This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 30th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President says it's both easy and good to end birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution,

and he says he can do it with the stroke of a pen.

The President is very, very likely wrong about that, but what drives the effort to prevent people born in the US from

being citizens? Cato's Alex Narasta comments. To hear Donald Trump tell it

there's just no problem at all with ending birthright citizenship.

He says Congress could have done it, but it turns out someone has told him we don't know who that he can

just do it within executive order that appears to be what somebody has told him

I don't know a very many legal experts who agree with him.

There are a handful like Eastman, who is a professor at Chapman University who thinks that

Congress could pass a law ending birthright citizenship. He's the exception

though most legal experts, originalists, living constitutional it would require a constitutional amendment.

All right, so that aside, I mean,

our colleague Ilia Shapiro has said this is not an active debate

in the legal academy.

It seems pretty clear cut that if you're born in the United States you have certain rights that you are a citizen.

That's right. That's the way it's been really since the beginning since the country was founded and even extending backwards through about a thousand years the English common law has recognized what's called just soli or law of the soil, the idea that those who are born here, who the

government has jurisdiction over, jurisdiction is just a fancy word for government power,

if they have jurisdiction over you. is just a fancy word for government power.

If they have jurisdiction over you,

then you are therefore a citizen at birth.

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