Publication

Over the last decade or so, concern about illegal immigration has sporadically led to a reexamination of a long-established tenet of US citizenship, codified in the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution and §301(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, that a person who is born in the United States, subject to its jurisdiction, is a citizen of the United States regardless of the race, ethnicity, or alienage of the parents. The war on terror and the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, a US-Saudi dual national captured in Afghanistan fighting with Taliban forces, further heightened attention and interest in restricting automatic birthright citizenship, after the revelation that Hamdi was a US citizen by birth in Louisiana to parents who were Saudi nationals in the United States on non-immigrant work visas and arguably entitled to rights not available to foreign enemy combatants.