https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/opinion/trump-birthright-citizenship.html

New York Times, blah blah blah.

But: the first precedent they mention is from 1898 (I stopped reading after that).

Well, if we’re going back to 1898, then, yes, the Court has absolutely ruled in favor of whiteness, multiple times. And this same institution is responsible for the Dredd Scott decision, and it seems like we might be regressing just that far now. There are no automatic backstops here, only the respect and trust people have for how things work. Or don’t have.

So, yeah, there are no guarantees, and we already know this, thank you, New York Times.

But they got one thing badly wrong in the headline, as per usual: Trump will never “have a case” in the sense that he might be right.

Immigration is the only thing keeping us from facing the same population decline that is facing Europe and China. It’s one of the things that keep us economically strong. And culturally vibrant, frankly. And I welcome it (taco truck on every corner!), and Trump and the Right are wrong about it.

We can certainly tune some things. Stop distinguishing by country of origin, for example. Separate quotas for Samoans and Haitians is ridiculous. (Basically, each separate region of the world where we’ve had an imperialist adventure around the turn of the 20th century gets a quota. Remember the Philippines? Quota. Nicaragua? Quota. Guatemala? Quota. Etc.)

And we can fix the H-1B visas to allow recipients more freedom to switch employers and not make employer sponsorship so onerous. That would raise H-1B salaries, benefitting domestic labour and treating everybody more humanely.

And lots more fixes smarter people than I have thought of and I just haven’t heard of yet.