Most Americans favor birthright citizenship. That wasn’t always true.
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
BY RUTH IGIELNIK
In 1993, a freshman senator from Nevada stood on the Senate floor to denounce birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants lacking legal status and introduced legislation to end it.
“No sane country,” he said, would offer a “reward for being an illegal immigrant.”
Thirteen years later, that same senator, Harry Reid, walked onto the Senate floor, this time as the Democratic minority leader, to denounce his bill, calling it “the biggest mistake I ever made.”
“That is a low point of my legislative career, the low point of my governmental career,” said Reid, who died in 2021.
His change of heart illustrates a little-discussed truth: Democrats were once largely split on birthright citizenship, and generally favored stronger immigration enforcement.
The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments Wednesday on President Donald Trump’s executive order removing birthright citizenship for children whose parents do not have legal status.
Generations of Americans became citizens through birthright citizenship, which is well-established through the 14th Amendment and nearly 130 years of case law.
And most Americans support the right, according to a New York Times analysis of polling on the subject. That includes a vast majority of Democrats and about 40% of Republicans.
But the history of public support for birthright citizenship also reflects just how volatile the immigration issue has been.
In the mid-’90s, as the United States struggled with an influx of immigrants entering the country illegally, Democrats were much more divided about birthright citizenship as well as immigration.
Since then, Democrats and independent voters have embraced birthright citizenship, and moved to the left on a host of other immigration issues. Republicans have stayed largely divided on the issue, while becoming more conservative on most other immigration issues.
The result is that more Americans than ever support birthright citizenship, at least since polling began on the issue.
When Reid introduced his bill, Bill Clinton had just won the presidency, in large part by moderating the Democratic Party’s liberal positions on a number of issues, including immigration. While immigration was not a focus of his campaign, he called for stronger action at the border and enhanced enforcement in the workplace.
“He positioned himself as a centrist, a new Democrat and a law-and-order candidate,” said Doris Meissner, who served under Clinton as a commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. “Immigration was a big part of that.”
Polling from the time shows that Clinton’s views were in line with most Democrats in the country. Two-thirds of Democrats said they preferred candidates that backed tougher laws to limit immigration, according to a 1992 poll from Gallup, CNN and USA Today.
In 1996, Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which among other things made it easier to detain and deport people lacking legal status. The bill passed with bipartisan support, though many Democrats, particularly those in the party’s left flank, remained opposed. Clinton’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Democrats’ appetite for stricter immigration laws began to wane in mid-to-late-2000s during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as an era of hyper polarization began to set in on nearly every issue.
The Pew Research Center found that the share of Democrats who held liberal policy views nearly doubled from 2004 to 2014.
When it came to birthright citizenship, Democrats began the 1990s evenly divided on the topic. By 2010, when Obama was in the White House, about 60% of Democrats supported it.
About a year later, Trump began to question Obama’s birthplace in interviews, pushing a racist lie that he was really born in Kenya and therefore ineligible for the White House.
Support solidified among Democrats around 2015, and by 2023, Democrats had become nearly unanimous, with 90% supporting.
Trump vocally opposed birthright citizenship in all three of his presidential campaigns. And he increasingly began using the term “anchor baby” — a dismissive way to describe immigrants who crossed the border to give birth to a child in the United States. In a 2015 interview with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, Trump repeatedly used the phrase, driving it to the forefront of the political conversation at the time.
That term, Meissner said, captures the feeling at that time.
“The number of people actually coming here with the purpose of having babies was very small,” she added. “But there was a palpable and growing concern, particularly on the right.”
Polling in 2015 shows that most Republicans found the term to be accurate while most Democrats said it was offensive.
The Democrats who thought the term was accurate, a little more than a quarter of those polled, were largely white and older, the last vestige of the party’s old-guard views on immigration.
“The increasing use of the term ‘anchor babies’ was the inflection point” on birthright citizenship, said Josh Pasek, a political science professor at University of Michigan. “It becomes very real to people. They stop thinking about it as a legal issue around the 14th Amendment and start thinking about it as a social issue that matches their views on immigration.”
By 2016, as Trump continued to hammer the issue, Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ presidential nominee, and the rest of the party coalesced around strong and sustained support for birthright citizenship.
“They were so angry with Trump’s approach, it pushed them into a more positive direction,” said Michael Tesler, a political science professor at University of California, Irvine.
Republicans tell a different story. Large majorities support Trump’s shutdown of the border and campaign for mass deportation, but a sizable share, about 40%, still favor birthright citizenship. This number has been fairly stable throughout the 1990s.
More than 50% of Hispanic Republicans, a growing share of the party, said they favor birthright citizenship for immigrants, according to a 2025 survey from the Pew Research Center.
Younger Republicans are also more supportive than older generations.
The increasing support mirrors the increasing percentage of first or second generation immigrants. That figure — 29% — has nearly doubled since 1985, according to Pew Research Center.