Birthright citizenship has made a mockery of our national immigration laws; getting rid of it is necessary to redeem our national sovereignty.

Much to the chagrin of pundits and journalists, President Trump has aggressively challenged the status quo in Washington, D.C., including with regard to issues that the political establishment has pronounced are settled law. Instead of remaining within the bounds of liberal dogma, though, the president has applied a refreshing, common-sense approach that has allowed for previously decided questions to re-emerge in a new light. 

That’s exactly what he’s doing by calling for an end to the self-destructive practice of granting birthright citizenship.

This is a significant issue in Colorado, because while illegal immigrants account for about 3.4 percent of the total population, the children of illegal immigrants represent more than 10 percent of all K-12 students in the state, placing a significant burden on our educational resources.

Though this arcane rule of birthright citizenship is now considered a sacred cow by the political establishment, its history is muddled and controversial. As constitutional law scholars have long pointed out, the policy’s story of origin is radically different from the way its public defenders often present it.

According to the usual tale, birthright citizenship was ensconced in American law with the ratification of the 14th Amendment and subsequent Supreme Court decisions in the late 19th century. But as several constitutional scholars have pointed out, the birthright citizenship practice as it currently exists has no basis in our legal history. It was never passed into law by Congress; it was simply taken as a given by Washington bureaucrats.

Birthright citizenship has had disastrous consequences for our nation, giving rise to an entire industry of “birth tourism,” the practice of foreign nationals coming to the United States to bear children, who then automatically receive American citizenship. Recent reporting has found that thousands of Russian women come to Miami every year for birth tourism, for instance, while tens of thousands of Chinese nationals travel to Los Angeles for the same reason. 

The practice is an affront to our national dignity. Citizens of rival powers should not be allowed to effectively “buy” U.S. passports and political participation for the price of a roundtrip airline ticket. In the interest of our national sovereignty, we must follow the president’s lead and try to bring an end to this disastrous policy. 

But that’s not the only problem. Birthright citizenship has also given rise to the phenomenon of “anchor babies,” whereby illegal immigrants have children in order to evade enforcement of America’s immigration laws.  

As U.S. citizens, anchor babies are also eligible for welfare programs, and their illegal immigrant parents can use them to apply for citizenship through family reunification laws. 

President Obama even tried to give parents of anchor babies de facto amnesty with his Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA), which alone would have effectively granted amnesty to nearly 4 million illegal immigrants. Though the order was blocked by the Supreme Court, it was a prime example of the ongoing push by liberals to use birthright citizenship as a back door to advance their open-borders agenda. 

The left clings to birthright citizenship because it is essential to their long-term political strategy, which assumes that supporting illegal immigration will bind Hispanic voters to the Democratic Party. Creating a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal immigrants has long been a key focus of the DNC platform, and the Democrat presidential candidates continue to make ever more brazen appeals to illegal aliens, even promising to provide them with “free” taxpayer-funded healthcare. 

President Trump, on the other hand, knows that birthright citizenship is an affront to American sovereignty. In his now famous words, “either you have a country, or you don’t.”

Tom Tancredo is a former U.S. presidential and Colorado gubernatorial candidate who represented the state’s 6^thCongressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1999 to 2009.