An IMGlobalwealth.news Report
Donald Trump has reopened his battle against birthright citizenship, signing two executive orders that seek to narrow one of America’s oldest and most distinctive routes to nationality.
The orders, signed on August 6th, come barely five weeks after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s broader attempt to deny citizenship to children born in America to parents who are undocumented or temporarily resident. The court held that such children remain citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment.
This time the White House has chosen narrower ground. One order instructs federal agencies not to recognise citizenship in several specified circumstances where neither parent is American. These include children of certain foreign government employees and designated “alien enemies”, as well as cases where parents allegedly entered into commercial arrangements specifically to secure American citizenship for a child, including some surrogacy arrangements.
A second order takes aim directly at birth tourism, defined by the administration as entering America on a non-immigrant visa for the purpose of giving birth there. It allows authorities to deny or revoke visas, refuse entry and potentially bar those involved in facilitating such arrangements. Washington argues that citizenship should not become a “commodity” acquired through misuse of immigration rules.
Birth tourism was already restricted. Since 2020, US consular officials have been instructed to refuse visitor visas where they believe the primary purpose of travel is to give birth in America and obtain citizenship for the child.
Yet the broader principle reaches much deeper into American history. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War, established that people born or naturalised in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. It helped overturn the exclusion from citizenship that had characterised the slavery era. The Supreme Court subsequently reinforced the principle in United States v Wong Kim Ark in 1898.
America is unusual, though hardly alone. Unconditional jus soli, the “right of the soil”, remains concentrated largely in the Americas, including Canada and much of Latin America. European states generally attach more conditions to citizenship at birth. Ireland, for example, ended automatic citizenship based solely on birth on Irish territory from 2005.
Italy has moved in another direction. Its 2025 reform restricted citizenship by descent, generally limiting automatic transmission to descendants with a parent or grandparent born in Italy. Rome is therefore tightening the “right of blood”, not American-style birthright citizenship.
Trump’s new orders may be narrower than his first attempt. But the constitutional argument is far from over: the ACLU has already said the new measures cannot alter the meaning of the Constitution, while further litigation is widely expected.
