#so he passed both his irish citizenship (from his parents) and his british citizenship (by location of birth) down to me

[luimnigh]

I've been fascinated by dual citizenship ever since I figured out I was one, so I was wondering what the stats on Tumblr was for it.

If you feel like, explain your situation in the tags.

[greatworldwar2]

• Amedeo Guillet

Amedeo Guillet was an officer of the Italian Army, he was one of the last men to have commanded cavalry in war. He was nicknamed Devil Commander, and was famous during the Italian guerrilla war in Ethiopia in 1941, 1942 and 1943.

Guillet was born in Piacenza, Italy on February 7th, 1909. Descended from a noble family from Piedmont and Capua. His parents were Franca Gandolfo and Baron Alfredo Guillet, a colonel in the Royal Carabinieri. Following his family tradition of military service, he enrolled in the Academy of Infantry and Cavalry of Modena at the age of 18, thus beginning his career in the Royal Italian army. He served in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War that prevented him from competing in equestrian events in the 1936 Summer Olympics Berlin Olympics. Guillet was wounded and decorated for bravery as commander of an indigenous cavalry unit. Guillet next fought in the Spanish Civil War serving with the 2nd CCNN Division "Fiamme Nere" at the Battle of Santander and the Battle of Teruel.

In the buildup to World War II, Prince Amedeo, Duke of Aosta gave Guillet command of the 2,500 strong Gruppo Bande Amhara, made up of recruits from throughout Italian East Africa, with six European officers and Eritrean NCOs. The core was cavalry, but the force also included camel corps and mainly Yemeni infantry. For Guillet to be given command of such a force while still only a lieutenant was a singular honour. In 1940, he was tasked to form a "Gruppo Bande a Cavallo". The "Bande a Cavallo" were native units commanded by Italian officers. Amedeo Guillet succeeded in recruiting thousands of Eritreans. His "Band", already named in the history books as "Gruppo Bande Guillet" or "Gruppo Bande Amahara a Cavallo", was distinguished for its absolute "fair play" with the local populations. Amedeo Guillet could boast of having never been betrayed, despite the fact that 5,000 Eritreans knew perfectly well who he was and where he lived. It was during this time, in the horn of Africa that the legend of a group of Eritreans with excellent fighting qualities, commanded by a notorious "Devil Commander", was born.

Guillet's most important battle happened towards the end of January 1941 at Cherù when he attacked enemy armoured units. At the end of 1940, the Allied forces faced Guillet on the road to Amba Alagi, and specifically, in the proximity of Cherù. He had been entrusted, by Amedeo Duca d'Aosta, with the task of delaying the Allied advance from the North-West. The battles and skirmishes in which this young lieutenant was a protagonist (Guillet commanded an entire brigade, notwithstanding his low rank) are highlighted in the British bulletins of war. The "devilries" that he created from day to day, almost seen as a game, explains why the British called him not only "Knight from other times" but also the Italian "Lawrence of Arabia". Horse charges with unsheathed sword, guns, incendiary and grenades against the armoured troops had a daily cadence. Official documents show that in January 1941 at Cherù "... with the task of protecting the withdrawal of the battalions... with skillful maneuver and intuition of a commander... In an entire day of furious combats on foot and horseback, he charged many times while leading his units, assaulting the preponderant adversary (in number and means) soldiers of an enemy regiment, setting tanks on fire, reaching the flank of the enemy's artilleries... although huge losses of men,... Capt. Guillet,... in a particularly difficult moment of this hard fight, guided with disregard of danger, an attack against enemy tanks with hand bombs and benzine bottles setting two on fire while a third managed to escape while in flames."

