Which countries offer birthright citizenship? Here’s how the US compares.
In one of the most anticipated cases of the year, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on April 1 on President Donald Trump’s efforts to reinterpret the Constitution’s guarantee of automatic citizenship at birth.
Mr. Trump once said that the United States was the only country to grant citizenship to anyone born in the country, a policy known as birthright citizenship. In fact, about three dozen countries provide citizenship without birth restrictions. It is true that many countries around the world have chosen, in recent decades, to tighten or even eliminate their birthright citizenship policies.
The case of Trump v. Barbara focuses on whether an executive order issued by Mr. Trump – which made children of illegal immigrants born in the United States ineligible for citizenship – complies with the 14th Amendment. (“Barbara” is the pseudonym of a plaintiff, a pregnant Honduran woman, who is part of the class action.) The amendment, passed after the Civil War, states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.”
Why we wrote this
The United States is one of about three dozen countries that grants citizenship without birth restrictions. The Supreme Court will review President Donald Trump’s efforts to reinterpret the constitutional guarantee of automatic citizenship at birth.
This clause has long been interpreted to mean that any child born in the United States is automatically a citizen. The Supreme Court upheld this reasoning in an 1898 decision. Since the 1980s, some have argued that the words “subject to their jurisdiction” warrant narrowing this interpretation. The Trump administration claims that immigrants living in the United States illegally are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and, therefore, their children are not entitled to citizenship at birth.
In the Barbara case, the Supreme Court will evaluate these different interpretations. Countries outside the United States have been having the same debates for decades. In fact, many countries in the Eastern Hemisphere have changed their laws from citizenship by place of birth to citizenship by nationality of parents.
Birthright Citizenship Laws Around the World
The United Kingdom passed legislation in 1981 that replaced birthright citizenship. France did the same with a law passed in 1993. Ireland made the change in 2004, with 80% of the population voting to end birthright in a national referendum.
Germany is one of many countries in the world that combines these two policies. After declaring itself a “non-immigration country” in the 1980s, Germany adopted a limited form of birthright citizenship in 2000.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, almost all countries in the Americas enjoy unrestricted birthright citizenship. In many cases, these countries have enshrined the right of citizenship in their constitution. One of the main reasons for the adoption of citizenship rights laws “in the ‘new world’ is precisely that the Europeans saw it as the ‘new world,’ that is, largely empty…and in need of people,” says Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton University, in an email.
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A debate on constitutional principles
But now, in the United States, “the facts on the ground have changed,” says Andrew Arthur, a researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates stricter immigration policies.
“It is no longer necessary to have this very liberalized system [immigration] political, to promote development, because the United States is today largely developed,” he adds. “It is clearly a trend that is continuing in Western countries,” such as the United Kingdom and France, he continues.
The United States was not isolated from the political and ideological forces that led to legal changes in Europe, says Martha Jones, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University.
“We have been debating birthright since the 1980s,” she adds. “One could say that this is part of a vast reflection on belonging to a time when, in certain circles, opinion is [that changing] demography must be stopped, must be contained. It’s true in Europe and it’s true here.
What is different about the United States compared to most European countries is that, according to many legal scholars, the right of citizenship is enshrined in the Constitution, and the U.S. Constitution is notoriously difficult to amend.
“Elevating it to the rank of constitutional principle makes, I think, [birthright citizenship] more [durable]more ineradicable than a national law” in the United States, says John Torpey, a sociologist at the CUNY Graduate Center.
So the justices will focus more on the 14th Amendment than on how the rest of the world has revised its citizenship laws, Mr. Arthur says.
“This Supreme Court is not going to get involved in this policy at all,” he adds. “They will be very interested in the debates in the room [in Congress in 1868] and the 14th Amendment itself.
