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I’m a bit unsympathetic to the idea of people claiming US citizenship when they’ve basically always lived in another country. It’s bad faith. Your mother gamed the system by giving birth in America (jackpot! US citizenship!) but then as soon as she’s medically cleared she goes home and raises the kid as (in this case) a Mexican, doesn’t pay taxes, doesn’t teach him English or about the USA. Like, he should not be a citizen as he has no actual connection to America other than his mother crossing the border specifically to give birth, and even then could not be bothered to pay for supporting documentation. Birth tourism is not something we should allow.
A criterion like 3/4's of your life spent in the US if you're under 18 and 3/4's of your childhood in the US if you're over 18 would be much better. On the other side of it, there are people whose parents moved when they were infants, are fully connected to the US and have no memory of living outside, and don't get citizenship.
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I'd also say it's likely that the people who enshrined jus soli for the United States could never imagine a world where a (common) pregnant women could not only travel, but also give safely give birth in a foreign land that they were not intent on living in for the rest of their lives, or that they would even want to!
I'm curious how opposition to jus soli has evolved over time to match the world that we live in due to technological advances (e.g. maternal mortality rates).
Jus Soli was never intended to be enshrined for birth tourism of any kind, and 1865 isn't so long ago that those people couldn't have imagined better boats and people coming in from Mexico temporarily. There is a reason Wong Kim Ark is about the child of legal permanent residents and there is a reason the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 had to be passed to grant Indian's citizenship, and that reason is that the 14th Amendment does not contemplate expansive jus soli as currently defined. Instead, it applies to people borne her who have no other foreign allegiances, and those who have taken substantive steps to submit themselves to US Jurisdiction as subjects of the nation.
And, of course, it goes without saying that in 1865 the idea of a dual citizen would have been considered absurd by all the people involved.
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I think it need at minimum an establishment of residence of some sort, preferably several years. If you have to live in the country legally, pay taxes, have a residences within the country, I get that. But I just cannot logically justify the idea that I could cross the border while in labor, go to the emergency room in Brownsville TX, pop out a baby, and that baby being legally American. I’m not even sure you couldn’t push this to absurdity— like if only my Uterus enters the United States and the baby comes out at the border, is that enough to satisfy jus soli or does the entire woman have to physically cross the border for the baby to be a citizen?
Imagine a pregnant woman sticking her butt through the bars in the border wall and pushing the baby out though the crack.
It a legitimate thought experiment. I mean there’s a point at which you reach absurdity and singularity and quite often can point out the problems with the idea in question. If I can basically stick my ass through a fence and pop the baby out and it’s a citizen of the country, I think the absurdity of the idea is clear. You just can’t coherently have citizenship grant rights and not have at least some form control over who gets the benefits.
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It's only consistent, as the US rather aggressively applies citizenship. There's a basket industry for "accidental citizens" who first discover they're American upon receiving a 6-7 figure bill for back taxes and renouncing citizenship incurs a tax on all assets. Further, because of FATCA, they suddenly get debanked.
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