Birthright Citizenship and the Catholic Bishops

While many of us are currently monitoring the situation in the Iranian fog of war, other pressing questions at home remain. What sort of victory against foreign enemies will we have if we end up losing our country to internal threats?

I am speaking, of course, of the migration crisis, which has thrown the very concept of American citizenship itself into doubt. After decades of treating citizenship like some ethereal idea, theoretically extendable to anyone who wants it, Americans have finally woken up to the fact that citizenship must be more than a piece of paper. New questions, as well as new battle lines, have emerged not only around illegal and legal immigration—but even the idea of birthright citizenship is now up for legal reexamination.

It’s against this larger background, then, that we should view Trump v. Barbara, a case the U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing on April 1. At stake is whether our laws permit Americans to have a country or not. The Court will hear the government defend the proposition that birthright citizenship does not include children born to parents who are “unlawfully present,” or who have only “temporary” status. Such conditions on citizenship are very common among many nations, including numerous historically Christian nations.

Enter the curious case of a 29-page amicus curiae—a strange train wreck of a legal brief in support of birthright citizenship filed last week with the Court. It produced an immediate firestorm of controversy, which far exceeded the attention usually given to the dozens of briefs filed in cases of this magnitude. Why does it matter? It was filed in the name of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and its immigration legal services arm, CLINIC.