Americanswers... on 5 Live! Will Trump's new challenge to birthright citizenship work?

**Justin Webb** (0:00)
In spite of a Supreme Court ruling, Donald Trump is not ready, it seems, to give up on his plans to limit birthright citizenship to the United States. In other words, if you're born in America, you are American by right. So now he's issued two new executive orders. What is the new strategy? Also, what has Hunter Biden been saying about his dad, former president, of course, Joe Biden's decision to grant him a pardon, and indeed the current state of Joe Biden's health? We have been answering all your questions on Five Live with Matt Chorley. Welcome to American answers.

**Marianna Spring** (0:36)
Americast Americast from BBC News.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:39)
You hear that sound? Oh, I think when I hear that sound, it reminds me of money.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:44)
We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it. This is a big cover-up and this administration is engaged in it.

**Justin Webb** (0:52)
This guy has Trump derangement syndrome.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:54)
I have four words for you.

**Matt Chorley** (1:03)
Okay, we've got a lot that we want to try and get through on Americast today. Let's dive straight in with a question from Jonathan in Hampshire. He says, Trump and denying birthright citizenship. Is he trying to get at illegal immigrants and people who travel to the USA just to give birth?
Does he realize this might apply to some of his own children? So this, we've got a clip, actually. This is President Trump in the Oval Office last week when he signed two new executive orders on birthright citizenship.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:31)
We had a very unfortunate decision in the Supreme Court concerning, birthright was close but a very, very unfortunate decision. So we're making adjustments because it's very unfair. This was done for a different reason. This was done right after the Civil War. This was for the babies of slaves.
And what's happening now, people are building businesses around it from, wealthy people are building businesses around birthright citizenship. That's not the way we're supposed to work. It's a disgrace. They're buying their way in. And we're not going to let it happen.

**Matt Chorley** (2:08)
So Sarah, this has obviously been something he's tried before. What's different this time, Matt?

**Sarah Smith** (2:13)
So he's using a different authority to do this because after the Supreme Court struck down the executive order he had signed, trying to end all birthright citizenship. He's now looking at different laws to find a different way to achieve the same result and hope that this would be judged to be constitutional. So there's two things he's trying to do, which is to expand the definition of people in America for whom giving birth here doesn't count towards birthright citizenship. So that's already the case for people on certain kinds of visas or diplomats, for instance, if you're working in an embassy here and you're a foreign citizen, your child doesn't automatically get citizenship for being born here. The bigger one is banning what he calls birthright tourism, the practice of apparently pregnant women traveling to the United States with the specific intention of giving birth on US soil and therefore achieving US citizenship for their children. Now, they claimed that hundreds of thousands of women are doing this every year and that in fact there's an entire industry around it with Chinese people and businesses there and bringing Chinese people to give birth in the West Coast, that there's a hub of Russian based businesses bringing Russian women to the United States to give birth. It does happen. It's not clear though that there's necessarily the numbers that Donald Trump was claiming because when they went up in front of the Supreme Court, the Solicitor General said they had no idea how many women do this every year and now he says it's hundreds of thousands. And it's going to be challenged in court, inevitably. This will end up going all the way up to the Supreme Court again.
But it's just as he has done before, Donald Trump's attempt to just use a different mechanism to achieve what the Supreme Court had told him he couldn't do with an executive order.

**Matt Chorley** (4:00)
Where does this go then, Justin? Because if he keeps trying to do it and then it actually doesn't work. I mean, does he get the credit from the people who want him to do it or does it become another thing which he talks about but can't achieve?

**Justin Webb** (4:11)
Initially, when he first signed the order in those first few days, it felt goodness. He's really intending to do stuff that people say, oh, you can't do that and he's going to do it. This idea of agency, which so much of Trump is about. But actually, if he keeps trying and keeps failing, I'm not sure it does much for agency really, does it? And I mean, I've got tattooed across my chest, the 14th Amendment. All persons born or naturalized in the United States subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States. That's what it says. And it's quite difficult to get around that. And the risk, I think, for him this time, as Sarah says, it goes to the Supreme Court and even when it is, and he is aiming, it is aimed mainly actually at wealthy people because illegal immigrants coming across the southern border, they're in desperate straits anyway, and they're not going to have timed it right to have the child, etc.