In those months many proud Italians died, including many brave Eritreans who fought without fear for a king and a people who they never saw or knew. To the end of his life, the "Devil Commander" used words of deep respect and admiration for that proud population to whom he felt indebted as a soldier, Italian, and man. He never failed to repeat that "the Eritreans are the Prussians of Africa without the defects of the Prussians". His actions served their intended purpose and saved the lives of thousands of Italians and Eritreans who withdrew in the territory better known as the Amba Alagi. At dawn, Gulliet charged against steel weapons with only swords, guns and hand bombs at a column of tanks. He passed unhurt through the British forces who were caught unaware. This action was the last cavalry charge that British forces ever faced, but it was not the final cavalry charge in Italian military history. A little more than a year later a friend of Guillet, Colonel Bettoni, launched the men and horses of the "Savoia Cavalry" against Soviet troops at Isbuchenskij. Guillet's Eritrean troops paid a high price in terms of human losses, approximately 800 died in little more than two years and, in March 1941, his forces found themselves stranded outside the Italian lines. Guillet, faithful until death to the oath to the House of Savoy, began a private war against the British. Hiding his uniform near an Italian farm, he set the region on fire at night for almost eight months. He was one of the most famous Italian "guerrilla officers" in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia during the Italian guerrilla war against the Allies occupation of the Italian East Africa.

Later in early 1942, for security reasons he changed his name in Ahmed Abdallah Al Redai, studied the Koran and looked like an authentic Arab: so when British soldiers came to capture him, he fooled them with his new identity and escaped on two occasions. After numerous adventures, including working as a water seller, Guillet was finally able to reach Yemen, where for about one year he trained soldiers and cavalrymen for the Imam's army, whose son Ahmed became a close friend. Despite the opposition of the Yemenite royal house, he succeeded in embarking incognito on a Red Cross ship repatriating sick and injured Italians and finally returned to Italy a few days before the armistice in September 1943. As soon as Guillet reached Italy he asked for Gold sovereigns, men and weapons to aid Eritrean forces. The aid would be delivered by aeroplane and enable a guerrilla campaign to be staged. But with Italy's surrender, then later joining the Allies, times had changed. Guilet was promoted to Major for his war accomplishments and worked with Major Max Harari of the 8th King's Royal Irish Hussars who was the commander of the British special unit services that tried to capture Guillet in Italian East Africa. At the end of the war, the Italian monarchy was abolished. Guillet expressed a deep desire to leave Italy. He informed Umberto II of his intentions, but the King urged him to keep serving his country, whatever form its government might take. Concluding that he could not disobey his King's command, Guillet expressed his desire to teach anthropology at university.

Following the war, Guillet entered the Italian diplomatic service where he represented Italy in Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, and finally as ambassador to India until 1975. In 1971, he was in Morocco during an assassination attempt on the King. On June 20, 2000, he was awarded honorary citizenship by the city of Capua, which he defined as "highly coveted". On 4 November 2000, the day of the Festivity of the Armed Forces, Guillet was presented with the Knight Grand Cross of the Military Order of Italy by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. This is the highest military decoration in Italy. Guillet is one of the most highly decorated (both civil and military) people in Italian history. In 2001, Gulliet visited Eritrea and was met by thousands of supporters. The group included men who previously served with him as horsemen in the Italian Cavalry known as Gruppo Bande a Cavallo. The Eritrean people remembered Gulliet's efforts to help Eritrea remain independent of Ethiopia. In 2009, his 100th birthday was celebrated with a special concert at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Amedeo Guillet died on June 16th, 2010, in Rome at the age of 101.

[deadofwinterrp]

[Character information]

Full Name: Gabriel James O’Brian

Age: 25

Gender: Agender (he/ they pronouns)

Place of Origin: Seattle, WA (hometown is Vancouver, BC)

FC: Richard Harmon

Role within the community: Inventory Management 

How long have they been in Sanctuary: two weeks.

[traits]

+ kind, persuasive, humble,

- shrewd, distant, cynical

[Connections]

Dorian: At some point before the two arrived in Sanctuary, they met up, surviving together for a while, or more so Dorian saving his ass time and time again.

