Cato Institute legal and immigration experts are available for interviews in light of next week’s Supreme Court oral arguments on the birthright citizenship case.

Cato’s B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies Ilya Somin issued the following statement:

The case before the Supreme Court is not about the constitutionality of denying birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants. It focuses only on whether it is appropriate for courts to issue nationwide injunctions against the President’s egregiously unconstitutional executive order, as opposed to remedies limited to people directly involved in the litigation or those living in states that have sued the government. If ever a nationwide injunction is justified, it is here. A situation where Trump’s order is in force for some people, but not others (or, alternatively, in some states but not others), creates obvious confusion and anomalies, especially when it comes to a policy (citizenship rules) that is supposed to be uniform throughout the nation.

In January, Vice President for Economic and Social Policy Studies Alex Nowrasteh wrote “There Is No Good Reason to Revoke Birthright Citizenship.” He says:

The revocation of birthright citizenship not only goes against almost 420 years of legal precedent but also will raise practical difficulties for native-born Americans regardless of their parentage. Furthermore, revoking birthright citizenship will likely worsen assimilation outcomes for the children of immigrants who aren’t born citizens… With the law, tradition, common sense, reason, and empirical evidence on the side of maintaining birthright citizenship, we can only hope that the courts maintain our exceptional system in its current form.

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