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Happy 250th, America: Birthright Citizenship and the Long Game

Talking Purple with Beth Guide — July 2, 2026

Good morning, everyone. First, let me apologize for being away. Life has been full, and getting back behind the mic has been harder than I wanted it to be. But I’m back — and my plan is to return to a regular Saturday rhythm so we can all get back in sync.

And what a week to come back. This Saturday, America turns 250. Two and a half centuries since the Declaration of Independence — the moment this country started and the foundation everything else was built on. I’ll be honest with you: I think we’ve drifted a long way from where we began, and that drift is exactly what I want to talk about today.

Where I live in Kingwood, Texas, we haven’t forgotten what this country means. We organized a group to walk in our Fourth of July parade, and right now I’ve got about 150 people planning to march with us. With the heat, the holiday, and everything else working against us, I think that turnout is something to be proud of.

Education is the firewall

Ronald Reagan once said we’re always just one generation away from losing our freedom. That line lands differently for me every year.

I’m not a historian and I’m not a legal scholar. I’m someone who loves the Constitution and has tried, at every turn, to understand how it’s actually supposed to work. And when I read the comments people leave on these issues, what jumps out at me isn’t disagreement — it’s how little shared background we have anymore. We can’t lay our opinions out clearly because we don’t have the foundation underneath them to know what we’re even arguing about.

I believe education has always been our best protection. It’s the thing that keeps a free people free. When I watch how the next generation is being taught — and how much of what they “know” comes from TikTok, X, and a media that no longer even pretends to be objective — I worry. The algorithms don’t hand you a balanced picture. They hand you the picture that keeps you scrolling. And unless you understand that’s the problem, you’ll never fix it.

A restrained, bottom-up country

Our country was founded on a restrained government — one placed there *by* the people. “By the people, for the people” isn’t just a slogan. It means you are free to make your own choices, and the government is supposed to be as small as it can possibly be.

Here’s the part I think most people miss: our system was built bottom-up, not top-down. The President was never supposed to push down on the states. The states were supposed to push up on the federal government.

That’s why I keep coming back to the 17th Amendment. When we moved to directly electing senators, the Senate stopped representing the states and became just another political body. States lost their voice in Washington. And I’d argue that’s a big reason we can’t pass constitutional amendments anymore and why so much of the system feels broken — you’ll never get the buy-in the Founders designed for when everything runs on political ideology instead.

That same problem shows up everywhere. Too many people don’t ask whether an idea is good, bad, or somewhere in between. They ask who said it. If Trump said it, one side decides it must be wrong and the other decides it must be right. I don’t live in that world. I’ve always believed there are three sides to every story: your version, my version, and the truth.

Birthright citizenship: the heart of it

Now to the issue that pulled me back to this mic.

I’m a naturalized citizen. I came here, I built a life here, and I can tell you that becoming an American is a gift. It’s something special. So when I talk about birthright citizenship, I’m not coming at it as someone who takes any of this lightly.

Let me start with a story about the long game.

Years ago, my parents moved in with us while my mom was passing away. In the middle of all that, our HOA sent a letter about a small bald patch in our lawn under a shade tree. My dad — retired Air Force, retired Exxon — went to the meeting, explained our situation, and promised we’d handle it. The guy running the board didn’t care who we were or what we were going through. Fix it in a week, he said, or they’d take us to court over a patch of grass.

I decided that day that board needed to change. So over the next five years, I did it the right way. I got myself elected, then recruited and backed better candidates each cycle — people who wanted the neighborhood to be about kids, events, and community instead of who mowed their lawn. Today we have a board I’m proud of. That’s the long game: you don’t smash the wall down, you put the pieces in place and change the system legally, so it *sticks*.

Here’s why that story matters. Birthright citizenship is being used against us the same way — as a long game.

My concern isn’t your gardener or your housekeeper. It’s organized birth tourism, and in particular the well-documented reporting on foreign nationals — I’m most concerned about China — traveling here specifically to give birth. Those children become American citizens, then are raised abroad, inside another country’s culture and, in some cases, another government’s influence. Estimates vary widely because there’s no official count, but even the conservative numbers are large, and the higher figures I’ve seen quoted run into the millions.

Think about what that means. We spent an entire Trump administration talking about foreign interference in our elections. If large numbers of people are raised overseas with no allegiance to this country and then can vote in — or even run in — American elections, *that* is the ultimate foreign interference. And the margins that decide our elections are tiny. Florida in 2000. Georgia in 2020. We’re talking about outcomes decided by tens of thousands of votes.