[Biography]

Gabe was born to a lovely Canadian couple of Irish and Germanic descent in the fall, his mother was a well-known psychiatrist and his father, a chemist, both working for a pharmaceutical company developing different kinds of antidepressants. While he didn’t have a bad childhood by any means, it was far from normal. His mother was constantly psychoanalyzing and testing different kinds of mental experiments and games on him, this being so traumatic and lasting so long through his childhood caused him to develop paranoid schizophrenia in his early teens. This leading to him spending a total of nine months of his life in a psychiatric hospital, these visits being staggered over 5 years when his psychotic episodes became unmanageable for his parents or he became so self-destructive that they feared for his safety.  Throughout school Gabriel tended to keep to himself and not keep many friends, he was also a C student in almost every class throughout junior high, except for when he joined the computer sciences and robotics club as an extracurricular to ensure he would graduate. There he discovered an aptitude for coding and working with computers and decided to make a career out of it. Due to a lack of effort in high school, his grades didn’t end up being high enough for him to get into the University of British Columbia but, the dean, seeing his potential decided to let him challenge the entrance exam for their Computer Sciences program which he ended up passing with a 97%. Once he was accepted he ended up living in the campus dorms, some of his best friends being girls and helping him to discover that he didn’t really feel as though he fell anywhere on the gender binary, soon opting to pick up the agender title. When he was in his third year of university his parents moved to Seattle on account of his father finding a much better paying job.

Once he graduated he followed his parents, gaining dual citizenship for both the US and Canada. Once in Seattle he discovered a rich nightlife in the LGBTQ+ community where he really got into drag for the first time in his life, for him it was fun and exciting and a very dark secret that he would keep hidden at all costs. It allowed him to freely express his feelings of femininity without fear of being judged, choosing to go by the alias of Charlotte Courtesan Goth (CC Goth for short), a very fierce queen with a very Lady Gaga- esque style and an eye for the dark and deranged. He also ended up developing a reputation for being one of the youngest and best cryptographers on the west coast, freelancing out of his apartment and working to make sure that company systems would be protected from hackers. One thing that gave him an edge in this field was his knack for hacking, it was something he did in his spare time and he never used it to steal anything other than information, although, this was something that he never saved and just remembered through sets of keywords and the occasional sentence or two that he would save on an encrypted hard drive that he carries everywhere with him. For a few years after moving, he stayed in his father’s home, his parents having divorced a year and a half after the move. Because of Gabe’s condition, when he moved out of the care of his parents and into his own place, he was assigned a social worker to ensure that he was taking care of himself properly. Over the time that he got to know said social worker the two grew close and ended up having an affair that she would eventually break off to go be with her husband shortly before the outbreak began.

After the outbreak, Gabriel survived by bouncing around from group to group, if he had to he would sell his body, sometimes his medications. Somewhere down the line he and Dorian linked up and this was how Gabe learned how to shoot. This pistol that Dorian had given him is something he still keeps on him. Eventually, the groups of survivors grew smaller and more ruthless. Leaving Gabe more alone than ever, wandering through the middle of nowhere with no access to his medication or even somewhere to hide from the elements. One of the scouts from Sanctuary had ended up finding Gabriel, half-frozen to death and in the middle of a psychotic episode. He had been holed up in a tent, equipped with his handgun, a backpack of his belongings and some food, blankets and sleeping bags. He had known that he was going to go into withdrawal so he used this tent as his own personal sanctuary to help ride out the seizures and all of the other horrid symptoms that came along with withdrawing from his medications.

[barrypurcell]

Nationality and Denaturalisation

On 9 February 1933, Irishman James Gralton was denaturalised and deported from what was then the Irish Free State. He had spent some years in the US, but he was born in County Leitrim in Ireland, to Irish parents, returned often and never renounced or even questioned his citizenship.

Gralton was never charged with a crime, but he was a communist. These days, critics of communism tend to concentrate on the genocidal inhumanity of Soviet Russia and North Korea, but, in Ireland in 1933, communism was understood as atheism. The Roman Catholic bishops who were co-running the country found this intolerable.

Gralton was also guilty of organising regular dances in a venue he built, called Pearse-Connolly Hall after the Irish republican activist and poet, Patrick Pearse and Irish republican activist and founder of the Irish Labour Party, James Connolly. Young people from the area would gather, have fun and listen to Gralton’s speeches on uniting the workers.

