No New Law Needed for Anchor Babies

The 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868) to the Constitution includes a citizenship clause, created specifically to grant citizenship to children of former slaves, as the first article of the Amendment, “1. 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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

There is a qualifier to the birth clause, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which has been ignored, allowing the misconstrued idea that the 14th Amendment grants automatic citizenship to anyone who happens to be born on American soil. This Amendment was authored by Senator Jacob Howard, Republican from Michigan. In explaining the 14th Amendment he said, “This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the family of ambassadors, or foreign ministers...” You cannot get more specific about the intent of the citizenship clause.

An 1873 opinion of the US Attorney General validated the intent of the Senator by stating that “under the jurisdiction” does not include aliens, because “they are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States to only a limited extent.”

The 1924 Citizens Act kept the jurisdiction clause intact and unchanged, as did the 2006 Federal law. There is no basis for anyone to grant citizenship to the child of an alien, legal or illegal, on the basis of circumstance of birth.

There are many people today who were born of alien parents and given US Citizenship, largely because of ignorance of the law by those completing and registering birth certificates. This most likely was not a matter of trickery on the part of the parents, nor was it collusion on the part of the doctors and state registrars. It was simply that they never thought to consider citizenship, when documenting the birth. That has changed. Illegal aliens eventually caught on to this, so that today there are more “anchor babies” than ever being born, and the parents are knowingly and deliberately taking advantage of this lack of vigilance. We now have probably millions of citizens who got their citizenship through this mistake. So the problem has two parts, those who are already citizens, and those who will be born here under these improper conditions in the future.

My opinion is that we need to enact a law (or just an executive order, because the law already makes these births non-citizen births) that declares a moratorium on registering alien births as US Citizens at a specific date, and thereafter requiring parents to prove their citizenship before a child is registered as a citizen. Our existing citizenship law grants automatic citizenship to children born in the US to at least one citizen parent. I think this would solve the “anchor baby” problem going forward, and would not punish those American citizens who had nothing to do with their improper certification as citizens. Once the “anchor baby” scam is ended, there will be one less incentive for people to come into the country illegally.