The Supreme Court affirmed on Tuesday that the right to citizenship that has been in place since the abolishment of slavery over 150 years ago is still, in fact, a right. If you are born on American soil — regardless of your parentage, race, creed, or any
other potentially differentiating factor — you are an American citizen. It’s one of the foundational principles of the post-Civil War republic, and Republicans despise it.
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s rejection of Donald Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship via executive order — a blatantly unconstitutional effort that should have been immediately rebuked by the court — right-wingers descended into a full-blown ethnonationalist frenzy that ventured into outright eugenics.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, himself the descendant of European refugees from 20th century pogroms and the Holocaust, told Fox News that the Trump administration would be taking “a hard look” at banning all pregnant women from entering the country.
Miller, the architect of Trump’s most draconian and inhumane immigration policies, complained to Fox News that “people from all over the world from third world nations — nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel — they can just come into the country, have a baby, and then that baby is automatically a citizen?”
“The baby can sit on a jury when he turns eighteen, and sit in judgement of you, and sit in judgement of me,” a hysterical Miller railed to host Jesse Watters.
Setting aside why Miller is so specifically concerned that the children of migrants might one day be allowed to sit in judgement of him, the unfiltered racism was ubiquitous across large swaths of the right.
Derrick Evans, a pardoned Jan. 6 rioter who recently attempted to run for Congress, tweeted that his followers should immediately contact ICE if they “see a pregnant foreigner.”
Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, published a list of supposed suggestions to prevent migrants from having citizen children given the court’s decision. These included: denying entry to the U.S. to all “female foreigners,” denying entry to all pregnant women, requiring “sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry,” and the outright “dissolution of the Union.”
Davis shared other posts suggesting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio should revoke the legal immigration status of any woman under the age of 55, and that the Department of Homeland Security should prioritize the removal of foreign women of “childbearing age.” Rubio is himself an American born to two Cuban refugees who, at the time, were not yet American citizens.
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh had a day-long meltdown in which he suggested that pregnant Guatemalan women were sprinting across the border (Guatemala and the U.S. do not share a border) 30 minutes before giving birth to “magically” grant their children American citizenship. Walsh cried that the true “birthright” belonged to his children, who deserve to “live in a country that resembles the one our ancestors established.” Well it does. Walsh’s ancestors theoretically also lived in a country that for almost two centuries has held that those born in America are American … unless he means before that, when those rights were denied to the enslaved population. He has not clarified.
While the right has framed most of their nativist fervor as a response to undocumented immigration, the reaction to the court’s decision made clear the Republican project is also intent on stripping migrants who do things the supposed “right way” of their immigration status, and of reversing citizenships already granted to some.
Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas), the son-in-law of Indian-born right-wing conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza, wrote that “immigration is the litmus test in our politics. You either want to stop robbing Americans of their birthright or believe that our nation is nothing more than the world’s economic zone.”
“More denaturalizations. More remigration,” he wrote in another social media post, recalling the white nationalist concept that endorses the ethnic cleansing of nations via the forced expulsion of migrants.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) was also incensed about the 150-year-old right to citizenship continuing to be a right, as it has been her entire life, writing that the “State Department should IMMEDIATELY cease to give out visas to pregnant applicants.”
Influencer Benny Johnson endorsed suggestions that Republicans should “codify into law a permanent ban on immigration from third world countries,” ban skilled worker visas like the H1-B program, and mandate pregnancy tests for women visiting the U.S. to prevent “birth tourism.”
In his own post, Johnson stated that dual citizenship should be made illegal. He endorsed complete travel bans for “hundreds of countries, suggested closing down “all legal immigration,” called to “denaturalize anti-American foreigners and fraudsters,” and to criminalize “birth tourism” even though the practice is already heavily regulated by existing immigration policies and airlines — who literally will not let you board a plane if you look too pregnant.
Of the roughly 3.6 million babies born in the United States every year, about nine percent are born to foreign parents — regardless of their immigration status — the vast majority are the children of long term residents who are already in the legal immigration process. Less thanhalf of one percent of U.S. births are thought to be related to so-called “birth tourism.” The executive order Trump issued was never just about undocumented immigration; it explicitly targeted legal immigrants, residents, and long term visa holders.
The fury currently roiling the right after Trump’s handpicked Supreme Court declined to give him the power to unilaterally rewrite the Constitution is not based in deep-rooted concern over a (nonexistent) invasion of anchor-baby-having migrant women. It’s about being denied a tool to create the white, Christian nationalist ethnostate they’ve been publicly salivating over for years now. It would be a mistake to think they’ll go quietly.
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