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Comment by sfasdfasd | Hacker News Reader

"U.S Born" == "U.S Citizenship" would be the default assumption of any rational, thinking person.

You can add more words to say the same thing but it only ends up being annoying.

This has literally been declared not the case by the president, and being contested in court, and held as true by a significant percentage of the population. It’s not semantics - it’s become a point of national disagreement.

It also leaves out all mention of process. The issue here isn’t that the parents are choosing to bring their citizen children with them but that they’re being denied all ability to leave their citizen children with their citizen parent. This is the crux of the actual issue here.

It’s not the case already for foreign diplomats on US soil. If the Russian ambassador’s wife gives birth at a US hospital while visiting the embassy, the child does not get citizenship.

Mark my words, Trump is going to win that court case. It’s not far fetched at all to interpret “* and subject to the jurisdiction thereof*” to mean people that have legally entered the country.

All people in the United States other than consular and other rare carve outs are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States government. Otherwise the government would have no ability to enforce its law on them. I think while you may be right due to political aspects of the Supreme Courts loyalties, it’s hard to find a reading where “jurisdiction” means “parents are citizens a-priori.” There’s no discussion of the parents, just that they’re subject to the laws of the United States, and citizenship and jurisdiction of the United States are concepts that have no intersection.

Notably, Trump's order also applies to people who entered the country legally. Why'd they include that if they think that only people who entered illegally are not "subject to the jurisdiction thereof?"

And it sure seems like the opinion of legal professionals is that it is far fetched.

It's not a matter of rationality and logic. The executive believes the 14th amendment only applies to former slaves. They don't believe it's operable in the 21st century and they don't believe it applies to foreign nationals. They call such children "anchor babies". Courts don't agree with that, but the executive also believes courts don't have the right to limit the executive when it comes to matters of immigration.

I can understand why this level of pedantry is annoying but we are not dealing with good faith arguments here. They are power plays.

> "U.S Born" == "U.S Citizenship" would be the default assumption of any rational, thinking person

Not in trump’s america, not if they have their way, and this nonsense wordplay is part of it. Look at the statements around a third term; those arent jokes

"U.S. Born" and "U.S. Citizen" are the same number of words though, so it just seems like you're deliberately obfuscating. Maybe a better headline would be "Two Undocumented Families and Their American Children Deported by ICE." That way we'd save a word and make it unambiguous: these children are Americans.

Less than half the population of the world live in birthright citizenship countries. Such countries as all of Eurasia except Pakistan, and all but a handful of African countries. Do those countries not have rational thinking people?

You're missing the point here. In the United States, the context of this discussion, birthright citizenship has been the law of the land for generations. It would be abnormal for someone in this context to think someone born in the US isn't a citizen. The right wing wants this to change, but it has not as of yet.

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