The left insists that birthright citizenship is “plainly written” into the Constitution and immune from any challenge. But cases like that of Chinese billionaire Xu Bo expose just how stupid that claim is.
Xu, a reclusive tech billionaire, has reportedly fathered more than 100 children — possibly more — through surrogacy agencies in the United States, though Xu himself has never lived in the United States. But his children, through the left’s twisted interpretation of birthright citizenship that has been the prevailing interpretation of the 14th Amendment for decades, are citizens.
It’s a convoluted form of the disgusting practice known as birthright tourism (where foreigners come to the U.S. to give birth to secure their children birthright citizenship) and it’s the exact abuse of the 14th Amendment that the framers — and anyone with a brain — would have found absurd.
The citizenship clause reads: “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.”
The limiting phrase — “subject to the jurisdiction” — was added deliberately, and its purpose was clear: not everyone born in the United States should automatically become a citizen.
As Sen. Jacob Howard, who drafted that clause, explained, the clause was “simply declamatory of what I regard as the law of the land already.” That law is the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which granted citizenship to persons born in the United States who were “not subject to any foreign power.”
Congress understood that membership into our social compact was not automatic. It flowed from jurisdiction and consent.
But that understanding collapses in the modern birthright citizenship debate — especially in cases like Xu’s.
Xu is not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, nor is he part of our social compact at all. We have not let him into it vis a vis the channels we’ve set up to do just that (legal immigration and naturalization). Yet, under current interpretation of the 14th Amendment, Xu can ship his genetic material across the border, hire surrogates in the United States, and then manufacture dozens of “citizens.” The idea that children created in a lab on U.S. soil by a foreign billionaire for the sole purpose of securing citizenship benefits would have been unimaginable to the framers of the 14th Amendment.
The framers of the amendment were trying to secure citizenship for freed slaves and their children. They were not trying to create a global entitlement program for foreign elites with enough money and access to exploit the law.
The Supreme Court recently decided to hear challenges to President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship.
Xu’s entire gambit exposes what the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause has become: a loophole that allows foreign billionaires who have never even lived in the U.S. and have no consent from the American people to join our political community to somehow create hundreds of children that we are forced to welcome.
The Supreme Court has the opportunity to right this wrong.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
