It's not really a question of what's a good idea. It is in the text of the Constitution, about as plain as it can possibly be. If you want to change it, you have to change the Constitition.

Ironically, the same Court members who most often claim the plain text of the Constitution to support their ideas are the ones who put the most effort into finding a tortured reading of the 14th Amendment.

Imagine being 18 and suddenly discovering you have to prove the citizenship status of a parent you've never met or else you'll be deported to a country you've never been to and who's language you don't speak

A belief held by the majority does not make it better simply for that fact. Not that long ago, the majority view was that slavery was a great thing, so I think you should see that argument falls fairly flat.

Offering birthright citizenship makes the US better than 95% of the other countries. Not worse.

Note: There are ~30ish countries that provide citizenship to anyone born within their national borders (many with restrictions, for whatever that may mean). Largely, this covers a spotting of countries across the globe, but is almost universally true within the Americas.

The US has always been a country of immigrants; the Constitution recognizes and enshrines this fact. Amending this rule requires a federal supermajority (66% in House and Senate) or a state majority (66% of state legislatures vote in favor of said amendment). Given how difficult it is to find consensus on even the most banal issue, it's unclear whether there would be sufficient support to ever amend.

Given the US is one of the most (the most?) successful countries in recent human history, shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't the 95% be looking at the US and seeing what to copy?

As a non-US citizen, birthright citizenship has always struck me as strangely unique to America - in my mind it comes from a time when it was actively trying to populate the continent (something not a lot of countries have wanted to do, I guess).

Roll forward a few hundred years and the context has changed, so it seems reasonable that the law should too? But I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this is no bueno for SCOTUS, which has an infinite hard-on for Originalism [0] - I certainly can't imagine the conservative justices are ruling based on humanitarian grounds.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism

We don't really amend the Constitution every ten years. We got 10 all at once, immediately after the Constitution was written. They were amendments only because there was debate about whether including them would deprive people of even more rights by omission.

Of the remaining ones, two cancel each other out, and several others (including the most recent) are trivial. The Constitution has not been meaningfully amended in half a century, and it seems wildly unlikely that it ever can be.

95% of countries weren't formed by settling on somebody else's land and excluding the original inhabitants from citizenship for several hundred years. The American project is what it is because of millions of migrants who settled there for the perverse incentives of free land via the Homestead Act.

Constitutional amendments are generally made with the purpose of granting rights to the people, not taking them away. The US once made the mistake of making an amendment to take away rights (banning alcohol), but then another amendment restored the right to get drunk.

> Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship.

Closer to 82% actually, depending on how you count countries. Almost every country in the Western hemisphere has it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

> Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship. It creates perverse incentives.

I typically find that the people using this logic don't seem to apply it to laws like universal healthcare, parental leave, or paid-time off. The lack of those benefits creates perverse incentives to already living citizens, not hypothetical future citizens. Why not focus on them?

> Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship

The map of which countries have jus soli is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

>Jus soli is the predominant rule in the Americas; explanations for this geographical phenomenon include the establishment of lenient laws by past European colonial powers to entice immigrants from the Old World and displace native populations in the New World, along with the emergence of successful wars of independence movements that widened the definition and granting of citizenship, as a prerequisite to the abolishment of slavery since the 19th century.[5]

>There are 35 countries that provide citizenship unconditionally to anyone born within their national borders.

>

Do you have US citizenship? How did you acquire it?

If you inherited it from your parents, how did they acquire it?

Usually strong opponents to birthright citizenship are just a few generations removed from someone who got theirs via birthright.

>It creates perverse incentives.

It also helped vault America into being the wealthiest country in the world.

I, for one, believe in American exceptionalism. This country is different in many ways and its success is due to that difference. I don't think that the US should actively aim to "revert to the mean".

> It creates perverse incentives

Perhaps advantageous, America has been the product of these incentives and still sits atop the world on most hegemon metrics. It amazes me how many people complain about the post-WW2 world order America built and benefits from more than any other country.

The US is unlike most other countries in that it is built on the recent genocide of the native population, with ~most of the current population being immigrants in the last 400 years.

Under what moral rules do genocidaires get citizenship but not, say, refugees?

Why do you think it's not a good idea?

Why should I give a shit what 95% of other countries do? 99% of other countries are worse in every way that matters

This has nothing to do with whether it is a good idea. The question is whether the 14th amendment plainly says that this is the law of the land in the US, which it plainly does.

That three Justices chose to attempt to gaslight us about this is a disgrace. I'll never trust their judgement again.

Its a terrible idea to give citizenship to the chidlren of birth tourist. It makes no sense that someone defrauds the US government to get their child citizenship then you do nothing about it.