THE SUPREME Court will soon take up a question it hasn’t seriously considered since the 19th century: Is America still a nation that grants citizenship to everyone born on its soil? That principle — grounded in American common law and enshrined in the Constitution — has long been beyond dispute. But on the day he was inaugurated for his second term, President Trump signed an executive order denying citizenship to children born to parents who are undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors. That order, promptly challenged in several federal lawsuits, is now before the high court. Abolishing birthright citizenship has been a fixture of the MAGA agenda for years. Trump’s order was designed to force a confrontation, in the hope that at least five justices might overturn a principle of American law regarded as settled for generations. So far, every court to examine the issue has been unequivocal: Presidents have no authority to cancel the citizenship of babies born in the United States. When US District Judge John Coughenour, appointed by President Reagan in 1981, temporarily blocked Trump’s order, he noted that in more than 40 years on the bench, he couldn’t recall another case “where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”

Viewed through the lens of law and history, the case for birthright citizenship is overwhelming. The 14th Amendment opens with an unequivocal declaration: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” That language was written to ensure that virtually anyone born in America would be recognized as American — regardless of race, social standing, or the citizenship of their parents. In an 1898 landmark, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court confirmed that a child born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants was a citizen —even though, under the Chinese Exclusion Act, his parents had been barred from naturalizing.

For 127 years, that precedent has been the rock on which American citizenship policy rests. The only exceptions are babies whose parents are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of US law, namely foreign diplomats, enemy occupiers, or (until 1924) American Indians born on tribal lands. No court has ever accepted the claim that undocumented immigrants or foreign tourists are in that category.

Viewed through the lens of practicality, the case for birthright citizenship is even stronger. Ending it would upend administrative systems that have functioned smoothly for more than a century. State governments issue birth certificates on the assumption that anyone born here is a citizen. Hospitals are not immigration outposts; nurses do not check passports in the delivery room. No centralized federal registry exists to evaluate parents’ legal status, nor could one be created without building an intrusive bureaucracy unlike anything Americans have ever tolerated.

What would replace the current system? A regime in which every new baby’s parents must prove their status before their child’s citizenship can be confirmed? A patchwork of agencies trying to sort out which infants qualify as Americans? Uprooting birthright citizenship would annually condemn thousands of US-born children to the terrible limbo of statelessness, solely because their parents lacked immigration visas, or came from countries that do not automatically transmit a parent’s citizenship to children born abroad?

Nations that tie citizenship to parentage, not birthplace, routinely produce large populations of residents — born within their borders yet denied legal nationality — who struggle to support themselves, secure basic rights, or be regarded as equals. The United States has never faced those problems precisely because citizenship here is simple, automatic, and clear: If you were born in the USA, you are a citizen of the USA. To replace that clarity with case-by-case adjudications would not just guarantee mistakes, delays, and injustices. It would manufacture a shadow population of native-born noncitizens — a permanent underclass in the heart of the country — and make the problem of illegal immigration far worse.

Birthright citizenship, enshrined in the Constitution, expresses a core American value: Children born on American soil begin life as equals, not as inheritors of their parents’ legal disadvantages.

Nations that tie citizenship to parentage, not birthplace, routinely produce large populations of residents — born within their borders yet denied legal nationality — who struggle to support themselves, secure basic rights, or be regarded as equals. The United States has never faced those problems precisely because citizenship here is so clear-cut. To replace that clarity with case-by-case adjudications would not just guarantee mistakes, delays, and injustices. It would manufacture a shadow population of native-born noncitizens — a permanent underclass in the heart of the country — and make the problem of illegal immigration far worse.

Viewed through the lens of law, the case is powerful. Through the lens of practicality, it is stronger still. But viewed through the lens of American identity, the case for birthright citizenship is strongest of all. From the moment the 14th Amendment was written, it marked a decisive break with the Old World’s hierarchies — a rejection of the idea that rights flow from bloodlines. Jus soli is not some quirky American anomaly. It is the norm throughout the Western Hemisphere, embraced by nearly every nation in the New World as the surest way to bind newcomers and their children into a common civic project.

Birthright citizenship expresses a core American value: Children born on American soil begin life as equals, not as inheritors of their parents’ legal disadvantages. Civic identity here is not dictated by ancestry or caste. To rip that principle out of the Constitution would warp the meaning of American citizenship into something narrower, meaner, and unworthy of a confident nation. Let the Supreme Court say so — unanimously.