President Donald Trump's order dismantling the citizenship rights of the 14th Amendment is not only illegal, it won't even accomplish what he and his supporters are hoping it will, Eduardo Porter wrote for The Washington Post in an analysis published on Tuesday.
Trump's order seeks to redefine the "jurisdiction" of the United States to exclude children born on American soil without a citizen or permanent resident parent from citizenship, and to deny passports and other federal documents to such children.
The order has already been blocked by a federal judge, who issued a scathing takedown of the administration's logic and accused them of operating in bad legal faith.
This "destructive stunt" by Trump, wrote Porter, "taps into a feature of the American psyche that has been around for 100 years or more. This impulse has, more often than not, been kept in abeyance by the overriding interest to populate the nation’s vast geography and power its economy. Inevitably, though, fear and loathing have found a way to break through. The xenophobia that has defined immigrants as criminal 'invaders' and propelled Trump into the White House is nothing new."
And in the past, anti-immigrant lawmakers passed laws attempting to stop non-white immigration.
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But Trump's push reflects an anxiety from white supremacists: America is about to cross a threshold where half of the population is nonwhite.
"The fact that the United States is approaching this milestone underscores how, in that long battle between the nation’s demand for foreign labor and the entrenched mistrust of foreigners, so far the economic imperative has won. Xenophobia today is punching back."
Nonetheless, abolishing birthright citizenship won't turn back the clock on this, Porter continued.
"Hispanics account for 19 percent of the population, 11 percent of which are of Mexican stock. Asians account for a further 6 percent. Black Americans — largely descendants of the enslaved people whose citizenship rights were first guaranteed by the 14th Amendment — account for 14 percent," wrote Porter. Meanwhile, "America’s hunger for foreign labor kept driving immigration policy after the 1960s."
The upshot he concluded, is that "however the Supreme Court answers" the question of whether Trump can rewrite the Constitution, "trying to recast America in a 100-year-old mold is a fool’s errand."
