U.S. Citizenship: Now Available Via Well-Timed Contractions

How the wealthy and the wicked are exploiting birthright laws. I said it.

Although my oldest daughter was born and raised in California, we moved to Texas when she was a sophomore in high school. Of course we hoped and prayed she’d go to college here, but that didn’t work out for us. She wound up choosing San Diego State… where we grudgingly paid the frankly obscene out-of-state tuition.

Because, you see, we were no longer citizens of the state we had paid taxes into for more than five collective decades.

It turned out, simply taking her first breath in the Golden State didn’t mean a lick when it came to her right to claim residency—even after living there for the first fifteen formative, consecutive years of her life.

Apparently, sweeping dismissal of your GPS coordinates at birth only applies at the state level. It turns out, whether you’re from Azerbaijan or Zimbabwe, if you land on American soil long enough to expel an infant from your nether regions, thanks to the 14th Amendment, that child emerges holding a golden ticket to automatic, lifelong U.S. citizenship.

Core childhood memory unlocked right here.

Ratified in 1868—when long-distance travel meant a horse ride into town—14A explicitly grants citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. and guarantees equal protection and due process under the law. It made sense at the time that a country still reeling from a brutal civil war might try to define, in writing, what it means to be an American—especially for former slaves, who had just been freed but were not yet recognized as citizens.

Excellent work. Five stars. Would ratify again.

The question isn’t about historical appropriateness—it’s whether we’ve quietly expanded an antiquated provision far beyond anything it was ever meant to cover… and then declared the conversation over. Because thanks to the same constitutional clause, today a tourist can practically go into labor on a layover, and if her uterus cooperates, leave with a United States passport. (For the baby. The baby gets the passport. The mom gets stretchmarks and eighteen years of insomnia.)

On one side, the argument is simple: if you’re born here, you’re a lifetime member of Club Republic with the full benefits package. No debate, no questions. It’s been that way for over a century. It’s clear, it’s clean, and it prevents a tsunami of bureaucratic and humanitarian problems.

The other side [*waves wildly from the bleachers*] thinks maybe that rule—written long before people could fly across the world, pop out a successor, and then bolt with an all-access pass before the kid has even figured out how to focus—wasn’t exactly designed for the world we live in now.

That’s the debate. And normally, this is where everyone picks a team, posts a flag emoji, and moves on with their lives. Except. There’s a reason this issue isn’t going away. And it’s not because someone’s housekeeper had a baby and now we’re all supposed to panic. It’s because there is, very clearly, an entire industry built around this loophole.

“Birth tourism” is real. Anchor babies—whether you find the term disparaging or not—exist. Surrogacy-for-citizenship is a huge, lucrative business. Wealthy foreign nationals can (and do!) come to the U.S. long enough to give birth, secure resident status for that child, and then raise him/her/hir wherever and however they’d like.

What’s the big deal, you might say. That’s every parent’s prerogative.

This made me giggle, NGL.

Would you still say that (presuming you might, which I’m guessing you wouldn’t; I’m just being hypothetical here) if you knew that in Southern California alone, there are 107 Chinese-owned surrogacy companies advertising these services? Or if someone told you about the 500 birth tourism companies in the People’s Republic of China? Or if you were aware, as reported by The Wall Street Journal recently, that one CCP-connected Chinese billionaire claims he personally has over 100 U.S.-born children being raised in China?

It’s not a one-off situation.

According to author and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, roughly 100,000 Chinese babies have been delivered here under these circumstances every single year for the past 13 years—something he calls a massive national security problem. “When the baby is ready to travel, they fly back to China, and the child will be raised in CCP schools with CCP control and CCP media,” Schweizer explains. “The problem is, when they turn 18, they’re going to be able to vote in the United States. They’re going to be able to contribute to political campaigns and apply for government jobs.”

They’ll also be able to serve on juries, purchase firearms, and serve in the military. So that’s comforting.

In other words, right now, more than a million “U.S. citizens” are being indoctrinated brought up in a system that is openly hostile to everything America claims to stand for.

(If there were an EXTRA BOLD key, I’d have used it.)

I say “claims to stand for” because plainly—inexplicably—there’s support for this within our own government. In states like Commiefornia, birthright citizenship isn’t just a pipe dream or a pet project; it’s a key component of the Democratic Party platform. Go figure.

Maybe we could try this?

As of this week, the issue is no longer theoretical, philosophical, or confined to spicy comment sections—it’s sitting in front of the Supreme Court of the United States, where it’s now a legal question. Not “is this being abused?” or “does this even make sense?” but “what does the 14th Amendment legally, technically require… and how far can we stretch that before it snaps?”

On his very first day back in the Oval Office, Trump signed Executive Order 14160, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” It seeks to end automatic birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents who are not permanent, lawful residents.

The “no human is illegal” crowd, as you might imagine, is not taking it well.

Despite what the media will tell you, this isn’t Trump going rogue. It’s the global norm. The vast majority of developed nations—minus only the U.S. and Canada—require at least one parent to be a citizen or a legal long-term resident for a child to acquire citizenship at birth. Us? We give out keys to the castle like Halloween candy.

The current administration insists the system is being exploited—at massive, threatening scale—and that the Constitution does not expressly require the government to grant automatic, unilateral citizenship to every infant born on American soil. Opponents argue that changing this interpretation would create chaos, undermine settled law, and create a cascade of bureaucratic nightmares.

And heaven forbid lawmakers, you know, be forced to make actual laws.

For what it’s worth, we update legal codes all the time when the world changes. We stopped regulating how many cows you can drive down Main Street once Main Street stopped being, you know, mostly cows. We dropped the rule that someone has to walk in front of your car waving a flag once we realized the car itself was supposed to be the faster option. We moved on from “no pigs in the parlor” once people stopped casually sharing their living rooms with livestock. We even relaxed the whole margarine crackdown when it became clear the government didn’t actually need to be involved in your breakfast. At some point, you acknowledge that the context has changed dramatically enough that perhaps the law should follow.

The birthright argument isn’t about ideology. No decent human wants any child to be legally homeless. It’s not about “hate,” “fear,” “fascism,” or whichever buzzword is trending this week. Setting boundaries is what you do when you care about something—not when you want to destroy it. It’s about governance—and whether a rule written 150 years ago still makes sense, or whether we’ve been running a 19th-century program on a 21st-century operating system and just praying the whole thing doesn’t crash.

In what sane world do you take a law written for a world of horse-drawn carriages, open sewers, and the occasional roaming goat and insist it applies perfectly, without adjustment, to a world of international air travel, luxury surrogacy packages, and same-day passport photos? Why does everything always have to be all-or-nothing? Why can’t it ever be “Damn, this train is picking up speed. Maybe we should add some guardrails”?

(Case in point: it should be fewer stupid laws.)

So now we have the Supreme Court stepping in to decide what, exactly, the 14th Amendment covers. Not in theory, not in a history book (like those are trustworthy), but in 2026, where travel is easy, money is mobile, and working the system is practically an Olympic sport. According to the New York Times (which also reported that an end to birthright citizenship would “disproportionately affect babies born to Asian parents,” which I’ll just leave right there), the court is expected to rule by late June or early July.

To be painfully clear, I’m not saying there aren’t countless legitimate, sympathetic cases to be considered. If a child is born here, grows up here, goes to school here, builds a life here, contributes to society here—that’s one thing. I’m just suggesting that maybe there should be some citizenship criteria beyond where your mother happened to be standing when her water broke.

Get your copy here.