Which makes me a US citizen. My parents were citizens too: Dad by birth, and Mom by naturalization. But even if they weren’t, I’d still have a US passport based on 150 years of legal precedent and cultural tradition. Both of which are now under fire, soon to be judged by the US Supreme Court.
“…birthright citizenship is simply national suicide,” one writer proclaimed in The Federalist, a conservative online publication.
Countered a Boston Globe columnist: “To rip that principle out of the Constitution would warp the meaning of American citizenship into something narrower, meaner, and unworthy of a confident nation.”
And so, the debate rages. At issue: an executive order by Donald Trump denying citizenship to anyone born on US soil without at least one parent who’s a US citizen or permanent legal resident. The outcome: to be determined by the highest court, probably sometime this summer.
In all fairness, both sides have put forward powerful legal arguments. Mostly they hinge on one particular clause of the 14th Amendment guaranteeing citizenship to anyone “born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof…” The question: if your parents are foreigners visiting America only temporarily or illegally, are they—and you—really subject to its jurisdiction?
Putting legal niceties aside, however, the real elephant in the room is something called “birth tourism.” The common practice, in other words, of pregnant women entering the country illegally or on temporary visas just to give birth. The result: automatic “anchor baby” citizens capable of conferring legal status on their elders. According to some estimates, 70,000 babies enter the country for that purpose annually, amounting to more than 500,000 over the past decade. Not to mention those born to the estimated 14 million undocumented immigrants already living in the country.
“…mass uncontrolled immigration,” The Federalist writer argues, “has fundamentally changed the debate over birthright citizenship.” Which now, he contends, means “millions of new citizens whose only connection to the country is that their parents snuck over the border in violation of our laws.”
Something, incidentally, that few other countries allow. Of the world’s estimated 200 nations, only 36—about 18 percent—offer unrestricted birthright citizenship. Most of them are in North America, including Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Much of Europe, Asia, and Africa, on the other hand, abolished or restricted the practice beginning in the early 1980s.
The Philippines hasn’t allowed it since 1935. With means that today, Philippine citizenship is determined not by the place of your birth, but by whether you have a Filipino parent.
“Aliens…do not necessarily imbibe Filipino ideals nor appreciate Filipino institutions by the mere accident of their being born in the land,” constitutional scholar Felicisimo San Luis wrote in the late 1940s. “They should not, therefore, be made citizens…when their loyalty may have still remained in the country of their parents. The disintegration of a state is bound to occur with perilous rapidity when its citizenry is saturated with unabsorbed elements.”
Which makes today’s Filipino handwringing over America’s prospective abolition of birthright citizenship both confusing and amusing. Ending the practice, Artemio V. Panganiban scowls in his Philippine Daily Inquirer column entitled “With Due Respect,” would represent a “plainly strained and grotesque” interpretation of the 14th Amendment. Why? Because, he argues, Trump’s executive order “unduly limits” an “inherent right” guaranteed by the US Constitution.
To his credit, Panganiban also articulates his primary motivation for opposing such a move: that undoing birthright citizenship, he believes, “is plainly disadvantageous to Fil Ams…and ultimately to the Philippines. Why? Because Fil-Ams remitted a whopping 40.9 percent of total remittances sent by all Filipinos working abroad, constituting by far the largest share of the $37.2 billion full-year 2023 remittances…”
Left unsaid is exactly how—or if—revoking birthright citizenship would affect Fil Ams, the vast majority of whom are citizens or legal residents. And anyway, Mr. Panganiban, America doesn’t make policy based on what’s best for the Philippines.
With due respect.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
