Caffeinated Politics

There are moments in a nation’s political life that reveal not just disagreement, but decay.

On the first day of Donald Trump’s second term, he signed an executive order on birthright citizenship declaring that some children whose parents are here illegally or temporarily, such as certain visa holders, are not American citizens.

This is not a legally meritorious challenge. Birthright citizenship has been constitutionally grounded for more than 150 years. It is not a serious policy debate. Rather, it is a symptom of how far the country has drifted from basic principles of equality and belonging.

Birthright citizenship is not ambiguous. The Fourteenth Amendment states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States… are citizens of the United States.” It was written precisely to end the idea that citizenship could be granted or withheld based on ancestry, race, or political convenience. It was meant to slam the door on the notion that some people are “real” Americans and others are not, even if they were born on the same soil.

In Sunday’s Chicago Tribune, a news story about this issue caught my eye.

The order, which has been blocked by the courts, would apply to children born on or after Feb. 19, 2025, potentially affecting the status of millions of babies.

It has also ignited broader political and public debate over who should have the right to call themselves an American, based on the circumstances of their birth and parentage.

As an American with birthright citizenship, Serrano worries that if Trump’s order were allowed to go into effect “we will be deporting babies soon,” with a spiral of consequences that could reshape the legal and cultural landscape of the country.

“Whether you’re from Ireland, Italy,  Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, China, if you were blessed to be born here, you are a citizen of this country,” said Serrano, an artist in the Pilsen neighborhood and father of three. “I don’t think people fully understand what that means” for the spirit and fabric of the nation.

The Chicago-based American Bar Association has also warned that an end to birthright citizenship could leave a large contingent of residents essentially stateless.

“And in many cases, proving citizenship would prove difficult or impossible even with representation — needlessly complicating the lives of many native-born Americans,” the organization said in an amicus brief. “Those unable to afford attorneys, or left in legal limbo even with legal assistance, would subsist as a ‘shadow population’…. This ‘self-perpetuating, multigenerational underclass’ potentially created by the Executive Order could persist for generations.”

So why are we here? Why is something so foundational suddenly treated as debatable?

Because the country has allowed fear and resentment to masquerade as policy. Some right-wing politicians have discovered that questioning the legitimacy of entire groups of people is an effective way to mobilize anger. Build resentment among a certain stratum of white voters. Because once you start treating human beings as mere abstractions, they become “them,” “others,” “invaders,” and it becomes easier to chip away at rights that were once considered untouchable.

The idea that a child born in an American hospital, or in a taxicab, or on a back country road to parents who may be struggling, striving, and simply trying to build a better life, should have their citizenship questioned is a sign of how low the national conversation has sunk. For me, this is a moral test of our national character. It reflects a willingness to weaponize identity for cheap partisan political gain, even at the cost of destabilizing a constitutional guarantee that has held firm through wars, depressions, and social upheavals. What is happening to us?

The United States has never been perfect, but it has long aspired to a simple, radical idea: that the circumstances of your birth do not determine your worth. Birthright citizenship is one of the clearest expressions of that ideal. To question it is to question the very notion of equal citizenship.

The real issue for me isn’t whether the Supreme Court will uphold birthright citizenship—I know it will. The issue is what it says about us that such a ruling is needed at all.

To Carson Wang of the Uptown neighborhood, the principle of birthright citizenship is “deeply American.”

His parents moved from China to the United States on work visas in 1998 and he was born in 1999, later attending high school in downstate Carbondale and the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, before moving to Chicago a few years ago.

This is the only country Wang has ever known.

“This is my world,” he said. “I could not imagine living my life and being in constant fear of losing this entire world that I know. That at any time, I could be pulled away from my home and my family and taken somewhere that I have no connection to – just a completely different society and culture.”

He recalled studying the 14th Amendment in high school and feeling an affinity to the landmark 1898 Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

Wong had been born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents. Following a visit to China, he was denied reentry to the United States under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which heavily restricted immigration from China and barred Chinese immigrants from becoming U.S. citizens.

But in a 6-2 decision, the high court sided with Wong; citing the 14th Amendment, a majority of justices affirmed that everyone born in the United States – regardless of the citizenship or nationality of their parents – are automatic citizens, with rare and narrow exceptions.

“I felt that closeness with his history. The fact that I could relate to just Asian Americans being a huge part of what America is today. The Wong Kim Ark case is a huge example of this,” Wang said. “To know that he fought for justice and was part of establishing or reaffirming what had already been a constitutional precedent.”

Dismantling birthright citizenship would destroy “a fundamental part of what it means to be American and how we’ve understood our collective equal protection under the law,” added Wang, a University of Chicago graduate student and volunteer with Asian Americans Advancing Justice Chicago.