Two Experts Explain Birthright Citizenship
A historical view from Geetika Rudra and a personal view from Jaykumar Menon
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“FLOOD THE ZONE WITH SHIT.” That was the advice for dealing with the media from Steve Bannon, the deplorable Trump whisperer in 2018. That’s also been the playbook for Donald Trump’s first week in the White House: Create so many head-spinning things, happening all at once, that journalists and lawmakers cannot possibly keep track; have so many awful nominees for cabinet and roles that many will easily get through.
Among many lowlights has been his executive order (EO) that attempted to essentially suspend the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Eighteen states filed suit before the ink was dry and a Reagan-appointed judge in Seattle blocked the order. While it may be unlikely to stick, this is yet another stress test of the courts unfolding in plain sight.
I’ve asked two people who know much more than I do on the topic to help explain why this matters. First, Geetika Rudra, historian, teachnologist and author of Here to Stay: Uncovering South Asian American History, looks at why the American idea of birthright citizenship was “a defining moment of world history.” After that, Jaykumar Menon, a human rights lawyer, writer, and co-founder of the Open Source Pharma Foundation, a global nonprofit, offers the moral case for opposing the end of birthright citizenship.
More context:
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The Historical Achievement That is Birthright Citizenship in the United States
By Geetika Rudra
In one of his first acts as President, Donald Trump signed an executive order to ban the children of immigrant parents, legal or non-legal, born in the United States from becoming United States citizens. Proponents of this act point to birthright citizenship as an incentive that encourages illegal immigration. This point of view is deeply misguided, betrays a fatal misunderstanding of what it means to be an American, and seeks to dismantle the protections our Founding Fathers put in place to keep the promise of American identity alive.
In “Here to Stay: Uncovering South Asian American History,” I explore the deep, entangled history of citizenship law and the creation of American since the United States’ inception in 1776.
The Founding Fathers’ decision to implement birthright citizenship was a defining moment of world history: separating the Old World Order, where any individual was limited by who their parents were, to a New World Order, where individuals are unencumbered by their pasts.
The United States of America was the first nation to allow its citizens the promise of a life by their own design, independent of where they came from.
While the Founding Fathers’ implementation of birthright citizenship was far from perfect—it excluded indigenous peoples, slaves, and any person of color—it set in motion a foundational principle of American identity. This principle would go on to be codified for all peoples born on American land with the passage of the 14th Amendment, granting citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
In the following excerpt of “Here to Stay”, I reveal the Founding Fathers’ debate on citizenship laws, and the intrinsic question we keep asking ourselves today:
Who Gets to Be American? The Origins of Birthright Citizenship
The members of this country’s first congress met in a two-story brick building at the heart of colonial America’s intellectual capital: Philadelphia. In the days leading up to the creation of the United States government, these Founding Fathers were tasked with architecting key pillars of how our new government worked. No issue was free from intellectual rigor (even the adoption of a single currency was the product of spirited debate). But the issue that proved the thorniest, as it would not only require legal thought but a foundational requirement for nation building: citizenship.
Our Founding Fathers created a new country. Now these white, landowning men had to decide who got to join.
Countries throughout world history have had a fraught time defining who can be a citizen and who cannot. By definition, the concept of citizenship is exclusionary. In the colonial era, two principles that governed citizenship in European nations were jus sanguinis and jus soli.
Jus sanguinis, or “right of blood” designated a person’s citizenship to where their parents were citizens. “Jus soli” or “right of soil” designated a person’s citizenship to where they were born.
America’s need for immigration-fueled growth was not lost on the Founding Fathers. And with this came the ever-green fear that immigration of the wrong kind of people would interfere with the creation of a society for the right type of people.
Opposing this fear was the noble ideal to create a society where no one individual is bound by the origins of their family.
In the end, idealism beat fear but with extensive caveats. Our Founding Fathers adopted birthright citizenship as it in its most practical sense unbound an individual from their past. But they excluded people of color: enslaved peoples, indigenous peoples, anyone who was not considered white.
And so began a precedent where people in power used the U.S. government to institutionalize racism and prevent our democracy from truly reflecting the people it served.
These are the lies President Trump continues to perpetuate today. The fight forward will require remembering the work of those who fought for citizenship rights before us.
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For a more personal understanding of the issue, I asked Jaykumar Menon, a human rights lawyer, writer, and co-founder of the Open Source Pharma Foundation, a global nonprofit, to weigh in.
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The Sacred Promises of Birthright Citizenship and the 14th Amendment
By Jaykumar Menon
Amidst the avalanche of autocratic, vengeful, conflict-of-interest laden, illegal, and planet-destroying actions of the first days of Trump 2.0 was a less-publicized assault on birthright citizenship, or in other words, what it is to be an American. If you are born here, you are an American citizen. No doubts, no yearslong bureaucratic vagaries, no inquiries into your antecedents—a stable base.
Enshrined by the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, it is a core part of what makes America special, miraculous and good—a nation marked not by blood, but by an ideal, and the Statue of Liberty, inhabited principally by immigrants and their descendants.
