The American Workforce Without Birthright Citizenship: A Bleak Future Awaits U.S.

Credit: Daryl Cagle

President Trump and policy-shapers such as Stephen Miller, Tom Cotton, Chris Kobach and others want to end birthright citizenship.

My study, “The Labor Origins of Birthright Citizenship,” examines three scenarios that would result if they end birthright citizenship.

Here are excerpts:

This study shows birthright citizenship in a new light. First, three empires granted birthright citizenship as part of broad policies for competitive labor advantage (Rome, England, and U.S.). Second, birthright citizenship has existed much longer than its critics acknowledge. Third, birthright citizenship has multiple and diverse sources. Fourth, birthright citizenship has always been part of broader immigration policies. In all three empires, birthright citizenship and naturalization co-evolved. These laws diversified homogenous societies by adding people of different races and color, languages, ethnicities, religions, and cultures.

The labor origins of birthright citizenship implicate troubling questions about the U.S. workforce, if this constitutional right is limited or ended.

Nine Month Entry Bar: This approach would deny citizenship to all children born to non-citizen mothers who enter the U.S. within nine months of giving birth. This policy would address birth tourism.

This nine-month entry exception is more complicated than it seems. It could apply to every child born within nine months of unlawful entry. However, if the purpose of the policy is to discourage illegal immigration, a strict nine-month exception would affect people who enter the U.S. on work visas. A strict nine-month bar would deny citizenship to children of Lawful Permanent Residents, and employees with temporary work permits, some who work for years in the U.S. for years.   

To evaluate the impact of a nine-month entry rule on the U.S. workforce, I consider data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) for temporary workers and families. In 2017 alone, the U.S. admitted 849,727 females of childbearing age.  The more relevant statistic— U.S. births to these women— is unknown. However, it is reasonable to suppose that the U.S. would lose some foreign workers— foreign mothers and foreign fathers— to other countries simply because of this rule. Canada, for example, has birthright citizenship.

U.S. Born Children to Unlawful Immigrants: This is a common policy prescription from birthright critics. Citizenship without Consent favors a prospective denial of this right to children on unlawful immigrants. However, retroactive application is also possible. This severe approach would require stripping of citizenship. Adding to this muddle, birthright opponents do not specify whether their unlawful immigrant citizenship bar applies to a child of an immigrant mother, or a child of either an immigrant mother or father, or a child of two immigrants. 

The large group of immigrant parents under DAPA offers one way to imagine workforce effects from implementing this exception to birthright citizenship. President Barack Obama implemented Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) as a postponed enforcement policy— a way of deprioritizing removal on unlawful immigrants. 

The DAPA-eligible population is about 3,605,000.  This figure is large because birthright citizenship applies to any child born in the U.S. to a qualifying immigrant parent. Because this parent must prove continuous U.S. residency for five years, there is a good possibility that long-term resident immigrants had a U.S.-born child (a birthright citizen).

The most restrictive form of the unlawful immigrant bar to birthright citizenship would apply to most DAPA parents and their U.S.-born children. Starting with DAPA parents: Even if courts or a different president restore DAPA— an outcome that would temporarily legalize the presence of parents and allow them to apply for work authorization— this birthright ban would expose anew up to 85 percent of three million DAPA parents to deportation.  This is because retroactive citizenship stripping for DAPA children would make the entire immigrant family’s immigration and citizenship status unlawful. This would have large workforce effects, as DAPA-parents lost work authorization and face deportation. A study of potential-DAPA eligible immigrants— unlawful immigrants who were parents from 2009-2013— found that 95% of these fathers were in the labor force and 93% had jobs.

This exclusion to citizenship would have large second-order effects on the American workforce, this one affecting children who lose their birthright citizenship. With unlawful status, they would be stateless children facing deportation. Massive citizenship stripping of this young cohort would ripple destructively in the U.S. labor market.

Statistics show the magnitude of this crippling effect. While the number of DAPA children is unknown, about 2.5 million DAPA parents have a U.S.-born child. This suggests that the child cohort facing citizenship stripping is in the millions. The DAPA child cohort appears to have birthdates ranging from January 1, 2010 through November 20, 2014.

By the mid-2020s, they will start entering the U.S. labor force. The Department of Labor (DOL), in a study that does not differentiate the workforce by immigration or citizenship status, showed that Hispanics registered the largest gains in the American workforce, increasing from about 12.0 million in 1994 to 25.4 million in 2014.  DOL estimates this group will reach 32.5 million in 2024, thereby growing the share of Hispanics in the total labor force from 13.1 percent in 2004 to nearly 20 percent of the labor force in 2024.  Removal of millions of DAPA parents, and millions of DAPA children, from the legal workforce would have unpredictable but unavoidably massive effects on the American economy.

European-Origin Exception: Some immigration opponents explicitly seek a whites-only America.  A slightly milder version anchors American identity in Eurocentric heritage. 

Compared to the nine-month and unlawful immigrant disqualifications for citizenship— which themselves devolve into definitional quagmires— the European-origin exception to birthright citizenship is enigmatic. Whatever form this would take, Eurocentric birthright citizenship would produce an American apartheid. This systemic inequality would weigh heavily on the American workforce. Whites have the nation’s lowest birth rates. Whites also registered the greatest decline in labor force participation, from 67.1 percent in 1994 to 63.1 percent in 2014. The DOL projects that this rate will drop to 60.8 percent in 2024. Viewing the European-origin form of birthright citizenship simply through the lens of national workforce composition, this scenario recalls a stagnant but ethnically homogenous England in the fifteenth century, stuck with labor force deficits that were remedied by more open naturalization.

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Opponents of birthright citizenship say that Americans must consent before the U.S.-born children of unlawful immigrants can be citizens. While my study produces extensive evidence of the labor utility of universal birthright citizenship, the economics behind this fundamental right also reveal a fundamental morality. Consent based on racial sameness is immoral and destructive of economic growth and international trade. Rome tempered its conquests with inclusive marriage, naturalization, and citizenship laws that correspond to America’s sense of strength through pluralism. England was a hungry, depressed, and depopulated island nation until it owned up to the shortcomings of its restrictive naturalization laws. England only began to prosper when it became a haven for religiously oppressed Europeans who had sophisticated skills that opened new industries in and around London. When Congress debated the birthright citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, disagreement arose as to whether to include the children of foreign laborers. A majority in Congress approved a universal form of birthright citizenship that included the “child of the Asiatic.” The reemergence of the birthright citizenship question puts two versions of morality on trial, one centered on racial superiority, the other founded on human equality. If economic history helps to determine this debate, this ancient narrative will prove that a nation’s wealth depends on preferring the human race to the white race.