Voters are Sounding More and More Like Trump on Birthright Citizenship

He lost in court. But he’s bending reality to his warped point of view.

(Illustrations by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark)

A MAJORITY OF THE SUPREME COURT decided last week to follow the obvious, black-letter text of the Constitution and uphold birthright citizenship. This should not have been a close call.

But the ruling—a 5–4 decision that Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship was unconstitutional—showed that the justices were torn. And they’re hardly alone. When we conducted a focus group with Donald Trump voters on the eve of the decision, participants expressed an alarming degree of skepticism toward the nearly 160-year old legal precedent.

This was a group of Florida women who voted for Trump in 2024. Here’s Debbie:

This kind of thinking is grounded in the zero-sum mentality that Trump has always used to frame the issue of immigration. Foreigners take, Americans lose out. Many participants in the focus group viewed immigrants as a threat to the country and a drain on our resources, which is something like the median position for Republican voters today. Here’s Dianna:

Still, in this group, there was broad support among participants for those who come to America “the right way.” Here’s Tatiana, who emigrated from Ukraine and recently became a citizen:

Tatiana has seen this process from the inside. But oftentimes voters are not familiar with the byzantine, years-long, bureaucratic nightmare that is our immigration system. They just know that there is a process for citizenship, and they think that people should follow it.

This is what I call the moral alibi. In these voters’ telling, they are not hostile to immigrants coming to America. It simply becomes a process question: one about fairness and rules, as opposed to a question about being pro- or anti-immigrant.

Even so, the average Republican voter still isn’t nearly as hostile to immigration as Trump and Stephen Miller. Voters contain multitudes, and many sympathize with the plight of immigrants. Cyndi said she worried that Trump’s approach to immigration would endanger people who became citizens the right way, like her son-in-law, who earned his citizenship in high school:

She went on:

It’s something to think about as we think about global goodwill as well, when you start kicking people out of our country. And why are you doing it? Do you actually have a reason for it?

The attempt to end birthright citizenship was the administration’s most audacious effort yet to rewrite the Constitution around Trump’s warped view of immigration. And even though it failed, it has clearly further moved the frame of the debate. Many rank-and-file Republicans now sound a lot more like Trump and Miller on immigration than the immigration squishes/reformers whom I grew up admiring <cough, Marco Rubio, cough>. Immigration hawkishness spurred Trump’s rise in 2016 and propelled his return to office in 2024. And it is going to be a litmus test for any GOP presidential aspirant in 2028 and beyond.

That is likely to be Trump’s lasting legacy on this issue. He lost in court, but he won the debate inside his coalition.

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Sarah Longwell is publisher of The Bulwark, host of The Focus Group podcast, and author of How to Eat an Elephant, out on September 8.