Daily Archives: 24 February 2025

Birthright Citizenship for Children of Illegally Imported Slaves

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Jason Riley, Upward Mobility columnist for The Wall Street Journal, in his op-ed last Wednesday has hung his hat on the universality of birthright citizenship on the citizenship granted the children of slaves who were illegally imported, and so as persons were present illegally. In support, he cited the 14th Amendment’s All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States clause and noted, correctly IMNSHO, the centrality of that subject to the jurisdiction thereof phrase to the hook for his hat.

Riley’s claim vis-à-vis those illegally imported slaves’ children is this:

Although the US banned the importation of slaves in 1808, an illegal international slave trade continued for decades. ….
According to the legal scholar Gerald Neuman, by the time the 14th Amendment was ratified, there were tens of thousands of black people in the US who had been brought here illegally. Naturally, some of them later bore children. It thus would seem that for authors of the Citizenship Clause, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” included the children of parents in the country without authorization.

Therein lies the failure of Riley’s argument. The Trump administration’s argument—and one I’ve made in these pages—is that illegal aliens and birth tourism mothers are not subject to our nation’s jurisdiction because, in the first instance, they’ve placed themselves outside our jurisdiction from the beginning by entering our nation illegally—in direct and deliberate contravention of our jurisdiction’s laws—and in the second instance, withholding themselves from our jurisdiction however legally they may have entered because they have no intention of staying or in any way breaking the bonds of their loyalty, citizenship, or still-accepted jurisdiction of their home nation.

Those illegally imported slaves, on the other hand, on their emancipation actively and consciously accepted the jurisdiction of our nation and our nation’s laws. They accepted and sought American citizenship, whether before or after their children were born.

Progressive-Democrats Punishing Victims

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There are growing numbers of young adults and adults who underwent surgical and/or hormonal procedures as children or younger adults who, recognizing their mistakes (or their parents’), want to detransition as far as reversing the hormonal and surgical treatments can take them.

Those persons, those efforts to correct their mistakes, are a growing embarrassment to the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and their Leftist supporters. Last week, the Progressive-Democratic Party in Colorado struck back at those detransitioners—hard, and dangerously to their health and lives.

The Colorado General Assembly’s House Judiciary Committee late Tuesday [18 February] considered legislation, introduced last week, to allow patients who underwent “youth gender transition procedures”—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to remove healthy genitals and breasts—before age 26 to sue their providers for damages up to age 38.

At the end of their “consideration,” however, after Progressive-Democrat after Progressive-Democrat after Progressive-Democrat absented themselves from listening to much/most of the witness testimony, Party, which holds the majority, tabled the bills indefinitely, effectively killing them.

This is what Party thinks of us Americans. This is what Party thinks of our children, young people who regret the medical procedures they undertook to more closely resemble the opposite sex. Do not contradict us, and especially, do not embarrass us is the ideology of Party.