United States President-elect Donald Trump said he would seek to end “birthright citizenship” in his country. The rule entails giving citizenship to anyone born in the country irrespective of their parents’ immigration status, NBC News reported on Sunday.
Trump indicated that his government may try to amend the country’s constitution to reflect the rule change. The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution says that all persons born in the country are citizens.
“We have to maybe go back to the people, and we have to end it,” the Republican leader said in an interview to NBC News, adding that he plans to take executive action to implement the proposal.
The move would involve taking away the citizenship rights of those born in the United States to parents staying in the country without valid documents.
The US president-elect incorrectly claimed that only the United States has birthright citizenship. According to a review by the United States Library of Congress, over 30 countries – including Canada and Brazil – provide birthright citizenship.
Trump also said that he would deport families with mixed immigration status, or families in which children were in the United States legally but the parents did not have the requisite documents.
“I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together, and you have to send them all back,” Trump said.
Trump also said he wanted to “work something out” with regards to “Dreamers”, or those who immigrated to the country as children at a very young age and have since grown up in the United States for 20 years or more.
“Many of these are middle-aged people now,” Trump said. “They don’t even speak the language of their country. And yes, we’re going to do something about the Dreamers.”
The interview was Trump’s first broadcast network interview since he won the United States presidential election last month. After winning the election, he promised to declare a national emergency to tackle undocumented immigration and enact a mass deportation programme.
Trump, however, told NBC News that his administration would aim to make it easy for people to immigrate to the United States legally. “The people that have been treated very unfairly are the people that have been on line for ten years to come into the country,” he said.
He emphasised that those seeking US citizenship “will have to pass the test” to show that they deserve the status. “They have to be able to tell you what the Statue of Liberty is,” he said. “They have to tell you a little bit about our country. They have to love our country.”
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