In a recent interview with Axios on HBO, Trump confirmed what many had suspected would be his next move. His proposal would deny citizenship to the American-born children of unauthorised immigrants and possibly to foreigners in the country on non- permanent visas.

Birthright citizenship is a 150-year-old right and a key provision of the 14th Amendment which grants American citizenship to every child born on US soil regardless of the immigration status of the parents. The legal term for this is jus soli, “right of the soil.”

The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment were clear about this provision in the constitution which says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

Birthright citizenship contrasts with blood citizenship, or jus sanguinis (“law of blood”), in which a child inherits citizenship from its parents, often from the father if the parents do not have the same nationality. During the Axios interview, President Trump erroneously said the USA was “the only country in the world” offering such benefits when actually there are 30 countries, most in the Western Hemisphere, providing birthright citizenship. They are Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Barbados, Belize, Brazil, Canada, Chad, Chile, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Lesotho, Mexico, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Uruguay and Venezuela.

The Fourteenth Amendment, however, has an exception which excludes a group of people who are not “subject to the jurisdiction” – accredited foreign diplomats and their families. “Subject to the jurisdiction” does not simply mean, as is commonly thought today, subject to American laws or courts. It means owing exclusive political allegiance to the U.S (Erler, 2015). Supporters of a review of birthright citizenship have picked on this clause however, suggesting different interpretations to it. John Eastman of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence argued that children of undocumented immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US and thus should not be considered citizens under the Constitution.

Trump’s power to end birthright citizenship by executive order is debatable and if he decides to move forward with it, could set up a chain of legal battles and challenges by the courts. The executive order cannot be enforced without a huge apparatus of internal control. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will, of necessity, become the skeleton of a nationwide citizenship police (Epps, 2018).

According to Axios, Judge James C. Ho of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in New Orleans said that changing how the 14th Amendment is applied would be “unconstitutional.” What would rather be a constitutional way of ending birthright citizenship is to accept the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment is accurate, and pass a constitutional amendment to override it. From all indications, this doesn’t look like the sort of thing that would ever happen.

Photo Credit: New York Post

Researchers have attempted to find out the reasons behind this and one common conclusion has been reached by most of them – people consciously form their beliefs on the basis of information they assume to be correct, not what is true.

During the final three months of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Buzzfeed, the internet media company carried out a research comparing the popularity of false election stories against the legitimate ones on social media. It was revealed that the 20 most popular false election stories generated more Facebook engagements than the 20 most popular legitimate stories in terms of shares, reactions and comments. The most popular fake story of that period was revealed to be “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.”  

As such fake news gets more widespread, researchers have attempted to find out the reason why it spreads so fast, and how to stop it. Another research by the prestigious journal Science published in March 2018 investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. Data used in this study comprised of up to 126,000 stories tweeted by 3 million people over 4.5 million times. It was concluded that “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.”

This conclusion therefore postulates that even with the current political moment and trending news around it, we interpret new information as confirming our beliefs and reject it if it runs counter to those beliefs. What we believe depends on our personal views and ideas and this cuts across every circle or endeavor. Without extensive verification or evidence, people believe messages because they sound appealing and respond to their wishes and desires. They then seek to assert those beliefs on others, widening the pool of fake news consumers.

President Donald Trump joined this pool of fake news creators when he claimed that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. He made this claim without any evidence in March 2017, tweeting that there was massive voter fraud which allegedly resulted in the popular vote count favoring his opponent in the elections, Hillary Clinton, by almost 3 million. He went further on to form a task force to review alleged voter fraud, improper voter registrations and “election integrity” in the federal election system. That group was disbanded in January, and no credible evidence was ever presented to substantiate the president’s claims.

When it comes to agreeing with fake information, people have a reflex action and immediately accept it if it already agreed with their pre-set position of things. This was the conclusion reached by a study published in the Social Psychology and Personality Science journal in April 2018. Dr Michael Gilead, the author of the research, said it was even more noticeable when the false material was about politics and social issues: “This involuntary, ‘reflex-like’ tendency to consider things we already believe in as being true, might dampen our ability to think things through in a rational way.”

It often occurs, however, that one may simply not know what to believe. This happens mostly when a person is confronted with new and false information that he has very little knowledge about. Under this condition, one may be prone to believing such false information purely on a motivational bias.

This requires urgent remedy. The disinformation spate must be countered with persistent fact checking and steps to ensure the integrity of information being churned out to consumers of such information. Improving the quality of news sharing and journalism in general is cause for serious concern and requires a concerted effort from societal institutions and the public at large.