Mona Charen

Now that we’ve completed our celebration of America’s 250th birthday, it’s time to prepare for the 300th. I will not live to see it, but I hope the nation will.

Though the Supreme Court has done its share to deform our constitutional structure recently, it also gave us a gift for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration. That gift was the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara.

By reaffirming birthright citizenship, the court upheld a pillar of equality in America. That is part of what the Revolutionary War achieved. It overturned centuries of deference, subordination and caste to create a new republic based on equality. As the late historian Gordon Wood put it, “Equality was in fact the most radical and most powerful ideological force let loose in the Revolution. … Once invoked, the idea of equality could not be stopped, and it tore through American society and culture with awesome power.”

Birthright citizenship is a constitutive part of this democratic philosophy.

Abraham Lincoln would like a word. In a July 10, 1858 speech, he said:

“We have besides these men – descended by blood from our ancestors – among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe – German, Irish, French and Scandinavian – men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none. They cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.”

If we were to confine citizenship to those who can trace their ancestry back to the Civil War, we would disenfranchise tens of millions, including the families of Antonin Scalia, Frank Sinatra, Jonas Salk, Barack Obama and, yes, Donald Trump, not to mention Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Steve Jobs, Andrew Grove and so many others.

The government’s lawyer, D. John Sauer claimed that birthright citizenship “has spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism as uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades, creating a whole generation of American citizens abroad with no meaningful ties to the United States.” But when pressed by Roberts about how big a problem this is, Sauer admitted that “no one knows for sure.” OK, then.

The Niskanen Institute examined the Center for Immigration Studies’ widely cited estimate of 33,000 births to tourists per year and found it completely wrong. The CIS, to its credit, issued a retraction. Niskanen estimates that the true number may be closer to zero. But even the inflated CIS estimates would yield less than 1% of births, and there are border controls and other methods short of changing the Constitution that can reduce that number.

There is nothing novel about xenophobia in America, but it has always been outweighed by our dedication to the idea of America as a “shining city on a hill.”

That rare openness to newcomers is one reason why America has been so much more successful in assimilating immigrants than other nations. As Ronald Reagan said in 1989: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our … strength from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.”