First, _jus soli_ is relatively rare in the world at large.
Second, the Supreme Court has never ruled on birthright citizenship; the meaning of the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" has not been tested.
Regardless of your political views, this is an extremely important area of US law, and for it to be undefined isn't fair to anyone.
Even if "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" has never made it to the Supreme Court, it's not an ambiguous phrase subject to multiple interpretations. The idea that some class of immigrants are outside the jurisdiction of the US even when they are physically in the country is not supportable.
Precisely. The phrase is exclusively intended to handle both foreign and US diplomats.
Diplomatically, embassies count as the soil of the country they represent and thus subject to the jurisdiction of said country. As a result, a child born to a foreign diplomat present in the US would not be granted citizenship. Similarly, a US ambassador (to Germany, for example) is treated as still subject to US jurisdiction, and by extension, any children of theirs would automatically become US citizens.
A person who entered the US illegally is still subject to US jurisdiction (or else they couldn't be violating US immigration law), so any children they have are citizens. The proper ways to address that are to a) prevent them from entering illegally in the first place, b) fix immigration law so they don't have to enter illegally, and/or c) add a constitutional amendment modifying the 14th amendment to explicitly deny citizenship to children born to parents who are here illegally.
> The phrase is exclusively intended to handle both foreign and US diplomats.
I'd argue that the phrase was originally intended to make it absolutely clear that formerly enslaved people were citizens, and so were their children.
Obviously it's been used for other purposes since then, and the authors and those who ratified it considered the repercussions through their own biases, but I believe that was almost exclusively the primary intent.
It's striking me at the moment how much the political climate today mirrors that of the time the 14th was ratified. From a historical perspective, the concern is over the expansion of the electorate - from the abolition of slavery then, and from uncontrolled immigration today.
The difference I see is that the abolition of slavery was a positive decision made by the US government; today's concerns around illegal immigration were caused by our failure to enforce our own laws. Based on my understanding of the motivations of our Justices today, that could be a key difference.
First, _jus soli_ is relatively rare in the world at large.
Second, the Supreme Court has never ruled on birthright citizenship; the meaning of the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" has not been tested.
Regardless of your political views, this is an extremely important area of US law, and for it to be undefined isn't fair to anyone.