Stop screeching about immigration, and get smart about it

Birthright citizenship is the law of the land. The Supreme Court has once again ruled that the 14th Amendment gives automatic citizenship to anyone born in the U.S.¹ This includes the children of illegal immigrants and temporary visa holders, both of which the Trump administration had sought to exclude from birthright citizenship.

Rightists immediately began howling about the ruling, and saying some very intemperate things. Sean Davis of The Federalist suggested dissolving the Union and/or sterilizing foreign visitors to the United States:

Right-wing political commentator Matt Walsh shrieked that the America he grew up in — which also had birthright citizenship and significant amounts of illegal immigration — has somehow been destroyed as a result of the SCOTUS ruling:

These histrionics — sadly typical of online reactions to major news events in the social media age — demonstrate how central the anti-immigration cause has become to the political right in the United States. The notion that immigration is an invasion bent on destroying the country by replacing its founding population has become a bedrock belief on the Right; it is a singular, all-consuming passion similar to what anti-racism was for 2010s progressives and Palestine has become to leftists in the 2020s. Nor is it just an object of passion; nativism has become a self-contained, hermetically sealed worldview not subject to reasoned argumentation, logic, or data.

It is a distinctly minority worldview. The overwhelming majority of Americans continue to say that immigration, on the whole, is good for this country:

This does not mean that Americans want open borders, or that they think all kinds of immigration are good. Sentiment against illegal immigration, and in favor of increasing border security, remains strong. A backlash against the disorderly flood of quasi-legal immigration under Biden helped get Trump elected in 2024. But even illegal immigration is not seen as an invasion by most Americans — support for a pathway to citizenship remains strong, even among many Republicans not affiliated with the MAGA movement.

The rightist view of immigration as the death knell of America is simply a small minority viewpoint. Guys like Sean Davis and Matt Walsh are a screechy online fringe. They seem to think that if they screech loud enough and make dramatic enough threats (“Dissolve the Union!”, “Sterilize tourists!”, and so on), they can bully the supermajority into giving them their way. They basically expect veto power over this one issue, based purely on the strength of their emotion.

And on the narrow question of birthright citizenship, poll after poll shows that Americans want to keep the practice. Here’s an example from The Hill:

Nearly 70 percent of respondents in a Quinnipiac University poll think the Supreme Court should keep birthright citizenship in place. The results come ahead of the high court’s ruling on the legality of President Trump’s executive order seeking to end the policy…The survey, conducted between June 18 and 22, found that 69 percent of 1,165 self-identified registered voters believe the Supreme Court should keep in place its 1898 ruling affirming that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to those born in the U.S…Less than 3 in 10 respondents (27 percent) said the high court should reverse its decision[.]

That doesn’t mean the public entirely disagrees with the Trump administration. About half of Americans think that birthright citizenship ought to be denied to the children of illegal immigrants: