Food for Your Brain: Trump’s Jamestown Visit and American Citizenship

President Trump is visiting today our nation’s birthplace for … birthright citizenship.

Birthright citizenship means anyone born on the king’s soil (today, this means U.S. soil) is a citizen.
The legal doctrine is called jus soli (right of the soil).

Some conservatives want to take this right away. 
They say that U.S.-born children of unlawful immigrants should not be U.S. citizens just because they are born here.

What’s their alternative? A doctrine called jus sanguinis—citizenship by blood, or descent. 
Their view is that the descendants of English people who settled here are citizens at birth. They can consent to others being citizens … or not.

Critics of their view, myself included, say this is a legal formula for white citizenship. Period. Everyone else can be given lawful permanent residence but not the right to vote. Conservatives do not deny it but instead shift the discussion to racially degrading terms, for example "anchor babies" and "chain migration." 

Back to Jamestown. King James issued a charter to a company to settle in Virginia.

The deal included birthright citizenship: The new settlers wanted to ensure that they and their children and descendants had English citizenship—partly to aid in inheriting and bequeathing property, and partly as a safety line to return home.

What was the view of birthright citizenship 400 years ago? England had it. They extended it to the children of foreigners. Repeat that line. That undermines the argument for limiting citizenship at birth to the descendants of English natives.

This is a very consequential issue. It has been settled in the U.S. for hundreds of years.

President Trump will likely try to change that in his quest to make America white again.