Birthright Citizenship and International Perspectives

The Center for Immigration Studies reports:

• Only 30 of the world’s 194 countries grant automatic citizenship to children born to illegal aliens.
  
  
• Of advanced economies, Canada and the United States are the only countries that grant automatic citizenship to children born to illegal aliens.
  
  
• No European country grants automatic citizenship to children of illegal aliens.
  
  
• The global trend is moving away from automatic birthright citizenship as many countries that once had such policies have ended them in recent decades.
  
  
• 14th Amendment history seems to indicate that the Citizenship Clause was never intended to benefit illegal aliens nor legal foreign visitors temporarily present in the United States.
  
  
• The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the U.S.-born children of permanent resident aliens are covered by the Citizenship Clause, but the Court has never decided whether the same rule applies to the children of aliens whose presence in the United States is temporary or illegal.
  
  
• Some eminent scholars and jurists have concluded that it is within the power of Congress to define the scope of the Citizenship Clause through legislation and that birthright citizenship for the children of temporary visitors and illegal aliens could likely be abolished by statute without amending the Constitution.

(A pdf of the full report is here.)