You're right, though, it is different; birthright citizenship is spelled out, very clearly, in the Constitution. It's an even plainer wrong.
It's Calvinball.
Likewise, in 1868 the writers of the fourteenth amendment probably couldn’t conceive of rapid international travel and the possibility that pregnant women could just show up weeks before their due date and their newborn child should “obviously” be an American citizen.
The amendment was quite obviously targeted at Native Americans and slaves, not any and all pregnant women the world over who manage to reach the US before giving birth. But as you’re noticing, there’s multiple ways people can interpret laws. It’s rarely as cut and dry as “this is obviously against the law!!!”
This is a better point than you realize, and in the opposite direction you intend.
Immigration in the 1800s was a… cursory process. Not only would those kids be citizens, but their parents would have had little trouble staying around.
We had very few rules beyond “don’t be Chinese” until 1891. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1891?wprov=...
Why am I supposed to be mad about people doing this, exactly? Because of hazy "rules are rules" talk?
Just to return to this for a moment… this is quite incorrect. Native Americans were explicitly not included. That came later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
"Consistent with the views of the clause's author, Senator Jacob M. Howard, the Supreme Court held that because Indian reservations are not under the federal government's jurisdiction, Native Americans born on such land are not entitled to birthright citizenship. The 1887 Dawes Act offered citizenship to Native Americans who accepted private property as part of cultural assimilation, while the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act offered citizenship to all Native Americans born within the nation's territorial limits."
SCOTUS did rule on the anchor babies thing, in 1898.