🎧 One Vote Away: Birthright Citizenship’s Narrow Escape
Anthony Teso responds to Lars Larson’s opinion on birthright citizenship
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com
Lars Larson’s July 1 column on the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision gets the ruling backwards. The Court did not create anything on Tuesday. It refused to destroy something that has been settled law since 1898.
Anthony Teso
In Trump v. Barbara, the Court struck down an executive order that sought to strip citizenship from children born on American soil. That order never took effect because every lower court judge who reviewed it found it flatly unconstitutional. The Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, reaffirmed what United States v. Wong Kim Ark held 128 years ago: the Fourteenth Amendment means what it says. All persons born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. This principle held even during the Second World War, when children born to Japanese parents held in internment camps were citizens at birth. Congress later codified it. Larson calls the decision “despicable.” He is describing the oldest and most stable rule in American citizenship law.
His complaint that Congress cannot override the ruling by statute is a complaint about the Constitution itself. The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment placed birthright citizenship beyond the reach of any future Congress on purpose. They had just watched the Supreme Court declare in Dred Scott that Black Americans could never be citizens, and they were determined that citizenship would never again depend on which faction held power in Washington. Larson objects that a child born here might one day run for president. That is not a loophole. That is the design. In this country we do not visit the legal status of parents on their children.
The fiscal panic is equally confused. Larson warns that Social Security and Medicare are now doomed. Those programs face one long-run problem: too few workers paying in relative to retirees drawing out. Children born here who grow up, work, and pay payroll taxes for forty-five years are the solution to that arithmetic, not the threat. Undocumented workers already contribute billions annually to Social Security for benefits most will never collect. If Larson wants to save the trust fund, he should welcome every birth certificate issued in Clark County.
There is a real story in this ruling, and Larson missed it. The 6 to 3 vote conceals a 5 to 4 split on the constitutional question. Three conservative justices were prepared to accept, in one form or another, a theory that was considered fringe a decade ago. Justice Kavanaugh, while voting to strike down the order, suggested Congress might restrict birthright citizenship by statute, and the Speaker of the House announced within hours that he intends to try. A guarantee written to be untouchable came within one vote of being touched. That fragility, not the imaginary flood of “anchor babies,” is what should worry anyone who takes the Constitution seriously.
Larson says America is the only country that recognizes the God-given rights of its citizens. Tuesday’s decision recognized the rights of people he would prefer to define out of the country. He should be relieved the Court declined to make citizenship a partisan football. Someday the other team gets the ball.
Anthony Teso
Camas
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