On Tuesday, Donald Trump reposted a story from the infamously unreliable right-wing blog The Gateway Pundit. According to that post, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is ineligible to be president or vice president because “her parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of her birth in 1972.”
This story is an obvious echo of the claims Trump made about President Barack Obama from before the 2008 election right up until 2016. Trump regularly repeated lies that Obama had been born in Kenya and repeatedly insisted that Obama produce his long-form birth certificate. When Obama did release the certificate, Trump declared it was a fake. In 2015, Trump even claimed that he had sent investigators to Hawaii and that those investigators had collected “absolutely unbelievable” evidence of how Obama’s parents had faked his birth certificate. Because somehow they knew their son would be running for president 47 years later.
Trump repeating the claim that Haley is ineligible is, at its core, a reflection of the racism that dominates everything Trump does and says. Trump did the same thing in 2020 in supporting a racist Newsweek editorial claiming that Kamala Harris wasn’t eligible to be vice president.
But there’s more to this than just the simple racism Trump is slinging at candidates of color. This is an expression of the racist, anti-immigrant policies that Trump adores and the right has adopted.
The basis of the argument against the eligibility of either Haley or Harris lies in the noxious idea that people who are born in the United States are not citizens if their parents were immigrants.
Birthright citizenship—the idea that citizenship is automatic for those born in the U.S.—is intrinsic to the nation’s structure and history. The 14th Amendment, the same amendment that has a third section bumping Trump from the Colorado ballot, opens with a statement that makes it very clear:
“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.”
But those who pretend not to understand the clear meaning of this statement often reference an 1873 statement by then-Attorney General George Williams: “The word ‘jurisdiction’ must be understood to mean absolute and complete jurisdiction, such as the United States had over its citizens before the adoption of this amendment.” They ignore that this is actually about re-awarding citizenship to people who have renounced their American citizenship and that Williams concludes by saying, “The child born of alien parents in the United States is held to be a citizen thereof, and to be subject to duties with regard to this country which do not attach to the father.” In other words, the children are citizens, even if the parents are not.
Ending birthright citizenship has become a rallying cry of the right. So much so that any search on the topic turns up one right-wing “think tank” after another, all explaining how a Republican president could do away with birthright citizenship without the pesky chore of repealing the 14th Amendment. Trump has made ending birthright citizenship a key promise in his 2024 campaign.
At its core, the quest to end birthright citizenship is nothing more than an extension of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that has featured in Republican ads and deadly white supremacist rallies. The claim of those opposed to birthright citizenship is that illegal immigrants are slipping into the United States, having children, and using those citizen-children as a means of dragging the whole family into the U.S.
Not only is this simply a page from the Big Book of Scary Stories for Racists, that’s not how they are using it.
Nikki Haley’s parents moved to the United States in 1969, three years before her birth. The same year he came to the U.S., her father completed his Ph.D. and became a biology professor at a historically Black university in South Carolina. Her mother held a law degree before even moving to the U.S.
Kamala Harris’ mother moved to the U.S. six years before her birth. Her father came three years later. Harris’ mother came as a graduate student in endocrinology and went on to get her Ph.D. Her father came to the U.S. as a Ph.D. in economics and took a position as a professor at Stanford.
By any measure, these four people—Nimarata Nikki Randhawa, Ajit Singh Randhawa, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, and Donald J. Harris—are exactly the kind of immigrants America, or any other country, would want. They were all driven, accomplished, and successful people.
There’s just one thing that makes their children targets of those seeking to end a right every American takes for granted: They’re not white.
