On Tuesday, the New York Times published a piece titled “Most Americans Favor Birthright Citizenship. That Wasn’t Always True.” I thought it might be an interesting lesson on how views on immigration – particularly the belief that every person born in the United States is automatically an American citizen – have shifted over time, particularly in recent years.

But in it, the Times sidesteps the real questions at issue, and the messy polling around what Americans think of automatic citizenship, in an effort to conjure a battle between America’s time-honored beliefs and Trump’s supposedly racist broadside on immigration. It’s deceptive in its framing, wrong on its merits, and bad journalism all the way down.

The article isn’t all wrong. The Times is right in its introduction that Democrats have shifted strongly to the left on automatic citizenship and immigration issues more broadly since former Senator Harry Reid first introduced legislation in 1993 to end birthright citizenship.

Where President Clinton’s Democratic Party was split on whether anyone born in the United States was automatically an American, today about 90% of Democrats support birthright citizenship. Backlash to Trump’s enforcement has hardened political divides on immigration issues more broadly, as the institution of the Democratic Party (like the Republican Party before it) struggles to find its footing on an immigration approach that satisfies both its voters and its base.

But that’s about where an accurate reading of the facts end. The piece’s lede, after introducing that the Supreme Court is weighing President Trump’s challenge to the policy, quickly pivots to broad and dubious claims. Citing an “analysis of polling,” the Times asserts:

Generations of Americans became citizens through birthright citizenship, which is well-established through the Fourteenth Amendment and nearly 130 years of case law.

And most Americans support the right, according to a New York Times analysis of polling on the subject. That includes a vast majority of Democrats and about 40 percent of Republicans.

That led the Times to conclude that “more Americans than ever support birthright citizenship, at least since polling began on the issue.”

But is it really reasonable to treat birthright citizenship as a settled issue in the minds of the American public?

For starters, the Times’ own analysis of the underlying polling begins only in 1995, so even a qualified claim that “more Americans than ever support birthright citizenship” feels like a bit of a reach.

More consequentially, where does the Times get support for the claim that “about 40 percent [of Republicans] still favor birthright citizenship” and that “this number has been fairly stable throughout the 1990s”? The article quotes a scholar from the Cato Institute – a libertarian group notable for being radically outside the mainstream Republican position on immigration – to assert that “‘even people who want secure borders and don’t want illegal immigration recognize that people didn’t do anything wrong by being born here,’” before citing a single poll of lukewarm support for birthright citizenship among Hispanic Republicans.

But anyone who actually read that poll, from Pew Research in June 2025, would see that it captures the far more complicated reality of Americans’ views on birthright citizenship. The headline of that poll reads: “U.S. public is split on birthright citizenship for people whose parents immigrated illegally.” It found the split among all Americans is 50% in support, and 49% opposed. “The public’s views about birthright citizenship for each of these groups are unchanged since August 2024,” the piece continued. Other polls back that up. A YouGov poll around the same time showed that 51% of Americans supported birthright citizenship – but only 26% of Republicans did; a far cry from the Times’ claim of 40%.

The way these questions are asked influences the topline polling results. A 2025 NPR/Ipsos poll found that “a slim majority of Americans oppose ending birthright citizenship, consistent with attitudes earlier this year.” But it also found that only “one in four support the measure to end birthright citizenship (28%), while 17% say they don’t know.”

That difference captures something important: Polls that ask whether respondents support active measures to end something usually receive less support than broad questions about how something should be. Might the Times be looking at data that indicates Republican respondents don’t support a particular measure to end birthright citizenship while claiming that data provides evidence that Republicans support birthright citizenship? Who knows! The Times’ sourcing of the support for birthright citizenship charted over time notes only that: “Each data point represents a yearly average across different question wordings. Source: Polls collected by the New York Times from 1993 to 2025. Ruth Igielnik/The New York Times.” Helpful.

Source: New York Times

And more broadly, somehow omitted from the entire piece was that immigration was perhaps the defining political issue in the most recent election, and delivered a victory not for the Democratic candidate but for the Republican one – on what the legacy media called a “hardline” position of closing the border and deporting illegal immigrants.

