From the first day of his administration, President Donald Trump has sought to end birthright citizenship, meaning that being born on U.S. soil would no longer be sufficient for establishing permanent legal status in the country.
So far, three different judges have blocked the executive order Trump issued on Jan. 20, which the administration has appealed to the Supreme Court. Legal scholars have pointed to over a century of jurisprudence to indicate that birthright citizenship is too well established to effectively challenge. Despite the history, the Trump administration’s attempts have ignited small-scale debates about birthright citizenship, a debate faith leaders say has too often failed to consider the ethical and moral implications of revoking it.
“I want folks to really think about what this means,” said Lauren Reliford, director of policy for the Children’s Defense Fund. “What are the real economic implications and what are the human costs?”
There have been few challenges to birthright citizenship since 1868 when the 14th Amendment was ratified, guaranteeing citizenship to formerly enslaved people. Challenges became especially rare after 1898, when the Supreme Court upheld in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that children born on U.S. soil are citizens, regardless of their parents’ status.
The Trump administration claims that birthright citizenship is “a magnet helping draw the flood of illegals across our borders,” suggesting that ending it will curtail illegal immigration. But Reliford said that this would be an ineffective immigration deterrent, because it doesn’t address the root causes of migration. Instead, she worries it would be used to strip civil rights from those who currently have them. In this case, Reliford said, the immediately targeted group of Americans are children.
‘Heavenly citizenship’
Rev. Robert Chao Romero, an immigration lawyer and historian from California, said the church is one institution that should have a particular investment in the moral arguments for policies such as birthright citizenship and the moral implications of revoking it.
“From my pastoral perspective, we need to keep making the moral argument as Christians in order to preserve the testimony of the church, the witness of the church,” he said. If Christians abandon these arguments, Romero said, they leave the legacy of their faith in the hands of those who invoke the name of Christ to justify ruthless and nationalistic policy.
“They’ll think that MAGA is all there is,” he said.
Romero cited a Christian theology of heavenly citizenship taking priority over all other identities, including political and national ones. This understanding, which he learned from the Coptic Orthodox tradition, Romero said, helps Christians to set aside their identity found in the rights and privileges of political citizenship. Unity with Christ is ever-expanding and open to all. Instead of looking to revoke privileges, rights, and securities associated with citizenship, Romero thinks Christians should be seeking to expand them.
“[Heavenly] citizenship transcends everything,” Romero said. It’s wrong for Christians to push that identity aside by advocating for a nationalist policy that would harm millions.
Birthright citizenship helps ensure that all children born in the U.S. have access to the social infrastructure, Reliford said.
“We have, in spite of the cuts that are coming down, a social infrastructure that ensures birthing persons and children have what they need,” Reliford said.
Children, by right of birth, can be covered by social safety net programs, including WIC, SNAP, and Medicaid, dramatically reducing child poverty and infant mortality. Taking that away would leave them vulnerable not only to hunger and illness but also to exploitation as stateless people.
The first Trump administration floated the idea of ending birthright citizenship, and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) filed a bill to that effect in Congress.
At that time a physician and member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Metropolitan New York Synod’s Anti-Racism Committee called for Americans, particularly Christians, to keep the move in the context of the administration’s overall hostility to nonwhite immigrants in particular.
“It is no secret that the current administration concern over citizenship refers to non-citizens giving birth in this country, mostly babies whose parents are coming from Central and South America and don’t look like the majority white populace living in the United States,” the Bronx-based physician wrote anonymously, “The narrative of calling for an end to birthright citizenship reinforces an us versus them mentality that is based on racial differences.”
Support from Christian institutions
While various aspects of immigration have become divisive among U.S. Christians, birthright citizenship is generally supported. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has repeatedly affirmed that stripping away this right would be a betrayal of both American values and Christian teachings on human dignity. Evangelical ministries and nonprofits that work with immigrants know the challenges faced by people without legal status, and do not want to see those numbers grow.
"If we didn’t have birthright citizenship, we would have many more undocumented immigrants,” said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief.
Helping those people secure housing and work and become integrated into a community is far more difficult than doing so for refugees or people with other legal statuses, Soerens said. Every group of people who lose legal status lose their ability to contribute fully to their cities, states, and the U.S. economy as a whole.
They also contribute to churches, he said. Many immigrants are Christians, and their children are born into tight-knit religious communities, the kind that foster a lifelong connection to faith.
“I would argue that it serves the church really well,” Soerens said.
Soerens said that it didn’t make sense to upend one of the few things that already works well in the U.S. immigration system. “We’ve all basically agreed about that for 150 years,” he said.
The legal foundation of birthright citizenship is clear. As legal scholars Vikram David Amar and Jason Mazzone point out, the citizenship clause “means exactly what it says.” The consequences of ending birthright citizenship have also been widely studied by legal and social policy experts. The Migration Policy Institute reports that such a change would lead to an increase in stateless individuals, making it harder for them to access education, health care, and employment.
Families with mixed-immigration status would not be the only ones affected, wrote Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. Right now the key document to prove one’s citizenship is a birth certificate, because the United States has no central registry. Either a birth certificate or naturalization papers are needed to obtain a passport; if a birth certificate becomes insufficient to prove citizenship, the “administrative chaos” will spread to anyone who does not already hold a passport, and getting a passport will be harder.
“The elimination of birthright citizenship could eventually place every single person in America in the precarious position of having to prove American citizenship by descent to justify their own citizenship or that of their children,” Nowrasteh wrote.
Reliford also pointed out that the additional administrative work that would be required to implement the executive order seems directly opposed to Trump’s stated goal of shrinking the federal government. Creating a more complex system to prove citizenship does not save money or eliminate bureaucracy, she said.
In her view, the one guaranteed result of ending birthright citizenship is a more segregated, hierarchical society, wherein thousands of children who would be American citizens are placed in harm’s way.
“Once advocates tell you it’s hurting kids,” she said, “Why would you continue down this path?”
Bekah McNeel is a freelance journalist living in San Antonio. She reports on the intersection of faith and early childhood for Sojourners.
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