After the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 to uphold the doctrine of birthright citizenship on Tuesday, experts are divided about the national security implications of the decision.
The court rejected U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order, which would have denied automatic citizenship for babies born in the United States whose parents are in the country illegally or on temporary visas.
Gerard Filitti, senior counsel at the Lawfare Project, told JNS that birthright citizenship was “never really the magnet” behind the importation of “terrorist ideology” into the United States.
“The magnet has always been lax immigration policy—admitting people we have not vetted, from anywhere, allied nations included, and then failing to remove those with no lawful basis to remain, whether they entered illegally, overstayed or let a visa lapse,” he said.
“A child’s citizenship status only becomes an issue when we fail to adequately screen who comes in or enforce removal when someone’s lawful status ends,” Filitti said.
Mark Goldfeder, director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, agreed with Filitti. The ruling “does not make America a magnet for terrorists,” he told JNS. “Weak enforcement does.”
“The answer to making America safer is to enforce the laws we already have: material-support statutes, visa revocation, deportation where lawful, prosecution for threats and violence and real consequences for people who turn ‘protests’ from protected First Amendment activity into intimidation or terror support,” Goldfeder said.
Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s center on border security and immigration, told JNS that he is concerned.
The ruling “leaves open a huge loophole, through which millions of foreign nationals with no allegiance to the United States have minted American citizen children despite no roots, commitment or loyalty to our country,” he said.
“Wealthy Nigerians and Russians exploit this for financial benefit,” he told JNS. “Wealthy and corrupt Chinese, including Communist Party members, military and intelligence officials, do so perhaps with hostile as well as venal intent.”
Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, told JNS that he doesn’t know if there have been many terrorists conducting birth tourism.
“It would be playing a long game indeed to get people into the country to give birth, bring the babies home, radicalize them and eventually get them to go to America to engage in civil terrorism,” he said.
Josh Hammer, senior editor-at-large at Newsweek and host of an eponymous podcast, told JNS that the ruling is “an absolute disaster for the Constitution, for republican self-governance and for national security as well.”
“It will have ruinous consequences for years to come, including, unfortunately, when it comes to the inevitable and evergreen threat of Islamic terrorism,” said Hammer, who is also a fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Filitti, of the Lawfare Project, told JNS that the ruling means that there is “no further room for executive action and effectively none for Congress.”
Ending birthright citizenship requires “a constitutional amendment, which is not happening,” he said.
Regarding national security and immigration, the court “has been clearing the administration’s path, not blocking it,” according to Filitti.
He cited the June 25 rulings in Mullin v. Doe, which allowed the administration to remove temporary protected status designation for Haiti and Syria and closed the removals to judicial review, and Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, which allowed the administration to deny asylum seekers at the border.
“While today’s decision is a loss for the administration on birthright, the fuller record is that on vetting, enforcement and removal, it has been winning,” Filitti told JNS.
