Correcting the Claremont View of Birthright Citizenship

https://americanmind.org/features/the-case-against-birthright-citizenship-2/correcting-the-claremont-view-of-birthright-citizenship/

In The American Mind, I ask my Claremont friends six questions about their view that the Fourteenth Amendment does not recognize birthright citizenship:"We are all familiar with the first sentence of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Unfortunately, my friends have misconstrued the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the amendment’s text. To describe their argument fairly, Claremont scholars read the phrase as referring to someone whose parents are already part of the American political community, such as a citizen or permanent resident alien.I think their reading takes a text with a defined legal meaning at the time of the 14th Amendment’s ratification and reads into it a deeper political theory that it does not bear. I don’t blame Claremont scholars for this—they are trained political theorists, after all. Sometimes, however, Claremont scholars seem to be engaged in a competition to find deeper political theories lurking in places where no one thought they resided. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And in this case, the cigar is just the use of standard common law legal concepts in the interpretation of the constitutional text."