I am agnostic on the constitutional disputes about birthright citizenship, but I strongly agree with automatic birthright citizenship as policy.* I support birthright citizenship for the same reason that I oppose guest worker programs. I am against the creation of underclasses, and I am terrified that the end of birthright citizenship would encourage the worst tendencies of the business-class right and the multicultural left.
With the end of birthright citizenship, one can foresee a deal where left and right elites allow, under statute (or in the case of illegal immigration, mere nonenforcement of the laws), a situation in which not only immigrants, but also their American-born children would live in the United States, but would be permanently ineligible for citizenship, ineligible for many public services, and be subject to individual or collective expulsion.
Why would the left and the right agree on such a deal? The appeal to the business right is obvious. The American business lobbies are used to demanding an immigration regime that maximizes employer leverage, and seem to be under the impression that rising wages in the context of an improving labor market constitutes some kind of crime against humanity.
The end of birthright citizenship (even if only for the children of unauthorized immigrants) would allow the business lobbies to seemingly offer a better deal to other elements of the right. Conservatives who fear that importing low-skill labor would increase costs to the government could be reassured that neither the immigrants nor their children will ever be entitled to much of anything. Conservatives who worry about how those immigrants and their children will vote can be reassured that the law would permanently ban those immigrants and their children from the franchise.
Why would the left sign up for this deal? In the first place, they would tell themselves that those immigrants and their children are better off as an American underclass then living somewhere else. But it is much more than that. The left would understand that these immigrants and their children would embed themselves in American society, even as the law treated them like semi-robots. These excluded persons would develop ties to people who are American citizens. They would have co-ethnics. Their children (or grandchildren) would only know English – whether or not they are taught in American schools.
The creation of a hereditary, noncitizen underclass will create a new social fissure for the left to exploit. The left will be able to posture as the representatives of an oppressed and marginalized underclass (no matter that the left would have been complicit in the creation of that underclass), and demand citizenship and full political rights for their clients. And they would have justice on their side.
Conservatives would then have a choice. They could demand that we stick to the terms of the original, despicable left-right deal that led to the creation of that underclass, or they could acquiesce to enfranchising a population that would see the left as their champions. And then conservatives would learn a few things about the Devil’s bargains.
We have our problems, but I thank God that birthright citizenship, as it is currently understood, weakens the temptation of hoping that importing workers might also mean excluding workers (and especially their children) from full participation in American life.
*Whatever the correct originalist interpretation of the 14th Amendment, our current judiciary is not going to take American citizenship from the children of unauthorized immigrants, and amending the Constitution to achieve that same goal is a practical impossibility.