Protests organised by Roman Catholic priests quickly turned ugly. There were a series of violent demonstrations and someone got shot. On 9 February 1933, Gralton was arrested, judged to be fundamentally un-Irish and deported to that celebrated hotbed of communism, the United States of America.

In 1933, the unstated but incontestable criteria of Irishness included being Roman Catholic, and eschewing both fun and organised labour—both of which were obviously not quite as antithetical to Irish values and interests as the Roman Catholic bishops would have liked. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having aspirational values, but problems arise when there are real-world consequences for failing to meet unachievable goals.

It is almost impossible for a modern democracy to codify or legislate the values of any nation such that ethnically or so-called culturally pure citizens of that nation can be identified. The recent public denaturalisation of Shamima Begum has brought to light the more immediate question of what it means to be English.

Shamima Begum was born in England in 2000, but left at the age of fifteen, with two of her friends, to join ISIS in Syria. She had three children, all of whom have died. She was discovered by an English reporter while pregnant with her last child in a Syrian refugee camp. She said she wanted to have her baby in England, but seemed relatively unrepentant about her sojourn with ISIS. She has since claimed that she was brainwashed by ISIS and wants a second chance.

On the 19 February of this year, Shamima Begum’s English citizenship was revoked. The English government has stripped many people of citizenship, but usually such people have been guilty of serious crimes and they have all had alternative citizenships. Begum has not been charged with any crime and the government of Bangladesh, where the Home Office claims she has citizenship, has officially stated that “Ms Shamima Begum is not a Bangladeshi citizen.”

For the first time in British history, someone who hasn’t been charged with a crime has been made stateless by the British government, in violation of both British and international law. If she hasn’t committed a crime, what has she done to incur the harshest penalty the Home Office has to deliver?

Begum, who was not involved in any combat or terrorist activity herself, appears to have been denationalised for nothing more a political opinion, formed during her early teenage years. More than one person has suggested that, if Begum were a white girl, the narrative would be more clearly one of grooming and abuse.

Right-wingers might believe that this denaturalisation sends a message to would-be terrorists. In fact, it sends a message that, if you’re brown and English, your citizenship is conditional. The vast majority of denaturalised English citizens are non-white—not because non-white people are more likely to commit crimes, but because non-white people are more likely to have traceable foreign extraction or dual nationality.

In fact, study after study demonstrates that crime is decreasing everywhere, and there seems to be an inverse correlation between immigration and crime rates, for reasons as yet unclear. In England, heavily publicised stories about crime rates among the Muslim population tend to be promulgated exclusively by right-wing media, perhaps because the stories are a combination of misleading statistics and outright lies.

If there is a rise in crime associated with Muslim immigrants, it comprises attacks on them by far-right groups. Study after study shows a genuinely worrying and demonstrable rise in all forms of racism in England, especially racism targeted at Jews and Muslims and those who, in the right-wing imagination, look like them. Unfortunately, those who seem most concerned about anti-Semitism seem least concerned about anti-Muslim bigotry and vice versa.

Ironically, xenophobic attitudes towards people who don’t pass this specious, casuistical purity test contribute to the kind of alienation that leaves many young people vulnerable to radicalisation. Predictably, those most likely to hold xenophobic opinions are least likely to do research on the psychology of radicalisation—or any research at all. But no one born in a democracy wakes up in the morning intent on blowing themselves up on the Metro for no reason.

Begum was clearly involved with people and activities proscribed by English law. She should therefore be given a trial and sentenced according to its results. The point of a justice system is that it applies to everyone equally. Militantly promoting her deportation on the basis that she is evil scum is playing right into the hands of ISIS (or their inevitable replacements), who are, by their own admission, constantly looking for ways to convince Western countries to reject their Muslim citizens, as they are actively encouraging Muslims everywhere to reject Western values.

Broken English

There will always be problems in nailing down what exactly it means to be British (or Irish or American), because no one seems able to determine what exactly British (or Irish or American) values are—not even those who seem to have a strong emotional attachment to them.

