Laila Fadl

whose parents entered the country illegally or who are living and working here legally on temporary but often long-term visas.

Well, let me just jump right in on this.

Are we the only country that does this?

Is that true?

No.

There are at least 33 countries that have birthright citizenship.

So we're always hearing about the original meaning of the Constitution.

So let's go to the founding in the late 1700s first.

Did we have birthright citizenship then?

Citizenship wasn't actually defined then, but University of Virginia professor Amanda Frost, who I talked to about this, says the colonists were very pro-immigrant.

Birthright didn't make it into the Constitution, however, until after the Civil War when Congress and more than three quarters of the states passed a constitutional amendment that defines citizenship in broad terms.

And it says, quote, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.

President Trump, of course, maintains that

that the amendment was only meant to ensure citizenship for former slaves and their children.

That interpretation, however, has not been embraced by the courts or the legal norms of this country for the last 160 years.

So is there a key precedent that the people who disagree with Trump are relying on?

Well, the most often cited precedent is a Supreme Court decision involving Wong Kim Ark, who was born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco in 1873.

His parents would eventually go back to China, but after he visited them there, he was denied entry into the United States on grounds that he was not a citizen.

He challenged the denial and won in the Supreme Court.

By a vote of six to two, the court said that because he was born in the U.S., he was a citizen of the U.S.