THEY'RE GETTING US READY FOR THE END OF BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

Since the day after President Trump issued an executive order on birthright citizenship, I've argued that the Supreme Court will side with Trump, tossing out more than a century of precedent, which is the Federalist Society supermajority's favorite sport. I think I see signs that I'm right about this.

At the academic end of the spectrum, we have a law professor named Ilan Wurman who used to believe in birthright citizenship now arguing before Congress that not everyone born here should be citizen. Here's Wurman in 2018:

And here's Wurman now:

Should EVERYONE born in America be a citizen? Part I

Ilan Wurman testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on 3/10 pic.twitter.com/S8jeQT1rLd

— rationally BASED podcast (@rationallypod) March 11, 2026

For the hoi polloi, we have the New York Post dusting off an old favorite booga-booga story:

Pregnant Chinese women have turned a tropical paradise into a maternity ward — pumping out babies who automatically become US citizens daily.

The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a US territory northeast of Guam in the Pacific Ocean, has been flooded with so-called “birth tourists” since 2009 when then-president Barack Obama introduced a visa-waiver program for Chinese nationals.

China-watchers estimate about 1,000 companies offer birth tourism to the Northern Mariana Islands, other US overseas territories and even the US mainland. They claim a gob-smacking 1.5 million American babies are being raised in China by Chinese parents who’ve participated in birth tourism.

If this has been happening for seventeen years, why is it a story now?

It's part of what I expect to be a huge propaganda campaign to make opposition to birthright citizenship seem like the normie position. The right is very good at reducing every story to a set of purely evil villains deliberately trying to harm upstanding patriots. Your enemies are rich Chinese birth tourists is an argument they hope will work, as is Yeah, birthright citizenship might have been okay once, but not after that evil Joe Biden opened the borders, which is what another right-wing legal scholar, Adrian Vermeule, argues in this Substack post:

Nor does the putatively consistent practice of granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens provide a convincing rejoinder. What was done at a small scale in the past may have very different consequences for republican sovereignty when done at a massive scale, as has occurred in recent decades, reaching a wild crescendo in the previous administration. The change of scale itself changes the nature and import of the practice, or more accurately, different practices in different eras. Fundamental principles remain the same over time, but their application may change with circumstances.

Arguments the Supremes could use to gut birthright citizenship are being floated in right-wing academic circles, but whichever ones are used, I'm certain the fix is in and birthright citizenship is on its way out.

I suggested a couple of weeks ago that the Supremes might open the door to denaturalizations in time for the midterms. Maybe that won't happen -- but at the very least, I think the Republican partisans on the Court are assuming that Democrats on the campaign trail will declare themselves in favor of a legislative restoration of birthright citizenship, which Republicans assume will hurt Democrats with swing voters. I'm not sure how that would play. But I expect the Court to do the worst possible thing again.