’m sure every court in the land will smack him down on this one, because it’s a direct impingement on a Constitutional Amendment. It will take a repeal of the 14th Amendment, which requires many political procedural hoops to be jumped through. Only once in US history was an Amendment repealed, which was the 18th Amendment on Prohibition in 1933.
Perhaps the 14th amendment is an outdated law that needs to be reconsidered, but at the same time if Trump is allowed to ignore the Con stitution and do whatever he pleases, he is a dictator in the truest sense.