The president, Donald Trump, said today that he wants to end the right to citizenship for those born in the country, which has provoked a lot of criticism and supposes an increase of his anti-immigration tone, in the middle of the campaign of the legislative elections of the 6th. of November.
“We are the only country in the world where a person comes and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a US citizen for 85 years, with all the benefits,” Trump said in an interview with the digital newspaper Axios. where he said that this “has to end”.
The president objected that, apart from the country, there are about thirty countries around the world that grant citizenship to those born in its territory, such as Canada.
The words of Trump retake one of his proposals against immigration of his campaign for the presidential elections of 2016 and joins other recent measures as the sending of more than 5,000 soldiers to the border with Mexico to deal with the arrival of immigrants undocumented
“They’ve always told me I needed a constitutional amendment, and you know what, it’s not necessary (…) Now they say you can do it only with an executive order,” said Trump, who offered no details about the plan and limited himself to to point out that he had analyzed it with his legal advisors from the White House.
The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1868, establishes that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject therefore to their jurisdiction, are citizens of the United States and the state in which they reside.”
This amendment began its approval process in 1866, one year after the end of the Civil War (1861-1865), and sought among other things to grant citizenship status to former African-American slaves, who had already been released.
Trump said he can end that precept by an executive order, but it seems unlikely that this way will prosper, since Article 5 of the Constitution itself stipulates that any amendment to the Magna Carta – the ratified amendments are already part of this – can not be undertaken by the president but by a broad legislative majority or state legislatures.
The Democratic opposition rejected the initiative immediately and dismissed it as unconstitutional.
“While Trump’s proposal to end citizenship by birth is obviously unconstitutional, his intention is clear: to incite fear, divide our nation and make vulnerable communities feel insecure,” the Committee spokesman said in a statement. National Democrat (DNC), Daniel Wessel.
For his part, the speaker of the lower house, Republican Paul Ryan, followed the wake of the opposition in an interview with a local radio: “You can not end the right to citizenship by birth with an executive order,” he said.
The immigration policy expert of the conservative Cato Institute David Bier said in a statement that this plan would be illegal and, in addition, counterproductive.
“Without the right to citizenship by birth, the number of illegal residents in the US would increase dramatically and they would all be told they are not Americans,” Bier said.
This right was already challenged shortly after its approval when in 1895 the government denied citizenship to a son of legal immigrants who had been born in the country, but the Supreme Court agreed with this descendant of Chinese in 1898.
In this regard, the vice president, Mike Pence, recalled today that the court has never ruled in a case in which the parents were undocumented. “The Supreme Court has never spoken about whether it refers to people who are in the country illegally,” he said.
If Trump finally signed the executive order, a legal battle may be triggered as his immigration veto on Muslim-majority countries already did.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) rejected the proposal and its head in the country Nicole Austin-Hillery warned that “threatens to stoke the fear and uncertainty, and undo countless lives of families overnight.”
The organization denounced that this initiative “stinks of political maneuver” before the proximity of the legislative elections “.
