Former President Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner for president in 2024, rolled out a new policy pledge on Tuesday in which he promised if elected he would sign an executive order on day one of his second term in office effectively ending birthright citizenship for illegal aliens and so-called “birth tourism.”
The policy proposal, contained in one of his Agenda 47 videos his campaign released, was obtained exclusively by Breitbart News ahead of its public release.
“As part of my plan to secure the border, on day one of my new term in office I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship,” Trump says in the slightly more than three-minute-long video.
Trump argues that birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens serves as a “magnet” and an “incentive” for future prospective migrants to attempt to enter the country illegally.
“Joe Biden has launched an illegal foreign invasion of our country allowing a record number of illegal aliens to storm across our borders,” Trump says in the video. “From all over the world, they came. Under Biden’s current policies, even though these millions of illegal border crossers have entered the country unlawfully, all of their future children will become automatic U.S. citizens. Can you imagine? They’ll be eligible for welfare, taxpayer-funded healthcare, the right to vote, chain migration, and countless other government benefits, many of which will also profit the illegal alien parents. This policy is a reward for breaking the laws of the United States and is obviously a magnet helping draw the flood of illegals across our borders. They come by the millions and millions and millions.”
“It’s things like this that bring millions of people to our country,” Trump adds later in the video. “They enter our country illegally. My policy will choke off a major incentive for continued illegal immigration, deter more migrants from coming, and encourage many of the aliens Joe Biden has unlawfully let into our country to go back to their home countries. They must go back. Nobody could afford this. Nobody could do this—and even morally it’s so wrong.
Trump says too that the United States “is among the only countries in the world that says that even if neither parent is a citizen nor even lawfully in the country their future children are automatic citizens the moment the parents trespass onto our soil.”
But, he argues, that case for birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens is built on a misinterpretation of the law.
“As has been laid out by many scholars, this policy is based on a historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates,” Trump says in the video.
Trump also says his promised executive order would end so-called “birth tourism,” where people from other countries attempt to come into the United States to give birth to their children so they will be born with U.S. citizenship. Trump says his executive order would require that at least one parent be either a U.S. citizen or legally in the country.
An immigrant family from Haiti waits to be taken into custody at the U.S.-Mexico border on December 07, 2021, in Yuma, Arizona. (John Moore/Getty Images)
“My order will also end the unfair practice known as ‘birth tourism’ where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the planet squat in hotels for their last few weeks of pregnancy to illegitimately and illegally obtain U.S. citizenship for the child, often to later exploit chain migration to jump the line and get green cards for themselves and their family members,” Trump says. “It’s a practice that’s so horrible and so egregious, but we let it go forward. At least one parent will have to be a citizen or a legal resident in order to qualify.”
