Trump Wants To Kill The "American Dream" By Stripping Away Citizenship Rights

Generally when we're talking about the 14th Amendment, at least from a legal context, we're talking about state and federal powers, due process and that sort of stuff. But there is also an interesting clause that all persons born or naturalized are basically citizens, and what Trump is trying to do is change the law so that way individuals who are born here can't just become citizens, that we then prevent individuals from having incentives from coming into the United States.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

So Brenton, let's talk about birthright citizenship. I'm sure a lot of folks have seen this in the news lately with Trump wanting to destroy birthright citizenship. Where did this come from?

Right. So, birthright citizenship, the idea of it comes from the 1860s when the 14th Amendment was ratified in the Constitution, and it said that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are basically citizens. And since then, we've had cases that have come up and said that relates not only to people that were born of citizens from the United States, but also people that were born from illegal immigrants. So people come in, they may be here on a work visa, may just be visiting friends and family, but they have a child that was born in the United States, because they were born on the soil, they became citizens.

And to be clear, the 1860s, obviously the Civil War. And so this was an answer as to what to do with the liberated slaves.

That's correct. It was also part of the, after the Civil War there was Civil War Amendments is what we call them, and they were the 14th, the 15th, and the 16th Amendment, or excuse me, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment. And what they basically did was they tried to say, these slaves who were slaves and are now freed have rights and part of that is the right to citizenship. And so what it was, was rebuke of the Dred Scott Case saying, look, these individuals are citizens. So that was really the foundation of why we have the 14th amendment, but also extended to individuals much beyond those that were slaves or descendants of slaves.

Generally when we're talking about the 14th Amendment, at least from a legal context historically, we're generally talking about like state and federal powers and due process and that sort of stuff. So this is an interesting clause that all persons born or naturalized, that's what we're really focusing in on, is this little clause in the 14th Amendment. And so our understanding from reporting is that Trump and from his own statements, he wants that to not be the case. It's been a Republican talking point for a long time, a derogatory term that they call anchor babies. The idea that an illegal immigrant family can come here, have a child, and as long as the child is born on US soil, then the child is a citizen, but not the undocumented family.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. And where it gets to and what they're trying to do is they're trying to change the law based off of what they see and their concept and belief is that if we make it so that way individuals who are born here can't just become citizens, that we then prevent individuals from having incentives from coming into the United States. So they think that it will draw down on the number of immigrants that cross or try to cross into the United States because they don't think that they can create children who will then be American citizens and be able to get access to advantages of what being an American citizen affords you.

So what they're wanting to do, it sounds like, is create a permanent underclass of people who would have been born here and be the citizen of nowhere perpetually stuck in this country, not able to access resources. It sounds very Orwellian to me. And then I think when we saw the fires in France, this has been what, a decade ago, when the Arabic community was rioting from North African French colonies because they were stuck. They could never be French citizens. This didn't go well for France. Why do we think it will go well for us?

And that's exactly it and that's what a lot of scholars are saying is that you're saying that you want to decrease the number of illegal immigrants, but if you actually do change birthright citizenship, you probably will create a lot more illegal aliens or undocumented citizens because you take away that status. And what does that do to states?