The Unseen Implications of Repealing Birthright Citizenship

Of the dozens of executive orders President-elect Donald Trump has promised to sign on his first day back in office, few will capture more attention and cause more debate than his decision to end birthright citizenship.

According to his campaign platform and subsequent public statements, Trump plans to direct the federal government to cease recognizing children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrant parents as automatic U.S. citizens. Members of his transition team have provided two primary justifications for this change. As a legal matter, they argue that the current practice of birthright citizenship is based on an unconstitutional interpretation of the 14th Amendment. As a policy matter, they also contend that birthright citizenship creates an incentive for illegal immigration and encourages “birth tourism,” the practice of noncitizens traveling to the U.S. for the express purpose of giving birth.

The arguments around these two contentions have been covered extensively elsewhere, and they will doubtlessly be rehashed repeatedly in the wake of Trump’s expected action. What is relatively new and insufficiently understood are the ramifications that ending birthright citizenship would have for the current moment of great-power competition, population decline, and mass polarization. 

Ending birthright citizenship would collide with these contemporary considerations in three major ways: It would erode America’s current demographic advantage over rival powers, needlessly endanger the advantage we have in internal assimilation and stability, and and mire us in an unnecessary and protracted distraction from building an immigration system designed to compete our with our adversaries and guarantee continued American prosperity.

Looming demographic challenges.

In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, economist Nicholas Eberstadt starkly detailed the rapid pace at which the world is aging: According to U.N. Population Division data, the majority of the world’s population now lives in countries in which the fertility rate is below replacement level. By 2050, more than 130 countries across the planet will be experiencing net mortality, where deaths exceed births.

Critically, the United States occupies an outlier position in these trends. In addition to having higher fertility rates than nearly all other developed nations, America’s “demographic exceptionalism” is tied to its history and projected future of robust immigration. 

This in turn has positioned the U.S. to be the only major power projected to maintain both population and labor force growth through the mid-century. This is especially important because America’s primary geopolitical rivals face severe demographic headwinds; China and Russia are already experiencing population decline and rapidly aging societies. 

Ending birthright citizenship would directly hurt American competitiveness on the world stage by needlessly weakening a key demographic advantage we hold over our great-power rivals. While the precise numbers are subject to conjecture and will depend on exactly how the Trump administration defines which immigrants are here “illegally,” historical estimates indicate that roughly 7.5 percent of all babies born in the U.S. going forward would no longer be considered automatic citizens. This would amount to more than 250,000 children each year, and in practice this number will likely be much higher if the definition of “illegal immigrant” is expanded to those who remain in the country after their parole or Temporary Protected Status programs are terminated. 

Throwing a quarter million children into a position of legal uncertainty each year would produce a score of negative outcomes for American strength. If these children do leave with their parents, as the architects of this policy intend for them to, then in the coming decades the U.S. will struggle more than it otherwise would to fill jobs requiring manual labor, where having a large number of young people is necessary. Funding Social Security also will become an even greater challenge with a smaller working-age population. 

And in the event that these children stay and grow up in the United States, they would be treated by the legal system and by large swaths of society as innate foreigners in the only land they have known, which would in turn challenge the other distinct advantage America holds over her rivals: domestic stability derived from a history of comparatively smooth cultural assimilation. 

America’s exceptional assimilation.

Some of America’s greatest advantages in great-power competition with China and Russia are derived from the factors closest to home for us. The most commonly cited one is our fortuitous geography. 

But another significant factor buttressing American strength and power projection is our remarkable ability to assimilate large numbers of newcomers and their descendants into the American political project. 

While this claim may sound remarkable given the prominence of our recent internal divisions around culture and immigration, consider the situations of China and Russia. China has resorted to full-scale authoritarian repression and even genocidal measures to deal with separatist and autonomist movements in minority regions within China such as Xinjiang and Tibet, and continues to ruthlessly crack down even on smaller expressions of minority identity. For its part, Russia has waged a bloody war against domestic separatists in the Caucasus within the past two decades and continues to struggle with radicalization in this region.

While the reasons behind these conflicts are complex and distinct from one another, at a broader level they are undoubtedly worsened by the limited and exclusionary conception of political belonging in China and Russia. Both those countries have struggled and will continue to struggle to promote a domestic concept of what it means to be a Chinese citizen if one is not Han Chinese or a Russian citizen if one is not an Orthodox Russian.

In contrast, America has a far greater track record of assimilating minorities into our polity due in large part to ideals of American citizenship undergirded by policies like birthright citizenship. For the children of immigrant parents, birthright citizenship not only validates their American identity without dispute to those who would cast them as having foreign allegiances, it also places patriotic burdens on these children to be loyal to their homeland. 

The responsibilities conferred upon the children of immigrants by birthright citizenship are especially important now because assimilation is under attack on all sides. Large segments of the left now view assimilation as a form of cultural imperialism and have retreated from defending it, let alone promoting it. Meanwhile, many on the right have drifted toward the idea that immigrants and their children are increasingly assimilating into a left-wing subset of American society or toward more nefarious racialized conceptions of American identity.

This means that future children born without automatic citizenship will instead inherit a political climate in which significant segments of both parties will actively or tacitly encourage them to give their political allegiance to a foreign power. Apart from the ominous impact this could have on how these children view their role and place in American society, it would also create new divisions and political hurdles in American politics that the proponents of this policy do not seem to have fully reckoned with.

The potential for statelessness.

Repealing birthright citizenship would cause havoc and uncertainty at all three stages of its implementation. In deciding who is defined as an “illegal immigrant,” the Trump administration will likely adopt an expansive definition of “illegal” that includes immigrants who arrived via legal pathways such as parole or Temporary Protected Status. Vice President J.D. Vance has already made clear that the incoming administration does not view these programs as having a legitimate basis in law.

If the administration does adopt this definition, it will create an even murkier legal area for the children born to parents who arrived via these programs, one that will be even more complicated to litigate. 

Many of the children born to illegal immigrants may also be temporarily rendered stateless. Some countries such as India do not automatically grant citizenship to the children of citizens born abroad. Given how politically polarizing other policies involving immigrant children, such as family separation and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), have been, artificially creating a population of potentially hundreds of thousands of stateless children living within the U.S. would become a poison pill in American politics.

Beyond these initial issues, the Trump administration will also need to decide what to do with these children now that they are no longer automatically citizens. The GOP will likely be split between hardliners who want to deport them immediately and those who want to grant them an eventual pathway to citizenship. The first option would likely cause even greater political polarization, while the second would further needlessly complicate our already byzantine immigration system.

The net effect of repealing birthright citizenship would be a prolonged state of chaos in our domestic politics and our immigration system. Doing so would squander key advantages we have over rivals who are gaining ground on the world stage and distract us from being able to build an immigration system that prioritizes the talent we need to remain competitive by miring us in decades of legal challenges, ambiguity, and disunity. As is often the case, those who are currently seeking to suddenly impose mass changes to the social fabric will find that the status quo has functioned well for a reason.