Birthright Citizenship Is About More Than Immigration
My father helped build Miami. The Fourteenth Amendment helped build something even larger.
I was in Switzerland when the Supreme Court handed down its birthright citizenship decision.
Everywhere we went, South Asian tourists were recreating scenes from the Bollywood classic Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, filmed in the Swiss Alps. They wandered through Alpine meadows and posed beside train stations that, more than thirty years after the film’s release, have become part of a shared cultural memory. None of them had ever lived in Switzerland. They’d made it theirs through story. My father made a place his own a different way.
My parents immigrated to the United States from Pakistan before I was born. My father was a civil engineer who eventually started his own firm in Miami. If you’ve flown through Miami International Airport, you’ve moved through spaces his firm helped design. If you’ve boarded a cruise ship from the Port of Miami, you’ve stood on infrastructure his company built.
Shortly before he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, his firm won the contract to rebuild the streets and sewer system of Liberty City.
He rarely spoke about his work in grand terms. He spoke the way engineers often do, as though every problem had a practical solution waiting to be discovered. Conversations revolved around drainage, traffic flow, pavement, deadlines, and clients.
As a child, I found it all faintly unromantic. It wasn’t until much later that I understood what he had actually devoted his life to.
The best infrastructure disappears into ordinary life. If it’s doing its job well, people don’t stop to admire it. The same was true of the airport and the seaport, people moving through them, assuming the road would hold and the water would flow when they turned on the faucet, never wondering who drew the plans. The work recedes into the background while everyone else gets on with living. That disappearance into the background is the whole measure of success.
But Liberty City felt different. Airports and seaports are places people pass through. Liberty City was a neighborhood. Children would walk those streets to school. Families would grow old in homes connected by systems no one would ever see. His work there did more than move people from one place to another. It made ordinary life possible.
The Fourteenth Amendment is the same kind of invisible infrastructure. That is why I kept thinking about the Supreme Court’s decision on birthright citizenship long after the headlines moved on. President Trump had argued that children born to parents who were here unlawfully or temporarily were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and so were not citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court rejected that argument, reaffirming what American law has long understood: with only narrow historical exceptions, birth on American soil confers citizenship. That conclusion rests on the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, the common law that preceded it, and a century of precedent beginning with United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
The Citizenship Clause was written after Dred Scott, when the country was forced to confront whether citizenship could depend on ancestry, whether the law could permanently place some people outside the political community because of who their parents were. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment answered no, and built that answer with words instead of concrete and pipe, words meant to hold up something larger than a city.
A hundred years before my father drew his first plan for Liberty City, Wong Kim Ark tested whether those words meant what they said. When he returned from a visit to China, immigration officials tried to keep him out, on the theory that he had never really been a citizen to begin with. He wasn’t trying to become a symbol. He was trying to come home. The Court agreed that he already belonged.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s real achievement was the starting point it established. The Constitution begins with the child, whoever the parents are. Birth in the United States, coupled with subjection to its laws, became the constitutional rule. Equality started there.
That has always felt personal to me, though not because my parents were immigrants. My father never spent much time talking about whether he belonged in America. He spent his time helping to build it. The airport, the seaport, the streets of Liberty City were how he answered that question.
I was born in the United States. So were my children. My parents were not. For most of my life, that fact felt almost unremarkable. Its very unremarkableness is one of the quiet successes of the Fourteenth Amendment for someone like me. I never had to wonder whether I belonged to the political community, any more than I wondered whether the runway beneath an airplane would hold.
When I think back to Switzerland, I don’t remember the mountains first. I remember the families laughing as they recreated scenes from a movie that had taught them to love a country none of them were born in.
My father chose a different way of belonging.
He helped build one.