In 2002, the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act made it a legal requirement for those seeking naturalisation as British citizens to pass a test on English culture and language called “Life in the United Kingdom.” This evolving series of questions has faced consistent criticism, mostly because it is almost impossible for native English people to pass it. On one occasion, the entire editorial staff of the New Statesman failed the test. It seems perverse to expect recent immigrants to know more about the English experience than university-educated journalists, whose job it is to explain matters of public interest.

It’s possible that the idea of nation states with discrete national characters is nonsensical. Almost everywhere, wherever two countries border, the people living on the border share more with each other than with the general populations of their countries, culturally if not ideologically. In Belgium, the Flemish people share more with the Dutch than they do with the Walloons (who share more culturally with the French). The people of Aragon and Navarre in northern Spain share more culturally with the people of Occitania in southern France than they share with Sevillians. The people of Minnesota share more culturally with the people of Ontario than they do with Texans or Californians. And so on.

Face Values

There are similar problems in nailing down what a phrase like Western values means. To you and me, it may be a shorthand for freedom and democracy and all that good stuff. To many people in other parts of the world, Western values means something more sinister.

In Iran, for instance, there are people alive today who remember the international political catastrophe referred to by the CIA as Operation Ajax, which mostly involved overturning the first democratically elected government in the history of Iran because they wanted to re-negotiate the fees paid by Anglo-American Oil—hence beginning the current round of political malefaction in that part of the Middle East.

When the Vietnamese Foreign Minister, Nguyen Co Thach, was asked why, after the Khmer Rouge attacked in 1978, he didn’t go to the UN instead of invading Cambodia, he famously said: “Because during the last forty years we have been invaded by four of the five permanent members of the Security Council.”

If we want Muslims (or anyone else) to embrace our Western values, it’s going to be a hard sell if these values include bombing their countries, stealing their resources and acting surprised when they refuse to be grateful for our interventions.

The idea that citizenship of any country—but especially of a democracy—should be dependent on holding the correct opinions or political outlook, is self-evidently ludicrous. I can only assume that every human rights lawyer in England is currently descending on the Home Office to take the Shamima Begum decision apart for the benefit of future generations.

The entire concept of nationality as a monolithic grouping of characteristics, behaviours or values (as most people, including anti-racism advocates, seem to believe) is incoherent. Those values seem to change over time as the zeitgeist demands. In other words, nationality appears to be something we do to people rather than something that happens to them.

Ireland’s Own

In a recent survey, two thirds of Irish people agreed that Ireland is too politically correct, but a more recent study claims that Ireland ranks among the worst places for racism in the workplace, at least among EU countries, and the land of a hundred thousand welcomes has “a worrying pattern of racism” in general.

When the Irish government announced, earlier this year, that a disused hotel in the small village of Rooskey, County Leitrim, around twenty kilometres from where James Gralton was born, was to be repurposed as a Direct Provision centre (i.e. a place where refugees are housed while their asylum applications are processed), the site was subject to two separate arson attacks and the plans had to be scrapped.

The government was also forced to abandon plans to house thirteen female asylum seekers in a hotel on Achill Island, after on-going protests gave rise to safety concerns for the already vulnerable women.

In these dark times of nascent right-wing ethno-nationalism in civilised democracies, we should remember that not only is the concept of race unscientific, but the concept of nationality is not entirely coherent either.

In 2016, the president of Ireland issued a posthumous apology for the deportation of Jimmy Gralton, calling it “wrong and indefensible.” He remains the only Irish person to have been deported from Ireland in the history of the country.

Areo Magazine, 12 November 2019

[theconservativebrief]

President Trump says he plans to issue an executive order that will end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States.

He made the statement in a taped interview with Axios that will air in an upcoming HBO special, but it’s an idea that he has floated previously and that has garnered a lot of interest on the right for several years.

The basic argument you hear from many conservatives is that allowing the children of parents who have entered the country illegally to become citizens is a violation of US sovereignty and encourages people to abuse our immigration system. For obvious reasons, this notion is quite popular among anti-immigration activists — and by extension, many in Trump’s base.