Beyond the electoral outcome, polling at the time made abundantly clear that Americans of all political stripes had shifted dramatically to the right on immigration. A June 2024 CBS/YouGov poll found that 62% of Americans, across political parties, supported mass deportations. Others, as recounted shortly after the election by, of all networks, CNN found that kind of support was appearing everywhere in polling. The idea that, amid such a shift, Americans were simultaneously becoming more supportive of automatic citizenship seems dubious; that the Times elected not to make clear what evidence existed to support such a claim, even more so.

Source: CNN

Beyond the polling, the piece entirely omits the legal case against birthright citizenship that the president is making, instead alleging that “birthright citizenship…is well-established through the Fourteenth Amendment and nearly 130 years of case law.” For the full argument to the contrary, read “Birthright Citizenship: A Fundamental Misunderstanding of the 14th Amendment” from the Heritage Foundation.

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My two cents: I’m trying to better delineate what the media is actually saying vs. what I think might be inspiring it – because, well, the blurring of that line is a big part of what makes me so frustrated with today’s legacy press. So in this case, we’re left to ask why the Times can’t seem to cover this story fairly.

As is so often the case, I think a big part of this is about Trump. This article has an enormously tortured departure into the history of the term “anchor baby” that, according to a former Clinton administration immigration official, inspired the Republican pushback to automatic citizenship. I’ll quote it here at length, and you can decide if this is good journalism informing readers on what people think about birthright citizenship, or the latest iteration of Trump Derangement Syndrome:

Mr. Trump vocally opposed birthright citizenship in all three of his presidential campaigns. And he increasingly began using the term “anchor baby” — a dismissive way to describe immigrants who crossed the border to give birth to a child in the United States. In a 2015 interview with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, Mr. Trump repeatedly used the phrase, driving it to the forefront of the political conversation at the time.

That term, Ms. Meissner said, captures the feeling at that time.

“The number of people actually coming here with the purpose of having babies was very small,” she added. “But there was a palpable and growing concern, particularly on the right.”

Polling in 2015 shows that most Republicans found the term to be accurate while most Democrats said it was offensive.

The Democrats who thought the term was accurate, a little over a quarter of those polled, were largely white and older, the last vestige of the party’s old-guard views on immigration.

“The increasing use of the term ‘anchor babies’ was the inflection point” on birthright citizenship, said Josh Pasek, a political science professor at University of Michigan. “It becomes very real to people. They stop thinking about it as a legal issue around the 14th Amendment and start thinking about it as a social issue that matches their views on immigration.”

More broadly, the Times has made a habit out of claiming that Trump’s approach to immigration – one broadly supported by voters, but certainly forbidden at an NYT cocktail party – is, ipso facto, racist. A 2025 Times article about Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship was titled “Is Trump’s Plan to End Birthright Citizenship ‘Dred Scott II’?” – a reference to the 1857 Supreme Court ruling that affirmed slavery.

Source: New York Times

The president has of course given the legacy media plenty of ammunition by doing and saying things that are, well, racist. But where this specific legal case, and Americans’ feelings about the topic, are concerned, I think there’s some intellectual bleedover from the Times’ “Trump is racist!” to “Trump ending birthright citizenship feels racist!”

And so, instead of trying to actually make sense of birthright citizenship on its merits, the Times built the affirmative case for why this particular element of immigration policy, long supported by Democrats and promoted with vigor across the legacy press, was allegedly no longer a debate. Of course America should open its doors to those in need; of course anyone born to parents who illegally entered the country, or to a billionaire Chinese Communist Party member exploiting lax surrogacy laws in California, are just as entitled to American citizenship as anyone else. Birthright citizenship, the thinking goes, is as American as apple pie.

Lost in all of this are the facts, both of automatic citizenship and the American peoples’ feelings thereof. Perhaps SCOTUS rules in line with what the Times calls a policy “well-established through the Fourteenth Amendment and nearly 130 years of case law.” Or maybe it doesn’t. But Times readers are all the poorer, in advance of any decision, from the Times’ “reporting” on the subject.

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