Immigration Myths and Birthright Citizenship
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Slate Audio
4.6 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 14 March 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Next month, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara. It’s still somewhat unbelievable that the high court will entertain arguments in favor of gutting an utterly clear constitutional commitment. Nonetheless, our motto on Amicus is “legal knowledge is power,” and in this case, historical understanding of legal knowledge … is power. On this week’s show, Dahlia Lithwick interviews constitutional and immigration scholar Anna O. Law about her forthcoming book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship.
In preparation for a lot of very bad originalist takes, Lithwick and Law discuss how immigration actually worked in the colonial and pre-Civil War eras and why the framers of the Reconstruction Amendments (including the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment) meant exactly what they said and said exactly what they meant. Law also explains how and why Wong Kim Ark affirmed birthright citizenship for children of Chinese immigrants, and emphasizes that the words “subject to the jurisdiction” had narrow historical exceptions. Finally, a reminder that the framers of the 14th Amendment chose to constitutionalize citizenship rather than establish it in statute—in anticipation of exactly the situation America finds itself in today.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court. I'm Dahlia Lithwick. |
| 0:22.3 | In just over a couple of weeks, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Trump v. Barbara, |
| 0:28.5 | the birthright citizenship case. This is a legal question that has no basis in constitutional law, |
| 0:35.0 | in statute, in text, or in history, and yet it is now being carefully |
| 0:40.5 | scrutinized for its possible legal virtue. |
| 0:44.0 | Last year, the court and the Trump administration dodged having to answer for President Trump's |
| 0:50.5 | wildly unconstitutional day one executive order, stripping birthright citizenship from |
| 0:56.6 | untold numbers of future Americans in Trump v. Casa. The court opted instead to kick the legs out |
| 1:03.2 | from under nationwide injunctions. But on April 1st, no really, April 1st, the High Court |
| 1:09.2 | will now address whether the words, quote, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside, in quote, applies to children born in the United States to parents who are not U.S. citizens or permanent |
| 1:28.2 | residents at the time of their birth. Many, if not most of us, approach this issue with an |
| 1:33.5 | imperfect and even highly distorted understanding of the complicated American history of |
| 1:39.7 | migration, deportation, citizenship, and nationality. And a whole lot of that bad history is then exploited to make bad arguments about the current debates over citizenship. |
| 1:50.8 | Maybe the framers of the 14th Amendment really meant only green cardholders and descendants of enslaved people or people on the Mayflower when they wrote the words, all persons and subject |
| 2:03.0 | to the jurisdiction thereof. I mean, really, who's to say? Well, it turns out there is a vast |
| 2:08.6 | body of scholarship to say that that is provably false. So on this week's show, I'm joined by |
| 2:13.9 | constitutional and immigration rights scholar Anna O. Law. She is the Herbert Kurtz Chair |
| 2:19.7 | in Constitutional Rights in the Department of Political Science at CUNY Brooklyn College. |
| 2:24.6 | Her new book, Migration in the Origins of American Citizenship, African Americans, Native Americans, |
| 2:29.8 | and immigrants will be published on March 24th. And it is an absolutely indispensable table-setter |
| 2:36.5 | on what American citizenship actually means as a constitutional, historical, and political |
| 2:42.5 | matter. This is vitally important material to review as we head into these arguments. So, Anna, |
... |
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