Scott Titshaw and Stephen Yale-Loehr write:

On April 1, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on one of the most consequential immigration cases in decades. At issue is whether President Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship can stand.

The stakes could not be higher. If the court sides with Trump, the damage will ripple far beyond undocumented immigrants. It will affect legal visa holders, green-card holders and even U.S. citizens. It would also create an underclass of American-born children, some of whom would become stateless.

For over 150 years, the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed that nearly everyone born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen. That guarantee, enshrined after the Civil War to extend citizenship to former slaves, has been a cornerstone of American identity. Trump’s order seeks to dismantle it by executive fiat.

Under the order, the federal government would refuse to recognize a child born in the U.S. as a citizen if the mother was in the country illegally — or even legally but only temporarily, say on a student or work visa — and the father was not a citizen or green card holder.

Consider a software engineer from India who has worked in the U.S. legally for years on an H-1B temporary work visa. Let’s say his employer sponsored him and his wife for green cards, and the petition was approved. But because of massive backlogs for applicants born in India, they may have to wait a decade or more for their green cards. If they have a child before then, that child — born in America — would not be an American.

And the order’s reach extends well beyond that. All parents, including U.S. citizens and green card holders, would have to produce evidence of their own citizenship or immigration status at the time of their child’s birth before that child could be recognized as a citizen. That is a burden millions of Americans cannot meet.

A recent survey by the Brennan Center for Justice found that at least 3.8 million Americans have no document proving their citizenship — no birth certificate, passport or naturalization certificate. Under Trump’s order, if these people have children, they cannot establish their citizenship. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports:

Alexander Porter Morse, a Confederate officer during the Civil War and a Louisiana attorney, argued for legalized segregation in the landmark 1896 Supreme Court case that established the “separate but equal” doctrine and buttressed Jim Crow laws.

He is again playing a key role in a monumental case to be argued before the justices Wednesday: The Trump administration has tapped Morse as an authority in its push to upend long-settled law that virtually everyone born in the United States is a citizen.

Over a century ago, Morse was among a trio of thinkers who spearheaded a failed effort — steeped in anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism — to erase birthright citizenship. The Trump administration is reviving their arguments to make its case today, some legal scholars say.

The administration is citing arguments “built on a racist foundation,” Justin Sadowsky, an attorney for the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance (CALDA), wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief.

Lucy Salyer, a University of New Hampshire history professor who has written on Morse and others, said she was struck that the Trump administration had chosen to elevate those figures and their ideas: “If you know the history and the broader context of what they were trying to achieve, it does ring alarm bells.” [Continue reading…]