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.
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.
Our what?
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")
Thats a tautology. “What the constitution says” is the thing in question.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
This was a tricky case where the constitutional text contains ambiguous language (whether the child is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. at birth). Meanwhile, English common law points one way, while some legislative history, the 1866 civil rights act, and the 1924 indian citizenship act point the other way.
1. An artificially whipped-up "question".
2. Conservative bias in the media.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
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.
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.
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
True, but again, scientists are saying that we're already putting massive strain on our ecological resources, and the strain is only increasing. Not just climate change, but ocean acidification, modification of biogeochemical balances, habitat destruction, etc.
We are at genuine risk of accidentally wrecking the ecosystems we depend on.
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
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.
Just look at the second amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Just as the second amendment has this "militia" phrase that provokes arguments, the fourteenth amendment starts with
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.
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...
Yet you rarely find anyone giving a shit about the American Samoans, you never hear about it.
> Yet you rarely find anyone giving a shit about the American Samoans, you never hear about it.
This seems entirely subjective.
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.
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.
It makes sense to me to say that they do not fall under US laws and US jurisdiction, and their children likewise.
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.
But that’s the whole debate! We all agree that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” creates exceptions that are not in the text. Where do those exceptions come from, and what’s the exhaustive list of them?
> people in foreign embassies (which is "foreign soil")
This is incorrect. Children of ambassadors are not citizens at birth, even if they’re born off the embassy on U.S. soil. Diplomats don’t give birth in embassies.
> invading armies, and indigenous tribes on tribal land.
Incorrect. Prior to the 1924 indians citizenship act, Indians born off tribal land weren’t U.S. citizens either, because they were considered citizens of the indian nations to whom their parents belonged.
Prior to the Indian citizenship act, a child of Cherokee Indians born on US soil where citizens of the Cherokee nation and were not automatically U.S. citizens under the 14th amendment.
Under Canadian citizenship law, a child born in the U.S. to Canadian citizens is automatically a citizen of Canada at birth. Using the exact same logic as for Indian tribes, that child isn’t a U.S. citizen at birth under the 14th amendment.
Which is gods-damned crazy. We are that close to overturning major civil rights.
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
This goes beyond the value of citizenship by birth, which I'm neither in favour nor against (personally I think that just sanguinis is nonsensical, but so is to automatically give citizenship even to accidental passer-bys), it's all about whether the law still carries any "evident" meaning or whether it can be spun around depending on political necessity, which is bad
After that bit of logic, nothing the supreme Court decides would surprise me
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.
Worth noting that the economic literature also shows that this is firmly in our best interests, and immigrants and their children more than pay their way in future taxes and future entrepreneurship.
The US didn't even have a particularly selective immigration process for the first century. It was only after a big influx of Chinese immigrants (and a corresponding backlash) that we enacted our first immigration controls, limiting how many immigrants could come from a given country each year. The aptly-named "Chinese Exclusion Act" of 1882.
But a big part of the problem is that many people do not have a legal pathway available to them, and either don't believe that or don't wish to accept it. So they spend years carefully pursuing every bit of due process they're entitled to, and those stories become part of the "slow immigration bureaucracy", regardless of whether the result was ever really in question. This is where immigration reform proposals have generally gotten bogged down; some people strongly feel we should resolve this by creating a general legal pathway, others feel we should resolve it by expediting removals, and both groups are very hesitant to agree to a proposal that doesn't resolve it at all.
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)
(Or at least, people wanted to come until the last couple of years...)
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.
Offering birthright citizenship makes the US better than 95% of the other countries. Not worse.
Under what moral rules do genocidaires get citizenship but not, say, refugees?
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.
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
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
So you are suggesting abrogating rights based on an event that occurs with minuscule probability. Get a grip.
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?
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.
toomuchtodo•1h ago
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)