Kari Lake doesn't like automatic US citizenship for the children of undocumented migrants
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Senate candidate Kari Lake has joined former President Donald Trump in saying the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants shouldn't automatically become U.S. citizens.
In a Jan. 18 interview with Univision Arizona, Lake said she didn't believe the children of undocumented immigrants were "natural born citizens" because "I think a lot of people are coming just to have their children here, and I don't think that was the idea of our founding fathers."
Lake's campaign declined to respond to The Arizona Republic's request to clarify her position, but Lake previously suggested support for getting rid of automatic citizenship for the children of migrants last year when she retweeted a "Team Trump" tweet touting that he would end the practice on Day One of Trump's return to the White House.
The 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause establishes that if an individual is born in the United States, they automatically are a citizen. The Reconstruction-era amendment was a product of slavery and the Civil War. Many formerly enslaved people were denied citizenship by the states, despite being born in the country, in an effort to continue to oppress them.
It also came as a direct response to the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision in 1857, Arizona State University law professor Paul Bender said. The court decided that freed slaves or previously enslaved individuals could not be American citizens, which prompted the need for congressional action.
Yet birthright citizenship could only likely end through a constitutional amendment.
Trump has pushed to end birthright citizenship since his time in the Oval Office. He argued that the 14th Amendment didn't apply to the citizenship of the children of undocumented immigrants because of the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" in the amendment. In 2018, he said he would pass an executive order to end the practice, but he never did.
The phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" generally relates to the children of foreign ministers, enemy combatants on American soil and people on foreign ships born in the U.S.
Some have argued that the children of undocumented individuals owe their loyalty to a country other than the U.S., and therefore aren't under the jurisdiction of the U.S., meaning that they wouldn't be citizens, despite being born in the U.S.
Besides Trump, unsuccessful Republican presidential candidates Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott also expressed support for getting rid of birthright citizenship for the children of migrants.
The amendment's relation to immigration has been applied through the Supreme Court's United States v. Wong Kim Ark decision in 1898.
Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese citizen parents, who lived in California when he was born. At age 21, Ark went to China to visit his parents and upon his return to the U.S., authorities informed him that he was not a citizen and was denied entry because of the Chinese Exclusion Acts.
The case made its way to the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled in a 6-2 decision that the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment automatically made Ark a citizen. Relating to the jurisdiction issue, the court ruled that because Wong's parents were not “employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China" that section of the clause did not prevent his citizenship.
While the original goal of the 14th Amendment had little relevance to the issue surrounding the citizenship of the children of undocumented individuals, Bender argued, "you can't change it without amending the Constitution," which is unlikely to happen.
"You either believe in that kind of thing or you don't," Bender said. "I don't think there's any constitutional basis for changing that."
On the campaign trail: Kari Lake assails Joe Biden on the border, secures support from a top GOP senator
Reach reporter Morgan Fischer at morgan.fischer@gannett.com or on X, formally known as Twitter, @morgfisch.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Birthright citizenship: Kari Lake opposes it for US-born migrant kids