The Supreme Court has affirmed this sacred right for more than a century, even for loathed groups, noting the ills of a permanent, intergenerational underclass. Already sufficiently terrible, the Trump EO goes beyond clipping the wings of children of the undocumented. It removes birthright citizenship for children born to those legally in this country.
These are people on work or study visas, who have followed a raft of rules, and who do not yet have green cards—which takes years. The endgame is clear: the goal of President Trump and Stephen Miller is not just to attack undocumented immigration, but immigration per se.
It’s all a case of “the bus is full, now that I’m on it.” Were this order in place when I was born in Lexington, Kentucky, where my father was a medical resident treating patients at the University (Go Big Blue!) and at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital, I would not have been a U.S. citizen at birth. I’ve always proudly considered myself as an American. But now many people born and raised in America will not be American and may need to leave.
Indeed, Trump himself might have been raised in Germany if his immigration policies were in effect. Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump (or, Drumpf), arrived from Germany as an “unaccompanied alien child.” Today, he would likely be caged and deported, a case of MAGA eating its own ancestors.
This ugly un-American order is clearly unconstitutional—“blatantly” so, per a Reagan-appointed judge that blocked it, wondering if lawyers had even looked at it. It violates settled precedent and our basic idea of Americanness. Any judge upholding it would be incompetent.
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Perhaps I’m wishcasting, but I do not think this is what even a majority of Trump voters thought they were voting for. The same can be said for the actions Trump has taken with medical research grants at the National Institutes of Health; reducing Medicare’s ability to negotiate lower drug prices; withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization; eliminating FEMA and federal disaster assistance. These are not popular positions among any constituency (except the most serious MAGA-ists), but backlash from the political left will do little to sway this White House.
Republicans need to be the ones to push back, and I would hope they might when forced to vote on cutting Medicare and Medicaid. But the acquiescence of all of them except Senators Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Mitch McConnell on Pete Hegseth’s nomination to be Secretary of Defense does not bode well.
If they can’t find it in themselves, somewhere, buried in all that talk of patriotism, virtue, and reverence for the Constitution, to remain unbowed in the face of a challenge to a fundamental right, then nothing’s off the table.
— Sree | Twitter | Bluesky | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube / Threads | Spread | TikTok
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TECH TIP | Sound to the Bone: Shokz OpenMeet Headset Debuts at CES
By Robert S. Anthony
Each week, veteran tech journalist Bob Anthony shares a tech tip you don’t want to miss. Follow him @newyorkbob.
If you’ve ever sat at an airline gate between crying children and loud, pompous corporate types, you know the value of a good headset. Besides distracting you from the madness around you, a quality headset offers the calming effect of providing audio you actually want to hear.
At the recently concluded CES technology show in Las Vegas, Shokz, known for its bone-conduction headsets, introduced the OpenMeet, a headset which combines both bone- and air-conduction features into a quality-sounding, lightweight over-the-head Bluetooth wireless unit.
With bone conduction, sounds are sent to the inner ear via micro vibrations transmitted through the bones in your head. The audio can be heard clearly, but no one around you can hear it since the audio isn’t airborne.
Another benefit of bone-conduction headsets is that the ears are not covered; the user is never cut off from ambient sounds—which is handy if children start crying or office colleagues shout your name. Since the sound vibrations go directly into the ear, it’s hard for external noises to drown them out, thus resulting in high-clarity incoming audio even in noisy settings.
However, most bone-conduction headsets are weak at transmitting bass sounds, which is obviously not great when listening to music. The OpenMeet, however, adds air-conduction audio, directing a small stream of audio directly into the ear like a conventional headset, thus boosting bass sounds. When tested, the OpenMeet indeed sounded better with music than bone-conduction-only headsets like the OpenComm 2, also from Shokz.
A fold-away boom carries two microphones which work together to eliminate up to 98 per cent of background noise, said Kim Fassetta, chief marketing officer for Shokz, during a “power session” presentation at CES.
Here again, when tested the OpenMeet headset fared very well: I was able to make a very clean, rich-sounding voice recording with the unit while a dishwasher and a television droned in the background.
Since the OpenMeet doesn’t need heavy audio drivers for each ear, it ends up being a very light headset at only 78 grams (2.75 ounces). In addition, explained Fassetta, the OpenMeet’s wide, flat bone-conduction pads and sculpted headset pads distribute the little weight it has evenly across the head.
The unit supports Bluetooth 5.4, has a range of up to 98 feet and offers up to 14 hours of talk time and 15 hours of listening per full charge, which takes about 90 minutes. However, a 5-minute quick charge can provide two hours of talk time, according to Shokz.
The Shokz OpenMeet, which won a 2025 CES Innovation Award, is available alone ($219.99), or in the OpenMeet UC package, which includes a USB-A or USB-C Bluetooth dongle ($249.99) for use with computers without built-in Bluetooth support.
Did we miss anything? Make a mistake? Do you have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree@sree.net and please connect w/ me: Twitter | Bluesky | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube / Threads | Spread | TikTok