At the end of his post on birthright citizenship, Mike Ramsey writes: "On the other hand, for nonoriginalists, the case against birthright citizenship in light of modern circumstances (which are quite different from the time the Amendment was adopted) might seem considerably stronger."
Some years ago, I wrote two posts on the Nonoriginalist Case Against Birthright Citizenship. While I agree with Ramsey about the originalist argument, I made out the nonoriginalist case against birthright citizenship. See here and especially here.
For an excerpt:
But the strongest normative argument against conferring citizenship on the children of illegal aliens derives from the fact that, in the modern world, American citizenship is a tremendous privilege. It gives access to high wage markets as well as welfare state benefits. Given these privileges, the normative question is how we should allocate this privilege of citizenship.
It seems obvious that citizenship should not be granted simply based on the accident of being born in the United States. Why would one want to allocate citizenship to children merely because they were born here as a result of their parents having come here illegally? As I noted in an earlier post, there are a variety of ways one might want to allocate citizenship (and immigration) – based on quotas from countries, based on skills contributed to the United States, based on years already lived in the United States – but none of those are based on the simple accident of being born in the US.
Finally, a third type of nonoriginalist argument is to look to the existence of laws throughout the world, especially that of “civilized” countries in Europe. A strong trend as to these laws suggests that normatively the United States ought to follow it. Significantly, the only two developed countries in the world that have birthright citizenship are Canada and the United States. None of the European countries have it and several developed nations have repealed it in the last generation.
Posted at 5:46 PM