Birthright Citizenship is National Suicide
by Daniel Greenfield
March 26, 2026 at 4:00 am
Truth Social
Had the common-sense provisions of the Expatriation Act of 1907 or even the milder Nationality Act of 1940 been in force today, we wouldn't have the farce of cartel and terrorist leaders who still hold our citizenship, active traitors with citizenship, "refugees" who spend most of their time back home or a Somali senator linked to fraud who is still voting in Minnesota elections.
Under these provisions... the "refugees" and "migrants" who maintain homes abroad, the women who marry foreign nationals for cash to give them citizenship, and the anchor baby would be as extinct as the dodo.
The Warren Court's deliberate misreading of the Fourteenth Amendment's awkward attempt to define all black people as citizens, "all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power... are declared to be citizens," somehow trumped the clear language of Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 that Congress has the power "to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization".
In a series of bad decisions, Supreme Court rulings argued that serving in a foreign military, desertion, marrying foreigners, and voting abroad did not merit denaturalization.
These rulings relied on now widely discredited premises, such as defining the Constitution's "cruel and unusual punishment" term as being anything that the justices disapproved of, and "evolving standards of decency" which allowed judges to redefine the law to fit liberal mores.
The Trump administration may be willing to take on "treason citizenship"....
Indeed, even the Fourteenth Amendment had emphasized "not subject to any foreign power".
America's founding principles were highly skeptical of both notions that were rooted in monarchial, rather than republican principles.
Monarchy made everyone born under the jurisdiction and sovereignty of the Crown into a "subject". Allegiance to the Crown was not voluntary the way that it was in America. That was why the Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, labored to defend the right of "expatriation" which still remains the only unquestioned form of denaturalization.
The American Revolution was predicated on the idea of citizenship as a voluntary action rather than an involuntary compact created by a place of birth. The growing intrusion of "Jus Soli" began with the Fourteenth Amendment, which, rather than quickly naturalizing freed black slaves, clumsily made everyone born here and "not subject to any foreign power" citizens.
And that's not only absurd; it's national suicide.
The prototype for American citizenship is neither "Jus Soli" nor the "Sovereignty of the Crown," but the concluding words of the Declaration of Independence, in which we "pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." A nation built on anything else is either a tyranny or an absurdity. Some on the left and the right now argue for tyranny or absurdity.
America was based on neither tyranny nor absurdity, but a voluntary community of mutual allegiance that it is possible to join and to withdraw from, and to be tossed out of and barred from for disloyalty.
Past Supreme Court decisions reversed the tyrannical one-way allegiance of monarchy and instead replaced it with a one-way allegiance in which the state was obligated to do everything for the citizen, but nothing at all was required from the citizen. Not even allegiance. Even asking them not to run terrorist organizations and drug cartels at war with America is asking too much.
No nation can survive on such principles.
f citizenship can't even be removed from the people who pledge allegiance to Al Qaeda and ISIS, then, to paraphrase President John F. Kennedy, what does it ask of us to do for our country, and what does it even mean beyond a set of legal complications?
The only pathway to reviving America is to make citizenship into a meaningful act of allegiance, not an accident of birth. Immigration in this regard is not the problem; immigration without allegiance is the real crisis, but so is the citizenship without allegiance...
America needs to exercise the traditional ability it once had to make citizenship meaningful by also making it selective, controlling immigration, ending the automatic grants of citizenship for happenstance births, and once again making citizenship conditional on ongoing allegiance.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22370/birthright-citizenship
