Following President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, Duke community members expressed skepticism about the policy’s implementation and disagreement with its fundamental purpose.
The order states that automatic citizenship will no longer be granted to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrant parents or of those in the country legally on temporary visas, such as student, tourist and work visas. The ban would overturn a century of legal precedent upholding birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.
However, the move immediately faced legal challenges, with attorneys general from 22 states filing lawsuits to block the administration from carrying out the order, a federal judge temporarily blocking the order Jan. 23 and another federal judge blocking the policy indefinitely in a Wednesday ruling. The ban was set to take effect Feb. 19, affecting children born on and after the date.
The Chronicle spoke to students who attained citizen status through the birthright clause to reflect on what the right means to them, as well as to faculty who examined the legal framework surrounding the policy and potential consequences of the proposed ban.
‘Becoming part of American society’
Although the proposed birthright citizenship ban would not apply retroactively, it remains a source of concern for many students from immigrant backgrounds who are already citizens.
Sophomore Zach Gor shared that he is unable to fathom what the alternative would be if he was not afforded U.S. citizenship at birth. Born in Connecticut to immigrant parents from India, Gor said that he has lived his entire life in the country as a citizen, and views birthright citizenship as “part of the fabric of America.”
“America is really a melting pot of cultures. Anyone from the world can come here and make a life for themselves,” Gor said, adding that he believes “birthright citizenship is kind of the key” to assimilating into American society, “no matter what your background is.”
When senior Timothy Gunawan first learned about the ban, he deemed it a “very dangerous thing to propose,” highlighting that Americans with non-citizen parents constitute a significant share of “American talent.”
“Especially amongst Duke students, there's a lot of very skilled people who want to be Americans and who are already Americans, and booting them off of their Americanness does not help America,” Gunawan said.
Born in North Carolina to Indonesian parents, Gunawan describes his citizenship as “existential,” noting that he has never known any identity other than American. Although Gunawan moved to Indonesia when he was 13, he continued to embrace American values while abroad.
Gunawan shared that his future aspirations — a career in government and foreign affairs representing the U.S. — hinge on his identity as an American citizen.
The end of birthright citizenship also has implications for international students born on U.S. soil.
First-year Humphrey Zhao was born in the U.S. but moved to Shanghai, China, with his family shortly thereafter, spending the majority of his life divided between Shanghai and Singapore. He expressed gratitude that his American citizenship has allowed him to pursue higher education and a future career in the U.S. without the extra burden of needing to meet visa requirements, noting that he might have attended college in Singapore or the United Kingdom instead if he did not receive U.S. citizenship at birth.
“If the children have birthright citizenship, then it’s a lot easier for them to develop and grow here,” Zhao said. “It's like the first step of becoming part of American society.”
‘An uphill battle’
Since his return to the White House, Trump has issued a slew of immigration-related executive orders aimed at cracking down on undocumented immigration, including measures to tighten border security, deport migrants who entered the country illegally and declare a national state of emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border.
However, some Duke faculty dismissed the president’s move to revoke birthright citizenship as lacking legal standing and condemned the adverse consequences it would have on immigrant communities.
According to Kate Evans, clinical professor of law and director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic, the executive order contradicts the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, as well as over a century of Supreme Court precedent.
Birthright citizenship traces its roots to the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to people “born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Ratified in 1868 to grant citizenship to formerly enslaved people in the aftermath of the Civil War, the constitutional right was extended to children of immigrants in the landmark 1898 Supreme Court decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.
In a Tuesday email to The Chronicle, Evans wrote that Trump’s new order would “create a class of undocumented children” who are not afforded citizen status even though they are still “subject to all the laws of the U.S.”
She believes the issue will likely wind up being decided in the Supreme Court. The administration could also resort to a constitutional amendment to redefine the criteria of citizenship, which would require a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate and ratification by three-fourths of the states.
Hannah Postel, assistant professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, is skeptical that the ban offers a solution to the issues of undocumented immigration. She explained that removing birthright citizenship could aggravate the current immigration system by creating a larger population of undocumented immigrants who would be unable to “regularize their status.”
“It is my sense that most immigrants and asylum seekers are not coming to the U.S. with the express purpose of having a child here,” Postel wrote in a Jan. 30 email to The Chronicle.
Evans pointed out that children of undocumented immigrants have to wait until they are 21 years old to petition for citizenship status for their parents, delaying any incentives to obtain legal status by having a child on U.S. soil by more than two decades.
When asked about how the ban might affect future generations of undocumented immigrants and their families, Postel wrote that immigrant communities would likely experience “overall decreased faith” in institutions vital to ensuring public health and safety, such as hospitals and law enforcement agencies. Evans noted that once the order takes effect, children of non-citizen parents could become “potentially stateless.”
There may also be potential logistical hurdles to implementing the ban. Postel explained that the policy could complicate the existing system of tracking and verifying citizenship, which currently relies on birth certificates. She cautioned that the order spells trouble for an “already extremely overloaded immigration bureaucracy” by backlogging the registration process.
“[I]f birth certificates are not sufficient to prove citizenship, then an entire new layer of bureaucracy would have to be put in place,” Postel wrote. “Especially at the beginning, such a system would be slow and error-prone.”
Both Postel and Evans are doubtful that Trump’s order will overcome legal obstacles.
“The administration faces an uphill battle in overcoming 125 years of constitutional precedent and upending this fundamental understanding of the Constitution through an executive order alone,” Evans wrote.
Students also shared doubts about the implementation of the order and suggested Trump’s move may be an empty gesture.
Gor felt that Trump’s rhetoric around the order was designed to “appeal to his base,” while Gunawan characterized the ban as a “scare tactic” that does not pose a serious challenge to the constitutional right. Gunawan expects the ban to undergo a lengthy process in Congress and the courts and believes it will not be implemented “without a good fight.”
“I think it's just … a symbolic gesture to show that ‘Hey, we're coming for you. You're not welcome here. Don't come,’” Gunawan said.
Lucas Lin is a Trinity sophomore and a university news editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.