WTH is Going On With Birthright Citizenship? Adam White Explains

On President Trump’s first day in office, he issued an executive
order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American
Citizenship,” attempting to change the current understanding of
the Fourteenth Amendment by declaring that the children of
illegal immigrants or people on temporary visas born in the
United States are not granted citizenship. While many Americans
may agree that the unfortunate realities of “birth tourism” and
“anchor babies” in the U.S. need to be curbed or stopped, Trump’s
executive order has been criticized as unconstitutional and the
wrong way to approach the issue. How are presidents of both
parties subverting Congress in their pursuit of legislative
goals? And how did President Obama’s action on DACA and President
Biden’s declaration on the Equal Rights Amendment help create
precedent for Trump’s actions today?


Adam White is the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional
Governance and senior fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the
administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin
Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the
Administrative State. Before joining AEI, he was a research
fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an adjunct
fellow at the Manhattan Institute.


Read the transcript here.


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