David Cole on Birthright Citizenship
| Tomorrow, the United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the legality of President Trump’s executive order from last year that attempted to overturn the principle of birthright citizenship. In the Review’s April 23, 2026, issue, David Cole writes about “the merits of the case”—or lack thereof: The issue pits a xenophobic administration against a well-established understanding that virtually all persons born here are US citizens regardless of their parents’ status. No lower court has sided with the Trump administration on the merits of the case. For the Supreme Court to do so would require it to repudiate the Constitution’s text, the Court’s own precedents, and the enduring understanding of all three branches and of the American people. But more than that, it would literally change our identity as a nation that welcomes all who are born here.
Below, alongside Cole’s essays, are five articles from our archives about citizenship and immigration in the United States. For the Supreme Court to accept the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, it would have to repudiate the Constitution, its own precedents, and the long-standing position of all three branches of the US government. “The Fourteenth Amendment alone was a revelation. It was created to ensure citizenship for Black people, but in the process it promised something that existed nowhere else in the Western world: if you came to this country and had a child here, your child would be a citizen from the moment they were born.” —December 21, 2023 Statelessness thus challenged conventional relationships between people, governments, and law: What did it mean to have people without citizenship? In the early decades of the twentieth century, jurists asked if the stateless might make a convincing case that individuals are the bearers of rights and duties because of their humanity, not the accidental circumstances of their birth. They wondered if individuals could become direct subjects of international law, even without being recognized as members of a nation, and what this might mean for legal nonpersons, like corporations.
—December 17, 2020 Discussions of eugenics and other fascistic ideas in American history tend to provoke the defense that they never took root. But if they never took root, why do they keep flowering? —September 26, 2019 The West’s hostility to immigration is not only immoral, it’s self-destructive.
—August 15, 2019 In our country’s history, immigration has never been just about policy. It has always been about who we are and what we are willing to stand up for. —December 3, 2018 New Subscriber Benefit!Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles. You are receiving this message because you signed up
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