There is no more precious possession than American citizenship. To be a “card-carrying” member of the wealthiest, most powerful, most technologically and institutionally advanced nation on the planet should be treated as an extraordinary inheritance that Americans should protect with every ounce of strength we have.

Gaining American citizenship should be a lengthy and involved process with stringent requirements. At the moment language requirements are weak to nonexistent, the “civics” test is nothing but a 10-question breeze, and permanent residents can apply for American citizenship after just five years, and they only need to be physically present in the US for two and a half of those years. We should strengthen our requirements to acquire US citizenship, quite radically, but the ease of acquiring citizenship through naturalization is not the most pressing issue facing the American people on this front.

Each year hundreds of thousands of children are born to legal and illegal immigrants in this country. These children, despite having no serious connection to the United States and certainly no historic connection to this country, automatically acquire US citizenship at birth thanks to the Supreme Court constantly misinterpreting the 14th Amendment. This state of affairs must come to an end.

Donald Trump has promised to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens, but I would argue that he must extend this to the children of all immigrants including and especially legal immigrants. We must protect and cherish membership to this country, and we can’t do that if the 1.2 million legal immigrants we allow in every year (and the 10.4 million non-immigrants admitted on “temporary” visas) can produce an anchor baby just as easily as illegal immigrants can.

This situation has come about because of consistent misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment. The 1st section of the 14th Amendment, penned by Jacob M. Howard, rightly and justly extended citizenship to the freed slaves and their descendants in the United States [You can read the original May 30, 1866 debates on the Amendment online at CONG. GLOBE, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 2890 et seq. (1866).] It was meant to ensure the legal protection of and democratic participation for African Americans, but this unique inheritance has been consistently bartered away by wayward Supreme Court rulings.

It was the 1898 case of US v. Wong Kim Ark that first saw the Supreme Court decide that citizenship could be extended to the children of legal residents in the United States.

This is despite the fact that Congress itself disagreed on this before, during, and after passing the Amendment. Some Congressmen, such as John Armor Bingham argued that the 14th Amendment did extend citizenship to the children of legal immigrants, so long as those immigrants did not hold allegiance to a foreign sovereign. I very much doubt that Mr. Bingham imagined there would be Indian spy networks operating in the United States for the purposes of assassinating their Indian political opponents on US soil. It also seems doubtful that Mr. Bingham would have foreseen the Chinese government’s continual harassment of ethnic Chinese in the United States. Some of these ethnic Chinese have been turned into spies for Beijing, and not only in the US. White Papers has before reported on this issue in France, Australia, and New Zealand.

Extending citizenship to every person born in the United States to non-American parents cheapens the very essence of America and exposes this country to a variety of national security threats. Americans must stop believing that everyone with an American passport is just as American as those of us with ancestors who arrived as pioneers in this country centuries ago. My mother’s family was one of the first European families to settle in California after the Mexican-American war. Today that inheritance is at risk because every immigrant, legal or illegal, can permanently establish themselves in this state by having an “American” child after entering the country.

Congress could pass a law interpreting the 14^th Amendment to only apply to African Americans, White Americans, and Hispanic Americans whose ancestors were present in the country at the time the territories they reside in were acquired. A separate law already exists extending citizenship to native Americans and thus no changes are required on that front.

Congress should further revoke the Supreme Court’s ability to adjudicate their legislation on this matter, a power granted to Congress in the Exceptions and Regulations clause of the Constitution.

Only after dealing with birthright citizenship can we turn to making the naturalization process more stringent. We must do everything we can to control the number and quality of people who come to this country and become our fellow Americans.