What is an American? The Supreme Court answered that question today, with an answer that should alarm every citizen who still believes this nation is something more than a patch of dirt. In Trump v. Barbara, six justices ruled that virtually anyone born on American soil is automatically a citizen, no matter who their parents are or why they are here. With that, the Court declared that being an American is an accident of geography and nothing else.
Here is the reality of the Court’s ruling in plain terms. A child born to a Chinese national here on a temporary visa, then raised in Shanghai under the watchful eye of the Communist Party, now holds the very same birthright as a boy in Kansas whose ancestors stepped off the Mayflower. The Court looked at those two children and saw no difference at all.
One of the attorneys who argued the case said it without blushing.
“In America, we do not punish children for the sins of their fathers,” the ACLU’s Cecillia Wang told the justices. “When you’re born in this country, we’re all American, all the same.”
It sounds generous until you realize it hands the keys of citizenship to anyone with a plane ticket and a due date.
Every nation has to answer the basic question about who belongs. There are two ancient answers. The right of the soil, jus soli, says you belong to the ground where you were born, while the right of blood, jus sanguinis, says you belong to the people you came from. Most of the civilized world long ago recognized that soil alone is a thin foundation for a nation, which is why birthright citizenship is so rare among developed countries. Britain doesn't have it. Neither does France or Germany.
By collapsing the whole question into the right of the soil, the Court has made citizenship cheaper than a tourist visa. It has told the world that America is merely a location, with no people and no inheritance to pass from one generation to the next.
The Court has taken the 14th Amendment, which was meant to protect the children of enslaved people, and instead ruled that it applies to any of America’s staunchest enemies—so long as they were born here. It does not matter how long they stayed, who their parents were, why they came, or whether they value our culture, laws, or heritage. The Court has ruled that none of that matters. An American can be anyone.
And lest you think this is a dramatic argument, it is important to note that birth tourism is already a documented industry, with maternity hotels catering to foreign mothers who fly in to deliver and fly home with an American passport for the child. There are over 1 million Chinese-raised American children who never lived in the US but were born here and have the same rights as every other American kid.
It takes very little imagination to see a regime hostile to the United States exploit the same loophole, manufacturing citizens by the thousand who can one day vote, hold office, gain security clearances, and serve a foreign master. It is already happening. And this ruling will increase it endlessly. The Chinese Communist Party does not need to defeat us on a battlefield if it can issue our citizenship at the maternity ward. A nation that will not guard its own front door has already begun to lose the war it refuses to admit it is in.
The justices in the majority waved all of this away. They treated an 1898 case about a San Francisco shopkeeper’s son as if it settled the fate of a 21st-century superpower facing a patient adversary that thinks in centuries.
As always, Justice Clarence Thomas saw clearly what his colleagues would not. He reminded the Court that the Wong Kim Ark decision “addressed only the citizenship of a child born to parents who were lawfully and permanently domiciled in the United States.”
The men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment never contemplated handing automatic citizenship to the child of every illegal entrant and temporary visitor. Thomas was right, and his warning will one day read as prophecy.
This is the most detrimental decision the Court has handed down in fifty years. Other bad rulings have cost us money, property, or comfort. This one costs us the nation itself, because a country that cannot define its own citizens cannot long remain a country.
Scripture is not silent about why nations rise and fall. Deuteronomy 32:8 says, “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided humanity, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.”
The Bible is clear that borders, nations, languages, and laws are good and Godly things from the Lord. This decision spits in the face of that key principle of natural law in favor of a toxic, suicidal, misplaced empathy.
So where does that leave us? The Court has spoken, and it will not reverse itself. The remedy the Founders left us for exactly this kind of overreach is Article V, a convention of the states, which can propose amendments that no court has the power to strike down.
Let the states convene and settle two questions that the Court has refused to settle rightly. Define American citizenship as the inheritance of a people and not the prize of a border crossing. And enshrine the protection of life in the womb, so that the same country will both welcome its own children and refuse to be conquered through the cradle.
What is an American?
The honest answer is an heir—someone who receives a nation and is charged to hand it on whole to the next generation. A people called to steward.
If we do not say so plainly, we will not survive, and we will have given our birthright away to those who never loved this land and never will.