As Vox’s Dara Lind notes, it’s unclear what the timetable for Trump’s executive order is or if such an order even exists. But let’s assume that it’s real and that Trump plans to sign it. What then? Can the president actually end birthright citizenship, a policy linked to the 14th Amendment of the Constitution? And if he can, what would that process look like?

To get some answers, I reached out to 10 legal experts. Their full responses, edited for clarity, are below.

Jessica Silbey, law professor, Northeastern University

The rule of citizenship acquired by birth by being born within the United States is the law of the Constitution. It is the first sentence of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” As such, it cannot be changed through executive order or legislation, but only by amending the Constitution.

The 14th Amendment was intended to make permanent the existing common-law rule of birthright citizenship and to extend birthright citizenship to persons of African descent and their descendants brought to the United States in slavery. The United States fought a civil war over this language, which was added to the Constitution in 1868 and explicitly overturned the prewar Supreme Court decision of Dred Scott v. Sandford.

That 1857 decision denied citizenship to Dred Scott, who was born in Virginia, enslaved, and who then sought his freedom through the courts. The Supreme Court denied him access to the courts by denying him US citizenship because he was of African descent.

The Dred Scott case and its glorification of racism and xenophobia is a reviled opinion and often used to demonstrate how far we have come as a nation devoted now to equal justice under the law. The president does not have the constitutional authority to change the 14th Amendment’s unmistakable meaning or purpose. But his words in the form of an impotent executive order may have the effect of inflaming a civil war, much like the Dred Scott decision did.

Renato Mariotti, former federal prosecutor, 2007 to 2016

The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” That cannot be changed without a constitutional amendment. Trump can try to issue an executive order, but under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, it would be invalid.

Perhaps he is banking on the Supreme Court to change its interpretation of the 14th Amendment to permit him to circumvent it via executive order, but that is unlikely given its clear language.

Jessica Levinson, law professor, Loyola Law School

The president cannot executive-order his way out of the Constitution. The 14th Amendment is clear: If an individual is born in the United States, that individual is a citizen of the United States.

There is no doubt that it’s not a coincidence the midterm elections are one week away. This is not a genuine effort to change the law. This is a genuine effort to inspire President Trump’s voters to go to the ballot box on November 6.

President Trump has repeatedly tried to style himself as a conservative who supports the strict constructionist or originalist view of constitutional interpretation. The hypocrisy of ignoring all principles of originalism and trying to rewrite the Constitution by executive order is stunning.

This issue was largely settled in 1898 in US v. Wong Kim Ark. There, the Supreme Court held that “to hold that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution excludes from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.”

Jed Shugerman, law professor, Fordham University

This is not how constitutional law works. You can’t amend the 14th Amendment by an executive order. When the 14th Amendment included the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” the framers and the public clearly understood that they were setting aside the children of foreign diplomats.

Other visitors to the United States were and continue to be plainly under the jurisdiction of US law. Why else can they be detained and convicted in US courts for violating US law, unlike diplomats?

Only right-wing extremists have twisted this text and its original understanding to suggest otherwise. I am relieved to note that some conservative and originalist scholars today immediately joined in the rejection of Trump’s stunt.

This part of the 14th Amendment was written to specifically reverse the disastrous Dred Scott decision, which ruled that African Americans are not and could never be US citizens. This decision helped trigger the Civil War. The Republicans of the 1860s used jus soli (“law of the soil”) birthright citizenship to guarantee citizenship, regardless of how one was brought to the land.

Keep in mind the background context of the slave trade. And keep in mind the racist background, which in the 1860s Republicans were focused on overturning with a clear brightline rule. Without a clear brightline birthright rule, the rules are up for grabs — and back to racial politicization. It is a betrayal of that legacy that the Republicans 150 years later would be reversing this commitment in violation of the Constitution as part of a broader racially demonizing campaign.

Susan Bloch, law professor, Georgetown University

Two points are clear. The president cannot change the Constitution by an executive order. That is not debatable. So the question is what does the 14th amendment say?

The 14th Amendment is clear that someone born in the US is an American citizen, at least if the mother is here legally. There is some debate about whether that is true for a baby born to someone who is not legally here. Most people think that the status of the mother is not relevant but that is still debatable.

