Why the US has birthright citizenship

On the first day of Donald Trump’s second presidential term, he signed an executive order about an old American rule: that with very few exceptions, anyone born here is a citizen. Trump’s order stated that the rule should no longer apply to the children of those in the United States illegally or temporarily. And while, within a few weeks, that order had been blocked by multiple federal judges, it was a temporary resolution, with the ultimate outcome yet to be determined, probably by the Supreme Court.

The US is far from the only country in the world that offers unconditional birthright citizenship. While it’s uncommon in Europe, Asia, and Africa, it’s very common among Western Hemisphere countries, partly because of their history as colonies populated mostly by settlers. But of the many countries with birthright citizenship in the world, the US is by far the largest, with hundreds of thousands of baby citizens born here every year to noncitizen parents. Those numbers naturally raise the questions: Is this what birthright citizenship was meant for? And why do we have birthright citizenship in the first place?

The short answer is that birthright citizenship in the US came about as a way of granting citizenship after the American Civil War to the large population of formerly enslaved Black people. But that raises a different question: How did a law intended for Black Americans end up creating hundreds of thousands of new US citizens born to immigrant parents every year? In the video above, we trace that history, answer that question, and look at a few of the times that the US has actually had this argument before. Today’s concerns over birthright citizenship may feel specific to our particular immigration debate. They’re actually not.