The Undergraduate Law Review at UC San Diego

As anti-immigration rhetoric and policies continue to fester in the United States (US), mixed-status immigrant families are often legally vulnerable. This paper evaluates the practicality of revoking the birthright citizenship doctrine found in the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment. In light of the predominantly conservative US government across all three branches and our current Supreme Court’s pattern in reversing long-standing decisions, people are debating the likelihood of a successful attack on birthright citizenship. However, scholars have raised strong doubts about the Court reversing this birthright citizenship standard. A lengthy history of legal statutes and the stare decisis doctrine protects the current territorial understanding of birthright citizenship as it pertains to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Even if the Court makes such a revocation, our current immigration laws do not allow for any means by which the US government could impose the processes of denaturalization, then deportation, upon such children. The rules that dictate whether or not an individual’s American status is revoked are limited to citizens who were granted legal status strictly via naturalization. As it stands, the US government cannot exclude these children of the undocumented from retaining their legal US citizen statuses, conferred to them by their right of birth within US borders.