America is an outlier among developed nations in offering unrestricted birthright citizenship. Not a single European country does.
By any reasonable measure, unrestricted birthright citizenship, the practice of giving citizenship to almost anyone born in America, is an irrational policy. It abdicates the composition of the nation’s citizenry to chance, instead of bringing it within our control. It communicates a deep unseriousness about our sovereignty and national security to the rest of the world. Without it, we can continue to open our country to foreign talent and victims of genocide or state violence. Together, the president and Congress can choose to narrow or widen the pipeline of legal immigrants.
In 2025, America is an outlier among developed nations in offering unrestricted birthright citizenship. Corporate media outlets will remind you that we aren’t alone, that around 30 other countries do the same. But what they usually don’t report is that those countries are the likes of Grenada, Nicaragua, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados. Not a single European country follows our lead. Nor do Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and the list goes on. Only one country in the world with a per-capita GDP anywhere near the United States’ matches our policy — Canada. And Canada historically hasn’t had much to worry about on the illegal immigration front, because their only land border is shared with us.
More than that, the global trend is consonant with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order ending unrestricted birthright citizenship. The United Kingdom, which had birthright citizenship dating back to the “ancient common law,” did away with it in the 1980s. Ireland got rid of it in 2005. New Zealand a year later. Germany, which tried to grab the mantle of “leader of the free world” during President Trump’s first term, doesn’t grant citizenship to a child of foreign parents unless one parent possesses a permanent right of residence and has legally resided in the country for at least eight years.
But somehow President Trump is “cruel” for calling for the end of unrestricted birthright citizenship in our own nation? Why would a nation affirmatively choose to create an incentive for illegal immigration and prioritize illegal immigrants’ children over law-abiding immigrants who apply for citizenship and follow the legal process? If it were a one-for-one trade, would you rather bestow citizenship on someone we as a nation and a people deem worthy of it, or on the basis of their parents’ success in entering the U.S. illegally?
By Mike Davis
