Turtle Talk

Neoshia Roemer has posted “Reproducing Citizenship” on SSRN.

Highly recommended.

Here is the abstract:

Almost immediately after taking office on January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed the Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship Executive Order. This Order limits birthright citizenship based on the immigration status of a child’s parents. This Article posits this is an Executive attempt to limit which families reproduce in ways that are beyond state power. If the government can limit birthright citizenship on the grounds it proposes, it effectively controls citizen making—which is to take control of the family. If we are to believe any myth about our constitutional republic, a long held truth is that the family maintains the right to reproduce on its own terms, not the government’s. The people choose their government, not the other way around.

Through barely coded language that reproduces racist and nativist attitudes, the Order attempts to control the reproduction of citizenship by imagining and excluding the mythical “illegal” immigrant to handpick who becomes a citizen. With this understanding, this Article situates this issue on the axes of constitutional law and reproductive justice, discussing efforts to limit birthright citizenship as a matter targeting select families. This Article proposes a “constitutional rights plus” framework that demonstrates the reproductive rights of the parent and the child’s right to citizenship are linked and inseparable. This is an attack on the entire family to control which families produce citizens. Utilizing the reproductive justice framework, this Article argues that the Executive Order reproduces citizenship in four ways. First, by reifying the bounds of who constitutes a family, the Order reproduces family discrimination. Second, the Order reconstructs the noncitizen regime of Dred Scott that would effectively render some children stateless and open to exploitation. Third, the Order reproduces family punishment and subordination by ensuring some families are punished for existing and remain subordinated through labor regimes. Fourth, the Order reproduces poverty as it locks families and children into a regime of cyclical poverty that they cannot escape.