Michael Anton has caused a furor by suggesting that birthright citizenship is not required by the US Constitution:

You have to read the whole 14th Amendment. There’s a clause in the middle that people ignore or they misinterpret — “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” — ‘thereof’ meaning of the United States. What they’re saying is, if you’re born on US soil subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, meaning you’re the child of citizens or the child of legal immigrants, then you are entitled to citizenship. If you’re here illegally, if you owe allegiance to a foreign nation, if you’re the citizen of a foreign country, that clause does not apply to you.

If you read the debate about the ratification of the 14th amendment, all the senators who are discussing what this is meant to do and what it means are very clear on this point; I tried to point that out. I expected the left would blow up and get angry which they did. What I didn’t expect, at least not to this extent, and what was very disappointing was how angry the so-called conservative intellectuals got with me, and they essentially said any opposition to birthright citizenship is racist and evil and un-American. . . .

Maybe it’s the same wing of the GOP who think that socialism is just peachy-keen, and that socialism increases the power of the individual vis a vis the government. As we’ve learned, it’s a rather sizeable wing.

And Anton clearly never saw the results of this 2011 poll, or he would not have been at all surprised:

Seventy percent (70%) of those in the Political Class favor automatic citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants, but 70% of Mainstream voters are opposed.

I discussed the issue of birthright citizenship on this blog in some detail in this post from four years ago. It’s not just Anton’s issue; this has been debated for quite some time and the anti-birthright side has made a pretty good case. By the way, the US is almost alone in having such a rule [NOTE added for clarification: among developed, first-world countries]:

To stop birth tourism, Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom have a modified jus soli, granting citizenship by birth only when at least one parent is a citizen of the country or a legal permanent resident who has lived in the country for several years.

[NOTE: the language of the above Wiki quote has changed ever-so-slightly since I wrote the original 2014 post, but its meaning is the same.]

Only Canada of all the developed countries has a rule that resembles ours.

It’s certainly a subject that should be able to be debated without name-calling. But name-calling seems to be the favorite debate technique of a great many people these days. And if Anton is “evil” for saying what he said, then I guess that Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom are all evil too.

And here I thought Europe was supposed to be so wonderfully progressive.

[ADDENDUM: I want to add that Anton suggested Trump do this via executive order, and I don’t agree with that. Of course, Trump could try it and there would immediately be a court challenge. I believe he would probably lose that challenge, but it would compel SCOTUS to clarify the issue, a process which has its own merits.

I believe, however, that the better approach would be a statute passed by Congress. This would almost certainly not happen, for the same reasons that the previous bill introduced by Vitter (I have discussed Vitter’s proposed bill in my 2014 post) did not go anywhere. If one were to be passed, however, it would also be challenged and would almost certainly ultimately go to the Court for clarification.

The safest route would be a constitutional amendment. This is quite difficult to accomplish, of course, but it would be the answer to those who believe that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment is properly read as requiring birthright citizenship even for the children of illegal aliens and/or birth tourists.]

[ADDENDUM II: To understand Anton’s argument better, I strongly suggest you take a look at Anton’s piece in the Claremont Review of Books. It goes into much greater detail on the debate about the 14th Amendment and its language.]

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]