MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: President-elect Trump has a list of issues he says he plans to tackle as soon as he takes office in January. Ending automatic citizenship for anyone born in the U.S. is one of them. Birthright citizenship has been enshrined in the U.S. Constitution since 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified. And Mr. Trump has never said exactly how he thinks he could accomplish this. Still, we wanted to understand more about what it would mean to end this right, so we've called Julia Gelatt of the Migration Policy Institute. That's a nonpartisan think tank focused on the study of the movement of people worldwide. Good morning. Thanks for joining us.
JULIA GELATT: Good morning.
MARTIN: So 1868 is a long time. Like, why do you think this idea of ending birthright citizenship seems to be gaining traction now?
GELATT: When birthright citizenship came about in the 14th Amendment, there weren't unauthorized immigrants in the United States like there are today. Starting in 1991, Congress has been introducing bills to end birthright citizenship. None of those have passed into law. But I think that as unauthorized immigration has risen at certain periods of time, there's been more attention to what rights unauthorized immigrants have in the United States, and the right to have a child who's automatically a U.S. citizen is one of those rights that some folks are concerned about.
MARTIN: So let's just say - this is a hypothetical. It's actually a very arduous process to, you know, either add or remove a constitutional amendment. But with that being said, for the sake of argument, what would it mean to end birthright citizenship? Like, how would that work?
GELATT: So what it sounds like from the current reporting is that the incoming Trump administration is saying that they might start requiring that applicants for passports or other federal documents that are issued to citizens prove that at least one of their parents was a U.S. citizen or a legal immigrant when that person was born. That would immediately be litigated, and then it would be up to the courts to decide whether the executive branch had the power to treat some children born in the United States not as U.S. citizens.
This would have the unintended effect of swelling the size of the unauthorized immigrant population in the United States, likely by millions of people over coming years. Today, we estimate that there are somewhere around 5 million U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants in the United States. But as children born to unauthorized immigrants were themselves treated as unauthorized immigrants, that would grow the unauthorized immigrant population in the country. And we could see even grandchildren of today's unauthorized immigrants being born without U.S. citizenship.
MARTIN: So that could potentially be what? I mean, how many millions of people could that be?
GELATT: So if we're talking about children who have two unauthorized immigrant parents, they could number somewhere around, you know, an additional 5 million people by 2050.
MARTIN: If you had only one parent who was undocumented, what effect would that have?
GELATT: Right. That would grow the unauthorized immigrant population even more. By maybe 11 to 16 million by 2050.
MARTIN: And what effect do you think that that would have? Like, how would that change the country?
GELATT: We know that when people have legal status and the right to work legally in the United States and full membership in the country, that helps them to integrate, to thrive and to contribute more to our country, to our economy and our democracy. And we know that birthright citizenship has helped the children of immigrants to really integrate fully and, in many cases, to surpass the success of their parents. If we were to deny children of unauthorized immigrants full membership in the country, you know, we'd really be limiting their potential.
What we see in countries where there is not birthright citizenship is that, you know, there are multigenerational groups of people who don't have full membership. They don't have a full say in the governments that rule over them. And in some cases, people can also end up being stateless. In that case, they can't access passports. They can't access official government documents that makes life very difficult and can make international travel impossible.
MARTIN: That's Julia Gelatt. She is associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, which is, as we said, a nonpartisan think tank that focuses on migration worldwide. Julia Gelatt, thanks so much for talking with us.
GELATT: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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