State Department Floats Passport Rule to Enforce Trump’s 6 Aug ‘Birth Tourism’ Order

Contests over who is a citizen are as old as the republic, from the 1857 Dred Scott decision denying federal citizenship to Black people, to the 1884 Elk v. Wilkins case limiting Native claims, to the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark ruling that birth on U.S. soil confers citizenship even to children of Chinese immigrants. Trump’s maneuver—shifting from an all-out rewrite to a surgical carve-out against “birth tourism” and diplomats—echoes how post-Reconstruction Southern states chipped away at Black enfranchisement through administrative hurdles rather than overt constitutional amendments. The draft rule also fits a global trend: Europe’s 1990s tightening of jus soli and India’s 2003 rollback show major states moving from automatic to conditional citizenship amid migration anxieties. Whether EO 14418 survives or not, the episode signals a century-long tug-of-war between expansive Fourteenth-Amendment readings and executive or legislative efforts to tether citizenship to loyalty or lineage. If courts uphold even part of this policy, it would mark the first successful federal contraction of jus soli since 1940, potentially emboldening future administrations to further recalibrate an institution that has been remarkably stable for 125 years; if struck down, it will reinforce the judiciary’s role as the guardrail of the post-Civil-War settlement.