No. of Recommendations: 5
The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
On the last day of his presidency, in his last speech, President Ronald Reagan recalled what someone had once written to him: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
Long story made short: In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the US Supreme Court held by a vote of 6–2 that ethnic Chinese Wong, wwho was detained up his return from China, was a citizen because he was born in the United States.
He continued: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Presentation Ceremony for the Presidential Medal of Freedom,” January 19, 1989, at
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/rema...Reelected in 2024, on his first day in office, Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” It announced a new U.S. policy, saying that the government would not issue documents recognizing U.S. citizenship to persons whose “mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or…when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”
Over the past month, a number of children born in the US have been deported along with their illegal imigrant mothers. The mothers had apparently been deenied the ability to contact their attorneys.
Jeff
