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And yet the proposed new rule is not unheard of, or especially offensive. Canada and the U.S. are in fact unusual among developed countries in granting citizenship at birth. Everywhere else outside the New World attaches some blood requirement. To be sure, the proposal looks like overkill: there are simpler ways to crack down on birth tourism, so far as it is a problem, without the risk of making the children in question — many born of permanent residents, refugee claimants and others with a legitimate reason to be here — stateless. But “division and hate”? Come on.

It’s odd seeing progressives clasping birthright citizenship to their bosoms, as it is scarcely more defensible in moral terms than blood citizenship. Though commonly painted as opposites — jus soli vs jus sanguinis, to use the Roman legal terms everyone takes care to trot out at some point in these pieces — they are in fact more alike as doctrines of inherited privilege, with all of the arbitrariness that implies. One asks who your parents were, the other where you were born, but both assign the right to citizenship based on nothing so much as the accident of birth.

Each gives rise to its own anomalies. Until comparatively recently, German law held that no one could become a citizen who was not of German blood, even if they and their forebears had been living in the country for generations. By contrast, it is enough in Canadian law to have been here for one day — your birthday — to be a citizen in perpetuity, even if you spend the rest of your life abroad. Stranger still, your children, though they never set foot in the country, will also automatically be citizens (as, until the last Conservative government changed the law, were their children, and theirs, and so on): our system combines jus soli with jus sanguinis.