America has always been more than a place on the map. It is a political community — a people united by common principles and institutions rather than merely by geography. That simple proposition has important implications for one of today’s most contentious constitutional debates: birthright citizenship.
Critics often portray efforts to reconsider the prevailing understanding of the 14th Amendment as an attack on America’s founding creed. In reality, the opposite is true. The debate concerns not whether all human beings possess equal natural rights, but who belongs to the American political community that exists to secure those rights for that particular people.
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