On October 30, President Trump said he was preparing an executive order that would abolish the long-accepted constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship in the United States. As a presidential candidate, Trump floated the idea that individuals born in the United States of undocumented parents were not citizens. According to Stanford Law Professor Bernadette Meyler, this theory contradicts more than a century of settled constitutional law dating back to the 1898 Supreme Court decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

Professor Meyler is a prominent scholar on British and American constitutional law and presidential powers. She has written extensively about birthright citizenship both in prior articles and in her forthcoming book on originalism coming out from Yale University Press.

“There are many open constitutional questions, but the citizenship of a person born within the territory of the United States, whose parent is not a foreign diplomat or a member of an invading force, is not one of them.”

Listen to Professor Meyler discuss citizenship and the 14^th Amendment in a 2015 podcast interview with the National Constitution Center.