So it is clear that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to someone born in the United States, at least if the mother is here legally, and no executive order can change that. And it is not true that we are the only country that has what we call birthright citizenship. Studies show that more than 30 countries grant citizenship to someone born within their borders.

Stephen Legomsky, law professor, Washington University

President Trump’s claim that he can eliminate birthright citizenship by executive order is flatly wrong. The Constitution declares that every person born in the US and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a US citizen.

The Supreme Court in 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, held explicitly that the language “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was meant to exclude (besides Native Americans born on tribal land) two groups and two groups only: children of foreign diplomats and children of enemy occupiers.

The Court based its interpretation on the three centuries of clear, unbroken British law from which the drafters of the US Constitution drew their understanding. Moreover, this is only common sense: Like anyone else, native-born Americans, whoever their parents are, can be charged with crimes if they disobey US law. How would this be possible if the US had no jurisdiction over them?

The president was also wrong to say that the United States is the only country that recognizes birthright citizenship. By my last count, there are approximately 30 countries with similar laws. They are particularly common in the Western Hemisphere, including Canada.

In taking this fringe position, President Trump has now gone beyond even his all-out war on immigrants. This latest attack extends his declaration of war to native-born US citizens. I expect that even the current Supreme Court will find this to be too great a stretch.

Keith Whittington, politics professor, Princeton University

This would be an absurd effort by the president that would never withstand judicial scrutiny. Birthright citizenship is embedded in both clear Supreme Court interpretation of the text and original meaning of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution and in federal statute.

The president could, presumably, attempt to adopt an innovative interpretation of those provisions and direct executive officers to follow that interpretation so as to exclude some class of individuals from the traditional understanding of the scope of American citizenship.

Such an order would be immediately challenged in court as contrary to both statute and Constitution, and I would expect the federal courts to emphatically reject the validity of such an executive order.

Peter Margulies, law professor, Roger Williams University School of Law

The Constitution wisely insulates US citizenship from the passing political winds. The 14th Amendment keeps things simple, with minor exceptions: a person born in this country is a citizen if they (unlike a foreign diplomat or an invading foreign enemy) must obey our laws.

Making citizenship subject to the passing wishes of the political branches would disrupt our democracy. Suppose Congress passed a law denying citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants. That would affect the ability of those persons to vote, work, and remain in the United States. But a second more sympathetic Congress could change the rules back, a third could reinstate the restrictions, and so on. US citizenship could turn on each election.

The Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision had triggered this risk, which helped start the Civil War. The drafters of the 14th Amendment wrote their simple rule of birthright citizenship to stop these nightmare scenarios. President Trump’s pre-election political play should not obscure the 14th Amendment’s abiding wisdom.

Peter Shane, law professor, Ohio State University

The plain language of the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship, which was the common law rule before the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott case. Its clear meaning is reflected in Congress’s debates leading to its proposal, and that meaning has been reaffirmed in Supreme Court decisions, as well as 150 years of Congressional interpretation.

The language cannot be amended except through the formal process of constitutional amendment laid out in Article V. If the president were to rely on an executive order reinterpreting birthright citizenship in order to withhold some government service or benefit for which any “citizen” is eligible, he would be acting unlawfully.

The evidence is succinctly summarized in a 2006 article by James C. Ho, whom President Trump appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, “Defining ‘American’: Birthright Citizenship and the Original Understanding of the 14th Amendment.”

Diane Marie Amann, law professor, University of Georgia

The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution begins: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This is no casual phrasing. Quite to the contrary, it emerged from the experience of Civil War and the tragedies that preceded it.

The provision deliberately repudiates the pre-war ruling in Dred Scott — a great stain on Supreme Court jurisprudence — that had denied citizenship to a US-born man on the grounds that he had been born into enslavement and was not part of our “political community.” Birthright citizenship has formed the cornerstone of American identity ever since the amendment took effect — for fully 150 years. It cannot be abolished by an executive order.

Original Source -> Can Trump end birthright citizenship? I asked 10 legal experts.

via The Conservative Brief