Birthright citizenship was a hard-won principle, not an original American default

Evidence

Twenty-first-century Americans become citizens by many routes, including naturalization after marriage and migration. The foremost way to citizenship is, however, the accident of birth. This is due to the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which established that: “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.” This birthright principle is now so foundational that many people assume citizenship in the United States has always worked this way. It has not. Convention delegates struggled over decades to establish the birthright principle as a foundation of American democracy, and today’s Constitution reflects their vision when it unceremoniously bestows citizenship upon millions of children each year by virtue of their birth on U.S. soil. The birthright principle distinguishes the United States as a democracy and while that rule predominates in the Americas, it is not a standard feature of democracies worldwide. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 689

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the birthright principle via the Fourteenth Amendment’s first clause and clarifies it is not a global democratic standard.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in ‘deviation vs design’ — what a nation counts as its origin story determines whether birthright citizenship reads as a deviation from or design of American democracy.