Europe is a Cautionary Tale on Birthright Citizenship
A Future Without Birthright Citizenship? Europe’s Restrictive Laws Show Us the Consequences.
Birthright citizenship is under threat in the United States, and Europe's restrictive laws offer a clear warning of what's at stake.
In the U.S., all children born on American soil gain automatic and unconditional citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. On the other side of the Atlantic though, not a single country in Europe grants this unrestricted right to children of foreign parents, regardless of immigration status.
As a result, many European-born non-citizens lack full political rights, making them vulnerable to deportation or exclusion from social services—even if they've lived in their country of birth their entire lives. The European model systematically denies these unfortunate individuals full participation in society while requiring them to contribute to the economy and welfare systems without equal and permanent access to benefits.
This is exactly what the current U.S. federal administration aims to replicate. The goal is to “Make America Great Again” by redefining who is American.
Europe's Citizenship Model is a Warning, Not an Example
Like the U.S., many European countries are shifting further to the right on citizenship and integration issues. France's new immigration law, which imposes a French language test for residency so difficult that even some native French speakers struggle to pass it, is an example of this retrograde trend.
I lived for many years in Renens, a small Swiss town where non-Swiss nationals make up more than half the population. Residents deemed “foreign” gain limited political enfranchisement only after meeting strict residency and integration requirements—rights that they can lose if they move too far, lose their job or have their residency permit revoked.
And it's not just France and Switzerland. Across Europe, governments are tightening naturalization laws, restricting integration policies, and making citizenship harder to obtain. These policies don't just impact new arrivals—they directly affect people who were born and raised there but are still seen as outsiders, a concept that is unimaginable in the United States and much of the Americas, where birthright citizenship is standard practice. These differences challenge common U.S. liberal idées reçues about European democracy.
These complications inevitably impact not just the individual, but the family and the community's ability to fully integrate. As a result, political participation is often conditioned on respectability politics, creating and reinforcing barriers to full democratic inclusion.
Why Importing the European Model is a Threat to U.S. Democracy
Eliminating birthright citizenship would permanently reshape the electorate and weaken U.S. democracy. Importing one of Europe's most illiberal policies would result in a permanent underclass in the U.S., held back by respectability politics and the shifting goalposts of integration. But the U.S. is not Europe. The Fourteenth Amendment was written specifically to prevent this kind of exclusion, even if it took decades to finally include all people born in the U.S. If it were to fall, people will slowly become outsiders, stripped of political power.
Birthright citizenship is a pillar of modern U.S. democracy, and that's precisely why it's under attack. If illiberal authoritarians succeed in restricting birthright citizenship, they will have successfully redefined who counts as American in a way that fundamentally restructures political power.
That's why birthright citizenship in the U.S. must be protected.
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