Am I missing something about birthright citizenship?

[generalbetrayus]

If there were to be no such thing as birthright citizenship, couldn't an administration like the current one declare that ALL people born in the US are no longer citizens and that they all have to APPLY for citizenship? Couldn't it then deny an application for citizenship to any of its enemies and have them deported to wherever?

[RockRaven]

1. You are not missing anything. It is about naked arbitrary power.

[Midnight Writer]

2. Exactly. The only thing most of us did to become citizens is to be born here.

We didn't fill out an application, we did not take citizenship classes, we were not questioned by authorities, we did not appear before a judge, we did not pass a background check, we did not pass a citizenship exam.

Wouldn't this leave everyone's citizenship status open to revocation at the whim of a possibly unstable demagogue?

[ColoringFool]

4. Let's start with the offspring of Czech and Slovenian immigrants.

[ret5hd]

3. I am the only citizen...

All your base are belong to me!

[DBoon]

5. If someone is politically inconvenient...

... they could go back many generations, find the initial immigrant ancestor, decide that immigrant ancestor was "illegal", and then strip their descendants of their citizenship.

It would be applied selectively, as it was during the 1919 Palmer Raids:

That morning’s mass deportation had been preceded by a crescendo of anti-immigrant rhetoric that will sound distinctly familiar today. “The surest way to preserve the public against those disciples of destruction,” Thomas Edward Campbell, the governor of Arizona, told a conference of newspaper editors on February 22, 1919, “is to send them back forthwith to lands from which they came.” And if native-born Americans were acting un-American, why not deport them, too? Senator Kenneth McKellar, of Tennessee, suggested that they “be deported permanently to the Island of Guam.”

And why not go one step further and strip objectionable people of U.S. citizenship, to make them more deportable? In 1919, alarmed by the growing presence of “peoples of Asiatic races,” the Anti-Alien League called for a constitutional amendment “to restrict citizenship by birth within the United States to the children of parents who are of a race which is eligible for citizenship”—i.e., whites. Senator Wesley Jones, of Washington State, promised to introduce such a measure—a proposal not unlike today’s calls to end birthright citizenship. That May, a cheering convention of the American Legion demanded the deportation not only of immigrants who evaded military service during the First World War but of any men who evaded service.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/11/when-america-tried-to-deport-its-radicals

[11 Bravo]

6. Careful! Don't give Goresuch, Sammy the Bull, and Uncle Clarence any ideas.

[Wiz Imp]

7. You are correct. That is why about 93% of all U.S. citizens are citizens by birthright