What happens if the US ends birthright citizenship?

Summary of What happens if the US ends birthright citizenship?

by NPR

34m•June 23, 2026
Listen to Episode

Overview of What Happens if the US Ends Birthright Citizenship?

This episode of NPR’s Code Switch examines the constitutional, historical, and political fight over birthright citizenship in the United States, centered on a Trump-era Supreme Court challenge. Through a conversation with author Daisy Hernández, the hosts explain why birthright citizenship exists, how it was shaped by Black Americans’ struggle after the Civil War, and why ending it could create a large stateless population in the U.S. The episode also compares the U.S. to countries like Colombia and the Dominican Republic, showing how changing citizenship laws can produce long-term racial and political consequences.

Main Idea

The core question is: who gets to be an American by virtue of being born here?
The episode argues that birthright citizenship is not a historical accident, but the result of a long struggle over race, freedom, and belonging—especially the fight to ensure formerly enslaved Black people were recognized as citizens.

What the Supreme Court Case Was About

Trump administration’s position

  • Donald Trump attended Supreme Court oral arguments for a case tied to his executive order targeting birthright citizenship.
  • His administration argued that:
    • The 14th Amendment was meant only to protect formerly enslaved Black people and their descendants.
    • Birthright citizenship encourages illegal immigration.
    • The U.S. should not be “the only country in the world” with this rule — a claim the episode notes is false.

The constitutional backdrop

  • The 14th Amendment established birthright citizenship after the Civil War.
  • The Supreme Court affirmed this principle in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), holding that people born in the U.S. are citizens.
  • The episode notes that the Court’s recent willingness to hear the case has alarmed many observers, even though the justices appeared skeptical of the administration’s arguments.

Historical Context: Why Birthright Citizenship Exists

Rooted in Black freedom struggles

  • Daisy Hernández emphasizes that Black Americans were already asserting citizenship long before the 14th Amendment.
  • After the Dred Scott decision denied citizenship to Black people, the Civil War and the 14th Amendment became the legal mechanism to overturn that ruling.
  • The episode underscores that birthright citizenship emerged from conflict, not consensus.

Indigenous people and citizenship

  • The episode also notes that Indigenous nations had a different relationship to U.S. citizenship.
  • Some Indigenous communities did not seek U.S. citizenship because they already saw themselves as members of sovereign nations.

Daisy Hernández’s Bigger Argument

Hernández’s book, Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth, frames citizenship as a social construct, not just a legal status.

Citizenship shapes daily life

She compares citizenship to race in the sense that it quietly determines how people move through the world:

  • Whether you can travel freely.
  • Whether you can enroll a child in school without fear.
  • Whether you can access health care safely.
  • Whether you can visit family without worrying about immigration enforcement.

Her point: citizenship is not just paperwork — it structures everyday life and access to rights.

International Comparisons

Colombia

  • Colombia uses citizenship by parentage rather than by birthplace.
  • That system has produced stateless children born in Colombia to Venezuelan parents.
  • Colombia had to create special legal pathways to prevent thousands of children from being left without citizenship.

Dominican Republic

  • The Dominican Republic ended birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants in 2010.
  • The policy was later applied retroactively, affecting people who had lived in the country for generations, especially those of Haitian descent.
  • Hernández presents this as a warning for what could happen in the U.S. if birthright citizenship is revoked.

Why This Matters for the U.S.

Scale of the potential impact

  • The episode cites estimates that:
    • About 255 babies a year could be born without citizenship if the executive order took effect.
    • By 2075, the U.S. could have 1 million people born here with no citizenship anywhere.

Possible legal and social fallout

  • Ending birthright citizenship could create a permanent class of stateless people.
  • It could also open the door to retroactive rule changes, as seen in the Dominican Republic.

Political and Racial Backlash

Not a new Republican idea

The episode traces the anti-birthright push back to:

  • The backlash against the 1986 Reagan-era legalization/amnesty law.
  • A 1995 Citizenship Reform Act proposal.
  • Later efforts by figures like Steve King.

A broader nativist pattern

  • Hernández argues that this movement is tied to changing racial demographics and fear of a more diverse citizenry.
  • She suggests Trump-era politics made a long-standing fringe idea central.

Citizenship, Race, and Authoritarianism

The “white country” argument

Hernández argues that the Trump movement is trying to restore a version of America as a white republic.

  • This appears in rhetoric about immigrants “polluting our blood.”
  • It aligns with authoritarian strategies that rely on fear, exclusion, and constant threat narratives.

An imperial lens

The episode also cites scholarship arguing the U.S. functions like an empire:

  • U.S. policies, military power, and foreign interventions deeply shape life in the Global South.
  • From this perspective, people arriving at the border are already affected by U.S. power and could be seen as having a claim to citizenship in a broader moral sense.

Notable Takeaways

  • Birthright citizenship is deeply tied to Black history and the post-Civil War reconstruction era.
  • The idea that the U.S. is alone in granting birthright citizenship is false.
  • Ending birthright citizenship would not just affect immigrants — it could create generations of stateless people.
  • The legal debate is inseparable from race, nationalism, and competing visions of who America is for.

Closing Tone

Hernández ends on a note of anxiety:

  • She expects the Supreme Court may still uphold the 14th Amendment, possibly with caveats.
  • But she is alarmed that the Court even took the case, because that alone signals how much the ground has shifted.

The episode closes by framing the birthright citizenship fight as part of a much larger American struggle over race, belonging, and power.