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Victor Davis Hanson: The Legal Reality of Birthright Citizenship and the Supreme Court’s Defection

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: Your thoughts on this birthright citizenship decision by the Supreme Court?

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, what the minority of [Clarence] Thomas, [Samuel] Alito, [Neil] Gorsuch, and, to a certain extent, [Brett] Kavanaugh—he had a qualified dissent—was that they are originalists, and they said if you look at the Fourteenth Amendment, it came in the aftermath of the Civil War and the increasing pacification of Native American tribes.

So what are we going to do with people who were traditionally not considered citizens of the United States? And so we said if you were a former slave and your parents were here, then you were a citizen; i.e., you didn’t just come in.

A court case sometime later reinterpreted that as anybody born here could be a citizen, but it emphasized the original wording of the amendment that says, “and not subject to the jurisdiction of another country.” But, in fact, everybody knows that if you come in here and you’re a foreign national, you are subject to the jurisdiction of another country.

What do I mean by that? I mean if Mexico has an extradition or a hold on somebody and they come in here, and they come to us and say, “We’re going to extradite him back to Mexico as a Mexican national,” we say, “Okay.” If Mexico says Victor is going to be extradited, I’m not subject to their jurisdiction.

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And so, to simplify things, every single person knows three things about this.

Number one, it was never the intent—never the intent—of the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment to give automatic birthright citizenship.

Number two, everyone knows it is widely abused and not sustainable. People are flying in from China in their third trimester, having a baby, and flying back with the baby so that that baby—who might not know English or anything about the United States—at........

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