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Except they're not equally connected to the surrounding community, and cannot be, because one of those connections — perhaps the most important connection — is ties of blood, of kinship. This is something I'd say most people in history, from ancient Athens to modern Dubai, have understood well. "Nation" and "state" are not synonyms, and their conflation by many modern people reduces our grasp on the relevant concept spaces.
I think you're smuggling in an assumption here: that the kids in question in some sense deserve or are entitled to citizenship, such that it constitutes a "punishment" for them to be deprived of it. Does a club "punish" everyone to whom it fails to grant membership?
Except that the US as a country has specifically rejected that blood and kinship ties are important since it's founding---I feel like I repeat this so much here but no one ever seems to remember "All men are created equal". This is what enlightenment, classical liberal, or whatever you call it values means! And yes, they are drastically different from any values anyone had before the 1700's---this is why the enlightenment was such a big deal and why we think of older civilizations as morally hopeless and barbaric. We definitely don't think of places like Dubai that are blatantly not onboard as reasonable.
It's also funny to get this reply when I've just had a bunch of discussions here about the prevalence of explicitly racialist values on the Motte. @Felagund, Let's see how much the peanut gallery supports this.
All men are created equal, not all men are created American.
Those other, non-Americans can go on being equal somewhere else.
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When the founders said that all men were created equal, what they were endorsing was an equality before the law, and a lack of hegemony. In particular, they were opposed to the deprivation of the traditional English rights from the American colonies, which they saw as antithetical to living freely, and were also opposed to titles and legal birthrights and so forth, supporting rather a republican form of government. If I remember rightly, they considered adding a prohibition on titles to the Constitution. (Yes, all this seems incompatible with slavery, but there's nothing forcing individuals to be consistent.)
So yes, I do think that Dubai and similar, where there is a large labor class with diminished rights would be contrary to American values, even if, given slavery, something more extreme than that already existed. (And even if I personally wouldn't be all that opposed to one existing, consensually of course, in the United States on economic grounds.) And so I do not think it would be American for there to be a class of permanent residents without other allegiance who are not citizens.
In practice, this would seem to mean that having a de facto class of people without birthright citizenship living out their lives in the country for generations would be contrary to American values. This seems to be what @atokenliberal6D_4 thinks removing birthright citizenship would be like.
At the same time, this vision does not seem to require that those with a more tenuous connection be granted the same affordances. So if lack of birthright citizenship were followed by immediate deportation, that doesn't seem to be obviously in conflict to me. An equality among men does not grant them a right to your sovereign territory, and as long as you are being consistent in not setting up a two-tier citizenship, this does not seem contrary to founding principles. I imagine this is what @Capital_Room would endorse.
But that's merely trying to spin out a philosophy from the declaration. The U.S. Constitution, following the abolition of slavery, acquired the 14th amendment, saying, among others,
This seems designed to, among other things, overturn the effects the infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that people of African descent could not be citizens (and which Lincoln, along with many others, thought was wrongly decided).
I imagine @Capital_Room would lean on the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause, which, from looking online, was originally meant to be excluding foreign nationals and some Indians (cf. "Indians not taxed") from what is under discussion here.
My reading of this would seem to allow for broader exceptions to birthright citizenship than currently are in place. But I'll also note that, contra @Capital_Room this does not seem to be about blood or an ethnic Nation, as this was deliberately to bring in people (Blacks) who were, to that point, excluded from citizenship based on blood.
So, I suppose, I think both of you have points?
Now I want to read Dred Scott and Lincoln on these matters some time. That would be fun.
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