Ramaswamy argued that according to the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees birthright citizenship to most people born in the US, children of undocumented immigrants born in the country shouldn’t be granted citizenship as their parents “broke the law” to be in the US.
“As the father of two sons, it is hard for me to look them in the eye and say, ‘You have to follow the law,’ when our own government fails to follow its own laws,” Ramaswamy said, The Washington Post reported.
What does the 14th Amendment say exactly? How did birthright citizenship emerge in the US? Why is it so widely debated? Here is everything you need to know.
The origin
At the centre of the birthright citizenship debate is the 14th Amendment. Its first section states: “All persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
But why was it brought in the first place? The amendment came in 1858 to nullify the US Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 judgement in the ‘Dred Scott v. Sandford’ case, which barred African Americans from becoming US citizens, regardless of their status at birth.
“Without the guarantee of citizenship, black Americans had lacked clear rights to own property, move freely, or even remain in the United States — ‘colonisation societies’ raised money for the mass deportation of former slaves to Africa, a continent their ancestors had left generations before,” a 2018 report by Vox said.
The 14th Amendment ensured a legally secure position in the US for African Americans for the first time.
However, the concept that children of immigrants born in the country were automatically US citizens remained vague until 1898. That’s when the Supreme Court for the first time said the 14th Amendment gave birthright citizenship to most people born in the US. The ruling came in the ‘United States v. Wong Kim Ark’ case, filed by San Francisco-born Wong Kim Ark, who was a son of Chinese immigrants.
The Wong Kim Ark case
Since their arrival in the US during the 1950s, Chinese immigrants were seen with distrust and resentment due to racial prejudices and taking away jobs from localities. This culminated in the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 — it not only excluded Chinese nationals from entering America but stated that they were also barred from getting US citizenship.
In 1894, Wong Kim Ark temporarily left the US to visit China. When he returned, the immigration officials refused to let him enter the country.
“He protested that he was a citizen (as he was born in the US); the federal government used the case to lay out the position that (in the words of historian Erika Lee) ‘American-born Chinese could not be considered citizens if their parents were not, and could never become, naturalised citizens,’” the Vox report added.
When the case reached the Supreme Court, it ruled in favour of Wong, saying, “The right of citizenship … is incident to birth in the country.”
The debate
The proponents of ending birthright citizenship have two broad arguments. First, they say the Wong Kim Ark case ruling was limited as Wong’s parents were legally in the US at the time of his birth — he was born in the 1870s, much before the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Acts. Therefore, children of illegal immigrants born in the country can’t automatically get US citizenship.
The second is regarding the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the 14th Amendment and if it applies to people living in the US without official authorization — in other words, illegal immigrants.
The side opposing birthright citizenship believes “that the amendment’s framers understood that the children of illegal aliens, like their parents, owed their loyalty to a nation that wasn’t the United States. Thus, they weren’t under the jurisdiction of the United States,” according to the National Constitution Center, a museum dedicated to the US Constitution.
However, Geoffrey Hoffman, director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Houston Law Center, told the Associated Press that such arguments are false “since any person in the US, besides diplomats, would be subject to US laws regardless of immigration status.”
The birthright citizenship supporters also say their opponents’ arguments have racial overtones — the supporters accuse the other side of harbouring the fear that immigrants would change “the character of America” and outnumber the white people.
About 4.8 million US citizens 18 and under had at least one undocumented parent as of 2018, according to an American Immigration Council report published in June 2021.
What’s next
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Birthright citizenship is a recurrent topic of discussion in American politics. Three years after Trump first proposed to abolish the provision, he told a news outlet that he would soon sign an executive order to reinterpret the 14th Amendment — that order never saw the light of day.
Moreover, analysts, at the time, pointed out that such an executive order would have been unconstitutional, saying the most likely way to amend the provision was through Congress.
“A constitutional amendment faces a higher bar since two-thirds of the House and the Senate need to agree on the proposed amendment and its wording, to present it to the states for ratification,” the National Constitution Center said.
