[When US President Donald Trump signed a recent executive order that would deny citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants living in the United States, he took aim at what he suggested was a peculiarly American principle: birthright citizenship. “It’s ridiculous. We are the only country in the world that does this with the birthright, as you know, and it’s just absolutely ridiculous,” Trump said, questioning a principle that some of his opponents say lies at the very heart of what it means to be called an American.
However, data from the Law Library of Congress suggests that the president’s remarks were not entirely accurate. More than 30 countries across the world recognize birthright citizenship on an unrestricted basis, in which children born on their soil automatically acquire the right regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
The vast majority of countries in the rest of the world either do not recognize the jus soli (Latin for “right of soil”) principle on which unrestricted birthright citizenship is based or, if they do, do so only under certain circumstances – often involving the immigration status of the newborn child’s parents.
So, how did the divide come about? The “right of soil” was introduced by the British via their colonies, according to “The Evolution of Citizenship” study by Graziella Bertocchi and Chiara Strozzi. The principle had been established in English law in the early 17th century by a ruling that anyone born in a place subject to the king of England was a “natural-born subject of England.” When the US declared independence, the idea endured and was used – ironically for the departing Brits – to keep out foreign influence, such as in the Constitution’s requirement that the president be a “natural-born citizen” of the US.
The principle would be debated for decades until it was finally made law in 1868 after the Civil War, which resulted in the freedom of enslaved Black Americans, and formalized by the 14th Amendment, which states: “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.”
But it wasn’t just the Brits in North America. Other European colonial powers introduced the idea in countries across Central and South America, too. Driving the practice in many of these areas was an economic need. Populations in the Western Hemisphere were at the time much smaller than in other parts of the world that had been colonized, and settlers often saw bestowing citizenship as a way to boost their labor forces. “You had these Europeans coming and saying: ‘This land is now our land, and we want more Europeans to come here and we want them to be citizens of these new countries.’ So, it’s a mixture of colonial domination and then the idea of these settler states they want to populate,” said sociologist John Skrentny, a professor at the University of California, San Diego.
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