The United States is notable for an almost unique quirk of its (current) laws, which automatically grant citizenship to anybody who is born within the country. This completely regardless of the circumstances of the birth.
Indeed, if for example, say, a pregnant Belgian woman just happens to be visiting the United States for a week as a tourist, and she happens to go into labor and give birth when there, the child will be automatically given US citizenship merely because of the location where the child was born, and no other reason.
And, indeed, the United States is probably the only country in the world that has this quirk (or, at a minimum, is one of the extremely few that do.) Pretty much no other country in the world has this, and citizenship is not granted automatically even if you are born in the country.
This is the result of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
The current argument about changing this is that, essentially, the amendment was poorly worded and that its literal interpretation is not what the spirit of the amendment was originally intended to be. That's because of the context under which the amendment was added: It was added at the same time as all the other amendments that made slavery illegal in the country (indeed, the 14th Amendment is right in the middle of all those that were added during the emancipation), and quite clearly the intent was to grant citizenship to all the freed slaves.
But, as it turns out, the amendment is too broadly worded and, probably unintentionally, its literal reading grants citizenship to every single person born within the borders of the country regardless of context.
And that's not just within the Continental United States. It's any place that officially belongs to the United States, that's under the jurisdiction of the country. It doesn't matter if it's some microscopic uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean: If it belongs to the United States, the same law applies there.
And yes, this is being constantly abused, and has been abused for decades and decades, perhaps centuries. One of the most notable countries whose citizens abuse this loophole is China. Indeed, it's estimated that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Chinese people have got US citizenship by their parents traveling to some tiny island in the Pacific that belongs to the US to give birth there, for this explicit purpose.
And while China might be the most notable example, it's by far not the only one.
Changing this law only makes sense. It's pretty much unique in the entire world, and makes little sense. No other country does this, and the fact that the US does is most likely the result of unintentionally poor wording or poor foresight by the people who wrote that amendment. (As mentioned, it's quite clear by the context that their intent was to give freed slaves citizenship, not the entire world.)
(Curiously, this quirk in American law has caused it to become a somewhat widespread misconception, even urban legend. A lot of people believe that the same principle applies to all countries. In other words, if you want your child to get, say, Spanish citizenship, then the mother can go give birth in Spain. However, that's not how it works. It only works in the United States.)
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