America is an outlier among developed nations in offering unrestricted birthright citizenship. Not a single European country does. //

the global trend is consonant with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order ending unrestricted birthright citizenship. The United Kingdom, which had birthright citizenship dating back to the “ancient common law,” did away with it in the 1980s. Ireland got rid of it in 2005. New Zealand a year later. Germany, which tried to grab the mantle of “leader of the free world” during President Trump’s first term, doesn’t grant citizenship to a child of foreign parents unless one parent possesses a permanent right of residence and has legally resided in the country for at least eight years.

But somehow President Trump is “cruel” for calling for the end of unrestricted birthright citizenship in our own nation? Why would a nation affirmatively choose to create an incentive for illegal immigration and prioritize illegal immigrants’ children over law-abiding immigrants who apply for citizenship and follow the legal process? //

Why go to such lengths to ensure naturalized citizens adhere to our laws and respect our constitutional ideals, if we then freely dole out citizenship to the children of those who have thumbed their noses at our immigration laws and at the ideals of democratic self-governance that brought them about? What message does that send to those who completed the heavy lift of securing legal citizenship by naturalization? //

In 2018, the Pew Research Center reported that in the last decade or so, somewhere between 6 and 9 percent of babies born in this country were to illegal immigrant parents — meaning at times the figure was close to one out of every ten births. Even at the low end, the number of those births — around 250,000 in 2016 — was larger than the total number of births in any state other than California or Texas.