Children of immigrants made Ohio what it is

By the time my 18-year-old grandmother set off alone on a grueling ocean voyage to America from Sačurov in eastern Slovakia, the United States had severely limited the number of people from eastern and southern Europe who could enter the country. It was at the height of the eugenics movement and growing nativism in the U.S. after WWI. Congress had passed increasingly restrictive immigration laws that put a new emphasis on "desirables" and "undesirables" in deciding who was allowed to emigrate from where. The Senate sponsor of the 1924 Immigration Act, Republican David Reed of Pennsylvania, wrote that the law's goal was to make the United States a more "homogenous" country. Mass immigration threatened to "dilute" that uniformity (sound familiar?) so national origins quotas were introduced to greatly curb or ban any group deemed not American enough or not expected to readily fuse with the native-born population. The xenophobic policies of the early 20th century — making a toxic resurgence in 2025 — slammed the door on Slavic immigrants who spoke strange languages and didn't easily assimilate. The only reason a Slovak teenager with a basket trunk of belongings could find her way to Cleveland, Ohio was because she had been born in America. Years earlier, her parents had filed through Ellis Island with thousands of other immigrants bound for jobs in the industrial Midwest. They settled in Pa. but did not became U.S. citizens. Eventually the tug of familial ties in Sačurov drug the family back home to their rural village. Years later, my grandmother, prodded by her Slovak mother, would return to redeem her birthright citizenship. It was all she had to start a new life in Ohio but more than the rest of her foreign-born family, save a younger brother, to come to the U.S. The young woman who couldn't speak a lick of English was an American citizen by birth — same as every other Ohioan who came into the world on American soil. The Constitution affirms that unconditional right even if Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost doesn't. Yost signed on to a brief supporting Trump's executive order to end birthright citizenship. He was running for governor at the time and angling for a Trump endorsement that went to Vivek Ramaswamy. But Yost joined 16 GOP attorneys general to defend the indefensible; excluding babies born to undocumented immigrants and people with temporary status in the U.S. from the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause. In essence, the Republican AGs endorsed the power of one man to decide who, among those born in this country, is worthy of citizenship. It was grotesque sycophancy in service to a lawless megalomaniac high on his own supply of unchecked tyranny. Under the Trump criteria — abolishing 150 years of precedent and a longtime policy of unrestricted birthright citizenship — any baby born in the U.S. after his executive order would need to have at least one parent who is a citizen or lawful permanent resident to qualify as a citizen. That would exclude my grandmother today as a U.S.-born citizen to noncitizen parents and probably the grandparents of many other Ohioans born in America were they to be judged by the same standards Yost advocated in court. His brief argued that, despite plain text to the contrary, the Constitution "did not confer citizenship to children born to individuals who were not lawfully and permanently present in the United States." Moreover, Yost and the others asserted, states like Ohio are being harmed because babies who "likely would have been born in a different country" if it weren't for birthright citizenship, may "participate in state welfare programs…and receive state healthcare…and obtain a driver's license." Because they are American citizens "born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." Whether a U.S.-born child's parents are U.S citizens, stressed the ACLU, "does not impact whether that child is a citizen." That principle, upheld in a Supreme Court case more than 100 years ago, confirmed that "a child born in the U.S. to Chinese parents — who at the time were prohibited from becoming U.S. citizens — was a citizen under the 14th Amendment." But the Supreme Court in 2025, stacked with Trump-appointed justices bent on giving him free reign to ignore the rule of law, just slapped down federal courts who had issued nationwide injunctions to stop Trump from implementing his clearly unconstitutional executive order. The court's right-wing majority basically made birthright citizenship a state by state, case by case, class-action or individual plaintiff patchwork of litigation destined to wind through lower courts for who-knows-how-long. In the meantime, Trump is free to roll out orders on which U.S.-born child will be denied the citizenship guaranteed to them by law in states that don't object. Yost won't object to natural-born Americans in Ohio being deprived of their rights under the 14th Amendment. The Trump bootlicker applauded those efforts and derided the judges who dared block them. "Democratically enacted laws (which executive orders are not) cannot be put on hold by judges who think they are kings," said Yost with blind irony, considering the self-described king in the White House. "Americans' freedom depends on each part of the government staying in its lane," he puffed. But apparently not on fealty to the Constitution from Ohio's chief law enforcement officer.