A MAJORITY OF THE SUPREME COURT decided last week to follow the obvious, black-letter text of the Constitution and uphold birthright citizenship. This should not have been a close call.
But the ruling—a 5–4 decision that Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship was unconstitutional—showed that the justices were torn. And they’re hardly alone. When we conducted a focus group with Donald Trump voters on the eve of the decision, participants expressed an alarming degree of skepticism toward the nearly 160-year old legal precedent.
This was a group of Florida women who voted for Trump in 2024. Here’s Debbie:
This kind of thinking is grounded in the zero-sum mentality that Trump has always used to frame the issue of immigration. Foreigners take, Americans lose out. Many participants in the focus group viewed immigrants as a threat to the country and a drain on our resources, which is something like the median position for Republican voters today. Here’s Dianna:
Still, in this group, there was broad support among participants for those who come to America “the right way.” Here’s Tatiana, who emigrated from Ukraine and recently became a citizen:
Tatiana has seen this process from the inside. But oftentimes voters are not familiar with the byzantine,
![Focus group participant Debbie: "I hope the Supreme Court backs [ending birthright citizenship]. . . . They’re a bunch of kids that were born to illegal immigrants, that came into the country illegally, and now they’re entitled to all these benefits, and their parents didn’t pay into it. They’re certainly not gonna pay into it. So I don’t think that they should be allowed to be citizens at all."](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!uPgI!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6863dcdd-d601-4eb1-92e8-3dd51c92bd4a_3000x1000.jpeg "Focus group participant Debbie: \"I hope the Supreme Court backs [ending birthright citizenship]. . . . They’re a bunch of kids that were born to illegal immigrants, that came into the country illegally, and now they’re entitled to all these benefits, and their parents didn’t pay into it. They’re certainly not gonna pay into it. So I don’t think that they should be allowed to be citizens at all.\"")
