President Trump was right when he said in a 2018 interview with Axios on HBO, “We are the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States … with all of those benefits. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1868 to extend citizenship to freed slaves and their children, but the left has hijacked the Amendment to apply to children born of diplomats, tourists or those that are here illegally.

The Amendment doesn’t say that all persons born in the United States are citizens. It says that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens. It is the conditional phrase that is ignored or misinterpreted by advocates of “birthright” citizenship.

An executive order would have been an important step in eliminating “anchor babies,” but the idea seems to have died in the dark when Trump was more interested in striking a deal with the Democrats over DACA in 2018. But the idea may still have an ember burning.

Trump made mentioned again in August 2019 about ending the practice of anchor babies. Speaking to reporters outside of the White House, Trump said, “We’re looking at that very seriously, birthright citizenship, where you have a baby on our land, you walk over the border, have a baby – congratulations, the baby is now a U.S. citizen. … It’s frankly ridiculous.”

According to Pew Research, around 5 million U.S.-born children younger than 18 were living with at least one unauthorized immigrant parent in 2016, up from around 4.5 million in 2007.

And it is our young adults who are stuck with the bill, unable to afford having their own families. Global think tanks that help craft public policy perpetually press the theory that Western nations need more migration to prop up sagging birth rates. Problem is, it just isn’t true.

In the United States, for example, more than $100 billion per year is spent to support illegal aliens and their children on welfare programs and other subsidies. This huge sum of money could be redirected to young married couples so they can actually afford to bear and raise children.

Although I would support an executive order to end birthright citizenship to illegals or anyone here on a temporary visa, if we really want to encourage Americans to procreate, we must have the courts declare that being born in the United States by parents who are not citizens or are here only on a temporary legal status, are not granted automatic U.S. Citizenship. It is the only way to end the debate and begin to enact solid policies that support fertility by U.S. citizens.

Conservative purists would argue that government shouldn’t provide subsidies of any type to any one group of Americans–including families–but the truth is that we already do this for non-citizens. Policies that support illegal aliens are the goody bags being handed out to foreign and illegal families at the expense of our own citizenship.

In Hungary, where birth rates are falling by 32,000 per year, Prime Minister Victor Orban proposed paying citizens to become parents by offering $35,000 loans that are to be canceled once they have three children. Hungarian women with four or more children would be exempted for life from paying income tax.

Why the loans? Because having children is expensive. In the United States, young people already struggling with the high cost of housing, health care and student loans cannot afford to have children or are postponing having a family.

According to an annual Care.com survey, 70 percent of families are paying rates the government defines as unaffordable, and nearly half of families spend 15 percent or more of their household income on care. This does not support an increase in U.S. birth rates.

“In a year that saw the U.S. General fertility rate decline by 2 percent in 2018 to 59.1 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 from 60.3 in 2017, the Care survey found that 63 percent, nearly the same share of respondents, said they made career/workplace changes in order to afford child care.

Democrats, of course, would oppose any such legislation that actually helps families. They don’t want to cede their current power over shaping the minds of our children within the educational system. Enacting policies that strengthened the family would go against everything progressives stand for, which was clearly laid out in Hillary Clinton’s 1996 family manifesto, “It Takes a Village.”

Hillary believes that children are raised not just by their parents, but others around them. According to Hillary, all of society—schools, business and government—have an obligation to consider how to impact children.

But rather than supporting the “it takes a village model,” just imagine paying U.S. citizens to stay home and actually raise their own children if they chose to rather than paying for children born to foreigners on American soil or illegals.

If we are concerned about fertility, we need to make it easier to afford children and we must demand policies that support American families, not children of illegal immigrants and foreigners who hold temporary visas or are coming to the United States simply to give birth.