The Supreme Court struck down the President's birthright-citizenship order on June 30, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees it. [1] The argument he had made for that order rested on a claim about the rest of the world: that the United States "cannot live with the shackles of Birthright Citizenship" because "no other Country in the World, of consequence, does it." [1] He has made versions of that claim for a decade. [2] It is false, and it is not close.
What the rest of the world actually does
Citizenship by birth on a country's soil has a name, jus soli, and it is the rule across most of the Western Hemisphere. By the count of the CIA World Factbook, more than 30 countries grant it unconditionally, roughly three dozen. [3][4] The list includes Canada and Mexico, two of America's three neighbors, along with Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and most of Central and South America. [4][5] These are not small or marginal places. They are the largest economies in Latin America and a fellow G7 member on the northern border.
The "of consequence" hedge
The phrase "of consequence" is meant to do the work of waving away the three dozen countries that prove the claim wrong. It does not survive the detail PolitiFact found when it rated the claim false: among the countries the International Monetary Fund classifies as "developed," exactly two grant unconditional birthright citizenship, the United States and Canada. [3] Read most charitably, then, as a claim about wealthy nations, it is still wrong. The country the United States shares its longest border with does the same thing it does.
Where it is rarer
Honesty cuts both ways. Birthright citizenship by pure soil is less common in Europe and much of Asia and Africa, where many countries grant citizenship by descent, jus sanguinis, or by a conditional mix. [5] Had the claim been that most of the world outside the Americas does not grant unconditional birthright citizenship, that would be defensible. That is not what was said. What was said is that no country of consequence does it, and that sentence erases an entire hemisphere, including the United States' own neighbors.
Why it matters
A factual claim about other countries was used to argue that a right written into the American Constitution should be treated as an embarrassing outlier. The Supreme Court answered the legal question on June 30. [1] The factual premise was wrong before the Court ruled, and it stays wrong after it: granting citizenship to the children born on your soil is not a lonely American mistake. Across the Americas, it is the ordinary way a country decides who belongs.
