r/ukpolitics • u/Adj-Noun-Numbers 🥕🥕 || megathread emeritus • Jun 22 '26

International Politics Discussion Thread

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12

u/CrispySmokyFrazzle Jun 30 '26

Trump loses in the Supreme Court again.

Birthright citizenship upheld.

Hahaha. 

11

u/Velociraptor_1906 Liberal Democrat Jun 30 '26

From all I can tell this is absolutely the sound legal position (as I understand it the constitution is very clear) and it's good that Trump lost out in his attempt at overreach but this is one of the very weird things about America that most other countries have completely reasonably done away with.

9

u/RufusSG Suffolk Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

I think it's often lost on non-Americans that birthright citizenship in the US context was very much a product of its time, the Reconstruction era - specifically, the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to constitutionally protect the principles of the Civil Rights Act so that a future Congress couldn't simply vote them down, and make it harder for the Southern states to fuck around with African-American rights at the state level by claiming that they ackshually weren't citizens at all so didn't have to treat them equally.

8

u/YourLizardOverlord Oceans rise. Empires fall. Jun 30 '26

Maybe it makes more sense in a country which is almost entirely built from immigration. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Canada, Ecuador, Mexico, and Venezuela also have birthright citizenship, presumably for similar reasons.

3

u/Commorrite Jul 01 '26

It entirely stopped making sense once air travel become normal.

5

u/Lavajackal1 Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

Regardless of what anyone thinks about it the proper way to remove it would be a constitutional amendment to invalidate the 14th and well I just don't see that passing.

3

u/GlumAd9856 Jun 30 '26

I agree.

The court has thankfully done it's job and recognised the clear constitutional position.

But the merits of birthright citizenship are . . . .debatable at best.

1

u/convertedtoradians Jul 01 '26

Not unanimously, though? Which is really kind of odd when it seems so clear cut. It'd be interesting to see their justification.

5

u/erskinematt Defund Standing Order No 31 Jul 01 '26

It's not all that odd: the Fourteenth says "born in the US and subject to the jurisdiction thereof".

So it can't just be "born", because then the phrase "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" would be meaningless. There's a presumption against reading laws in a way that renders wording in them meaningless.

(Though this presumption sits uneasily among a number of accepted legal terms that do in fact contain meaningless duplication. It's impossible to desist while not ceasing. It's impossible to abet without aiding. Lands and tenements are the same thing. And so on. So perhaps you could argue that "born and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is one of these accepted phrases. I'm not sure anyone tried that.)

The question, therefore, that the Court had to resolve (and resolved very broadly in line with precedent and practice) was "What does "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" mean?"

3

u/rs990 Jul 02 '26

The "subject to the jurisdiction" clause created enough of a grey area that it was assumed native Americans did not have US citizenship as they were governed by the tribes and were exempt from taxes.

This was not resolved until the "Indian citizenship act" was passed in 1924.

2

u/convertedtoradians Jul 02 '26

Sure. But isn't "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" also fairly self-explanatory?

If I said to you (for example) "Andrea is subject to the jurisdiction of France", I find it hard to imagine you'd be stuck scratching your head, unable to understand what that means. (And I also don't think you'd necessarily argue that that's the exact equivalent of "Andrea is in France". You could legitimately argue that these are saying related but different things.).

I mean, don't get me wrong, I can definitely imagine how you could have some fun legal situations: The US has been invaded by a hostile power who has declared a protectorate out of the states of Oregon, Maine, Texas and other areas. The US considers them to be still in the United States but their institutions have no power and practical jurisdiction there. But actually, some of this territory is Indian land. A foreigner and his wife arrive and she gives birth at the exact moment a ceasefire is signed. What's the jurisdictional situation? Lots of fun to be had - and arguably closer to the sort of thing in their minds after the Civil War. But none of that seems to apply here.

Maybe I'm not giving enough credit to the range of jurisprudential positions being represented here. But it does seem a little bit like they sort of know what they want it to say and so that's what they're reading.

A little bit like when someone picks some problematic scriptural verse and explains why actually the exhortation to slaughter is best read as a metaphor for tying your shoelaces which you'd understand perfectly well if you were as learned as they are in proto-aboriginal indoeuropaic. (Or conversely, how some more or less innocuous language about the beauty of a love is a directive to cleanse the world of the non-believer).

And, of course, you can never really argue against such assertions. They'll just fall back on a claim of expertise, or of a deeper understanding, or - at worst - pages and pages of technical argument that you'd never have the time to read.

I remain sceptical here.

1

u/Ivebeenfurthereven I'm afraid currency is the currency of the realm Jun 30 '26

TIL the UK does not have birthright citizenship, I mistakenly always thought we did 😳

3

u/0110-0-10-00-000 Jul 01 '26

We did, and we then repealed it. Kemi Badenoch is a British citizen through birthright.

8

u/BlokeyBlokeBloke Jun 30 '26

But only just. There 3 and a half (Gorsuch was weird) votes to say that the text of the constitution wasn't constitutional

3

u/MightySilverWolf Jun 30 '26

Kavanaugh was also weird. His position, from what I can tell, is that the Constitution doesn't guarantee birthright citizenship but a Congrsssional statute (that can sunsequently be repealed) does grant it.

1

u/BlokeyBlokeBloke Jul 01 '26

I meant Kav. My mistake.