The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments this week in a case that could fundamentally alter who qualifies for automatic U.S. citizenship, as critics increasingly frame birthright citizenship as a matter of fraud and national security rather than simply an immigration policy debate.
The case centers on President Trump's executive order declaring that children born in the U.S. to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily will no longer be considered American citizens. The order challenges over 125 years of legal understanding under the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to anyone born on American soil except for children of foreign diplomats and those born to a foreign occupying force.
At a recent Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on birthright citizenship, Republican lawmakers argued that the constitutional principle granting automatic citizenship is being exploited through what they call "birth tourism" — a practice in which pregnant foreigners travel to the U.S. to give birth, securing American citizenship for their children.
What the Right Is Saying
Conservative lawmakers and immigration restrictionists argue that birth tourism represents a genuine exploit of American citizenship that warrants aggressive action.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., said during the subcommittee hearing: "The question before us today is a simple one: Is American citizenship the inheritance of a nation and its people? Or is American citizenship simply a hollow legal definition without protections against fraud, abuse, and bad actors?"
Andrew Arthur, a senior fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and former immigration judge, said American citizenship comes with significant privileges, including access to public benefits. He argued that most noncitizens must undergo a lengthy naturalization process, and this shouldn't be circumvented simply because a child was born on U.S. soil.
"The tax-paying citizens who help fund those benefits don't want to see their generosity abused, and I think that's really why you hear birthright citizenship and birth tourism often mentioned in the same conversations," Arthur said.
Some Republicans have also raised national security concerns, arguing that foreign governments — particularly China and Russia — could exploit birthright citizenship to establish future intelligence operatives in the U.S.
What the Left Is Saying
Immigration advocates and progressive lawmakers contend that concerns about birth tourism are vastly overstated and do not warrant reconsidering a constitutional amendment that has stood for over 150 years.
Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, told NPR: "You don't kill a mosquito with a cannon. It's a problem but you don't need to revisit a 150-year-old constitutional amendment to address occasional incidents of fraud."
Democrats on the subcommittee argued that existing immigration and national security laws already provide tools to address fraud without undermining birthright citizenship. They pointed to the Trump administration's first-term policy instructing the State Department to deny tourist visas to pregnant women believed to be seeking birth tourism as an example of targeted enforcement.
Immigration advocates argue that restricting birthright citizenship would cause far more problems than it solves, potentially creating a class of stateless children and punishing American citizens born to undocumented parents.
What the Numbers Show
The scale of birth tourism remains difficult to quantify precisely. The State Department does not track the number of babies born through birth tourism.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there were approximately 9,500 births to those who reported a non-U.S. address as their residence in 2024. The Center for Immigration Studies, which supports restricting immigration, estimates that temporary visitors gave birth to about 70,000 babies in 2023.
Both figures suggest that tourist births represent less than 2% of the approximately 3.5 million babies born in the U.S. each year.
During Trump's first term, the administration instructed the State Department to deny tourist visas to pregnant women if officials believed they were planning birth tourism. A 2022 Senate Committee on Homeland Security report found that the 2020 policy change made it more difficult for birth tourism companies to continue operations.
In the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory near Asia that has been cited as a hub for birth tourism, tourist-related births dropped from 581 in 2018 to 47 in 2025 after local officials worked with federal partners to tighten border security.
The Bottom Line
The Supreme Court's upcoming decision will determine whether Trump's executive order can legally restrict birthright citizenship, potentially reshaping one of the most established principles of American constitutional law.
While both sides agree that some level of birth tourism fraud exists, they disagree sharply on whether this justifies constitutional intervention. Critics of the executive order argue that existing laws provide sufficient tools to address fraud, while supporters contend that the practice represents a fundamental exploitation of citizenship that requires stronger action.
The case is expected to be decided by late June. Whatever the outcome, it will likely become a central issue in ongoing debates about immigration policy and the meaning of American citizenship.