Levin: “Birthright Citizenship” Adopted for Political Power

by Sharon Rondeau, h/t GW

(Dec. 15, 2024) — On Saturday’s edition of “Life, Liberty & Levin,” host Mark Levin’s opening monologue immediately focused on immigration and “national identity,” quoting from works by political scientist and Pres. Jimmy Carter adviser Samuel P. Huntington and historian and JFK presidential adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

“In a variety of ways,” Huntington wrote in “Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2005),” Levin quoted, “the American establishment, governmental and private, has become increasingly divorced from the American people,” causing those in power to morph into “an unrepresentative democracy” by opposing the will of those who placed them there.

Levin compared Huntington’s ruminations to Trump’s “landslide” re-election last month in light of his focus on border security and “mass deportations” of illegal aliens. “The people support it,” Levin said. “Now the media are pushing back; the Democrat Party is pushing back; academia is pushing back; the same so-called elites, the same ruling class, the same establishment that put us in this position now with massively open borders…”

The Democrats’ purpose in embracing birthright citizenship, which is the awarding of U.S. citizenship to anyone born within the country’s borders, and liberal immigration policy, Levin declared, was to secure their position as a “monopoly party” “for the next century.”

Transitioning, he asked, “What is birthright citizenship? We hear this,” referencing NBC News’s Kristen Welker’s contention in a post-election interview with Trump that the “14th Amendment” precludes Trump’s presumed authority to rescind the policy of birthright citizenship with an executive order.

“You promised to end birthright citizenship on Day One,” Welker was shown recounting to Trump at the outset of the interview clip. “Is that still your plan?”

“Yuh, absolutely,” Trump responded.

“The 14th Amendment, though, says that, quote, ‘All persons born in the United States are citizens,'” Welker responded. “Can you get around the 14th Amendment?”

“That’s not what the 14th Amendment says in Section 1,” Levin abruptly said once the clip concluded. “She’s a liar. She’s not the only one…It says, in relevant part, ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.’

“The fact that you’re born in the United States isn’t enough,” continued. “There’s been no law passed — none — that conveys birthright citizenship onto illegal aliens or their children. There’s been no Supreme Court decision that definitively confers birthright citizenship onto illegal-alien children, none. Nobody’s 100% certain how this came to be, but everybody seems to be 100% certain that the president can’t fix it. Well, does the Constitution confer birthright citizenship on children of illegal aliens? Of course it doesn’t.

“What does ‘jurisdiction’ mean?” he continued. “She purposely, purposely read it out of the Constitution. Does it mean geography? ‘Jurisdiction’ has nothing to do with geography…it had to do with political allegiance to the United States of America. Now how do we know this? Because that’s what the authors said it meant.”

He provided examples of foreigners whose children are born in the United States by happenstance. “Does that make their children American citizens?” he asked his audience. “…Of course not; we don’t confer citizenship on the children of tourists and diplomats and students. Why, then, would we confer citizenship on the children of illegal aliens? Well, the Constitution doesn’t.

“‘Jurisdiction’ means “subject to the laws and rules of the United States,’ he expounded. “It does not mean the conference of citizenship by the fact of one’s physical presence in the United States. This has absolutely nothing to do with the history of the 14th Amendment; it does not support that view. On the contrary, this part of the 14th Amendment, which is one of three post-Civil-War amendments…it was addressing the fact that recently-freed slaves were to be treated as full citizens throughout the United States.”

As The Post & Email has extensively reported, Joe Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, was born in 1964 to parents both of whom arrived in the U.S. for higher education on student visas. Her father did not naturalize until 1981, and there is no evidence her mother ever became a U.S. citizen.