Where I part ways with the “deport everyone” crowd

Let me be just as clear about the other side of this.

When people ask, “Should people who are here illegally be deported?” my answer is yes — the criminals, absolutely, 100%. But I don’t believe most Americans actually want to round up the housekeeper and the lawn crew. And I know I’m in the minority on this: you cannot take someone who was brought here as an infant, who has lived in this country for 35 years and never set foot in Honduras, and ship them “back” to a country they’ve never known. That’s not hyperbole. That’s common sense.

I feel it personally. If someone told me to go “back” to Italy, I couldn’t do it. I love Italy, but I don’t speak the language beyond ordering an extra meatball. Being born somewhere doesn’t make it home.

The Dreamers are exactly the kind of problem Congress should have solved years ago. They won’t — because they’d rather keep the issue to run on than fix it. But somebody needs to fix it.

“Subject to the jurisdiction thereof”

Here’s the legal crux, and it’s the part I wish more people understood.

The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment doesn’t just say “born here.” It says born here and subject to the jurisdiction thereof. I’m bound by the laws of the United States because I’m a citizen and a resident. Someone who isn’t domiciled here, who steps off a plane, gives birth, and flies home, is a very different situation — and I don’t believe that clause was ever meant to hand out citizenship to the entire world one baby at a time.

You can see this tension in how the justices approached it:

• Clarence Thomas went down the domicile road — if you don’t actually live here, you don’t automatically inherit the rights of the country.
• Samuel Alito focused on allegiance and what the implications really are.
• Brett Kavanaugh treated it as a narrow, largely statutory question and pointed out that Congress could address the modern reality of mass illegal immigration and birth tourism — something the people who wrote the amendment in the 1800s simply never contemplated. Back then you didn’t hop a six-hour flight; you spent six months on a boat.

I’ll be candid that I came away less impressed than I hoped with some of the reasoning, and I don’t think the argument was made as sharply as it could have been. But the core question — what “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” actually means — is the right one.

A path forward: let the states force a clean case

So what do we do?

Amending the Constitution isn’t realistic, for the same reason I mentioned earlier: the Senate has become too political to ever reach those thresholds. But there’s a cleaner path.

Some are now suggesting that states stop issuing birth certificates to children of people who aren’t lawfully domiciled here. Birth certificates are issued at the state level, but they touch federal questions — which is what makes this an interstate matter. If a state like Texas takes the lead the same way it led on the abortion question that ultimately reshaped the national landscape, it forces the issue back to the Supreme Court in the *right* way — on solid legal ground rather than as a bombastic executive order that’s easy to knock down.

That’s the long game again. And it’s the difference between winning loudly for a news cycle and winning in a way that actually holds.

There’s an irony in all of this that I can’t get past. We’ve got people arguing that naturalized citizens — people like me, who’ve lived American lives and hold American values — shouldn’t be allowed to run for Congress. Meanwhile we’re comfortable with large numbers of people, raised in other countries with other allegiances, holding American citizenship and the vote. If you’re worried about the integrity of the ballot, that’s the direction to look.

Women’s sports: this one isn’t close

While I’m here: on biological men competing in women’s sports, I don’t think this is complicated.

A person who went through male puberty keeps physical advantages that hormones don’t erase. For everyone who cares about women’s rights, this should be one of the clearer calls we’ve got — because it directly costs women scholarships, records, and opportunities. Introducing biological men into the women’s sports ecosystem is a step *backward* for women. They got that one right.

Celebrating America — and seeing it through fresh eyes

The Democratic Party of my father and my family back in New Jersey feels gone to me. The classic Democrats I grew up around had to bend toward the far left to survive, and I think that warped what the party could have been. If you’re a normal, common-sense Democrat, we need your voice in the debate.

But here’s my challenge to everyone, regardless of party: if you can’t bring yourself to celebrate this 250th anniversary, ask yourself *why*. We should all be able to be proud Americans this week.

I’ll close with something that genuinely moved me. I am not a soccer person — I’ll happily talk your ear off about baseball or football, but soccer isn’t my thing. Even so, watching all the visitors who came to this country for the games discover America was a joy. People marveling at Buc-ee’s. Trying to smuggle ranch dressing home in their suitcases. One of them said the best way to understand America is to go *see* America. They’re right.

We are so apathetic about how good we have it. So this week, go look at this country the way a first-time visitor does. Get out into your community. Wave a flag. Watch the tall ships come up the Hudson if you’re lucky enough to be near them.

Happy 250th birthday, America. I’ll be back soon — I promise.