In the year 2000, a Chinese businesswoman arrived in the United Kingdom. She was six months pregnant. Given that China at the time enacted its brutal one-child policy, and she already had one child, she knew she had to leave China. Canny woman that she clearly was, Mrs. Man Lavette Chen made sure she was in Belfast, in the province of Northern Ireland. On September 16, she gave birth to a daughter, Catherine.
Chen had not chosen the Northern Irish capital for its weather. And it might seem that Britain was an odd place to go to give birth, because Belfast is British, and Britain had scrapped birthright citizenship in 1983.
But under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement peace deal to end the Troubles, anyone born anywhere on the island of Ireland was Irish. And Irish meant European. And a European baby, Chen’s lawyers argued, needed her mother beside her, so the family could settle in Cardiff, the capital of Wales (in Britain and, at the time, also in the European Union, and under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice). Nobody has ever gone to such lengths to live in Wales since maybe Edward I, in the 1280s.
The European Court of Justice agreed with Chen, but four months earlier the Irish had voted, 79% to 21, to take birthright citizenship out of their constitution. After complaints from the Dublin maternity hospitals about foreign women flying in to give birth, a national referendum voted overwhelmingly to end the right. That is how the last birthright in the European Union died: one anchor baby, one flight to Belfast, one referendum, done.
Britain has already devalued citizenship by reducing it to paperwork. But those Europeans who ever had birthright citizenship, including Britain, who manage to get almost everything about immigration policy wrong, have all scrapped the concept. Most never allowed it in the first place. The United States has long been a major outlier in this respect, now even more so with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara.
In fact, only about 30 countries worldwide now grant citizenship to anyone born on their soil, almost all of them in the Americas. This perhaps hints at the historic reasons behind such a constitutional divergence; the New World was filled by immigration, whereas the Old World might have an older constitutional sense of citizenship as tied to blood.
Britain settled this nearly 50 years ago. In the British Nationality Act of 1981, Margaret Thatcher legislated that a baby is British only if a parent was British or “settled” in the country. Anyone else’s child has to earn it by living in the United Kingdom for 10 years. This became an acute problem in the decades after World War II, as the collapse of our Empire caused confusion about who still counted as part of what had been a sprawling imperial family. Waves of immigration never seen before caused huge tensions on the British mainland. Even though they have, to pardon the awkward turn of phrase, now been whitewashed from contemporary leftist history, which tells of Britain welcoming sons of the Empire, Left-wing governments of the mid-20th century did what they could to prevent an influx from places like the Caribbean, India, and Pakistan.
What about the continentals? France passed a nationality law back in 1889. A child born in France to foreign parents becomes French at 18, provided he has lived there for five years since age 11. The recent tightening is another vestige of the Age of Empire. Mayotte is a French island off the east coast of Africa (think of it as like Hawaii, rather than Guam). It has the biggest maternity unit in France, but is mostly full of mothers who crossed illegally from neighboring Comoros. France restricted birthright citizenship there in 2018 and tightened it again last year: both parents now need a year’s legal residence. The far Right did none of this.
Germany had no right to citizenship for anyone not born to German parents until 2000, when some allowance was put in place. And in the Scandinavian countries, so often painted by the American Left as examples of socialist paradises, they are actively taking passports from those dual nationals who commit crimes, even if they were born there. This is going through the Swedish Parliament as we speak. The Danes have been doing it for many years already.
And down under, both Australia and New Zealand removed birthright citizenship to prevent the same phenomenon of abuse by overstayers and illegals. And in both cases, Left-wing governments instituted the changes. I don’t even need to tell you that these sorts of debates aren’t even needed in places like Japan or the UAE.
But in America, in 2023, 320,000 babies were born to mothers who were in the country illegally or on temporary visas. That was 9% of all births — adding an equivalent population of Pittsburgh each year.
This has become a full-scale industry. In 2019, federal prosecutors charged 19 people over “maternity hotels” around Los Angeles that sold Chinese clients a delivery for $40,000 to $80,000, on the promise of “the most attractive nationality.” The security threats, given the danger of the Chinese Communist Party to all that the West holds dear, are obvious.
Far be it from a Brit to tell Americans to change their constitution, in this year of all years. But it should help to illustrate what an outlier the U.S. (and Canada, bless ‘em) has become across the developed world. If you do attempt to change the rules around birthright citizenship, do not let any leftist tell you it is an unspeakable, far-Right evil policy. It would only be bringing you into line with all of Europe and most of the developed world.
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James Price is a former Chief of Staff to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.
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