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In A Nutshell
- Ending birthright citizenship would expand the unauthorized population by up to 6.4 million U.S.-born children by 2050, the opposite of its stated goal.
- Latino immigrants would bear the largest raw impact, accounting for nearly 80% of unauthorized births in the short term.
- Asian immigrants face the steepest relative impact, projected at 41 unauthorized births per 1,000 unauthorized residents, more than double the rate for Latinos.
- The order targets children of temporary visa holders like H-1B workers and students, not just undocumented immigrants, which drives the disproportionate impact on Asian communities.
More than six million babies could be born on American soil without U.S. citizenship over the next 25 years if the Trump administration’s birthright citizenship order takes effect, new research projects. Most would be Latino. But the group facing the steepest blow per capita may catch many people off guard: Asian immigrants.
That finding comes from a study published in the journal Demography by Penn State researchers Jennifer Van Hook and A. Nicole Kreisberg. Using population projection models, they traced how the order would reshape American demographics through 2050, and what they found complicates the policy’s stated goal of reducing unauthorized immigration.
On Inauguration Day 2025, President Trump signed an executive order targeting children born on U.S. soil to mothers who are either unauthorized immigrants or temporary visa holders, including students and H-1B workers, when the father is also not a citizen or lawful permanent resident. Since 1868, the 14th Amendment has guaranteed citizenship to nearly everyone born here, making the U.S. one of the few countries that grants automatic citizenship by birthplace. Six federal courts blocked the order between June 2025 and January 2026, and the Supreme Court is now weighing its constitutionality.
How Ending Birthright Citizenship Would Backfire at Scale
Under the order’s full language, researchers project 6.4 million unauthorized births between 2025 and 2050, with more than 3.4 million of those children still living in the U.S. at midcentury. “Unauthorized” is a research shorthand; the order itself never assigns these children a formal legal category. Even in the most extreme scenario modeled, one in which all new unauthorized migration stops entirely and deportation rates double, 2.3 million babies would still be born here without citizenship, and 1.2 million would remain by 2050.
Latinos, who make up the largest share of today’s unauthorized population, would account for roughly 78% of unauthorized births in the short term and more than 90% of unauthorized U.S.-born residents by 2050. Higher birth rates and lower rates of return migration mean their U.S.-born children are more likely to stay. By midcentury, the unauthorized Latino population is projected to be 29% larger than it would be under current law.
Trump framed the order partly around so-called “birth tourism,” in which foreign nationals travel to the U.S. specifically to give birth. Fewer than 9,000 foreign pregnant visitors make that trip each year, representing about 1% of all births to foreign-born parents. The populations who would actually absorb the weight of this policy are vastly larger and far more embedded in American life.
Why Birthright Citizenship Would Hit Asian Immigrants Disproportionately Hard
Asian immigrants would face the largest unauthorized birth rate of any group under the order, not because of undocumented border crossings, but because of how the order is written.
About 70% of Asians living in the U.S. without permanent resident status are here on temporary nonimmigrant visas. Among Latinos, that figure is less than 10%. Because the order strips citizenship from children born to nonimmigrant parents, it produces a dynamic often overlooked in the broader immigration debate. Researchers project roughly 41 unauthorized births per 1,000 unauthorized Asian residents under the full order, compared with 17 per 1,000 among Latinos. Without the visa-holder provision, the Asian figure drops to just 7.7, meaning the extension to visa holders, not the crackdown on undocumented immigrants, drives most of the impact on Asian families.
Graduate students from India or South Korea, software engineers on H-1B visas, academics on employment visas: under the order, a child born to any of them on American soil would have no guaranteed legal status here. Many of these families may eventually return home, given that visa holders already leave the U.S. at higher rates. But while they remain, their U.S.-born children would live in legal limbo, and if those children do leave, the order would restrict their ability to return as adults.
What Children Affected by Birthright Citizenship Restrictions Would Actually Face
Here’s a question the executive order never answers: what legal status would these children actually hold? It doesn’t say, and researchers flag that ambiguity as significant. Children denied birthright citizenship would likely face limited access to health care, education, and social services, along with the persistent risk of detention and deportation, all despite having been born in the United States. Research consistently shows that when unauthorized status touches one household member, it raises stress and limits opportunity for the entire family.
For Latino communities, a longer-term concern looms. As unauthorized status reaches into second- and even third-generation families, the line between Latino ethnicity and immigration status grows harder to distinguish. Researchers warn this could reinforce the false assumption that all Latino immigrants are undocumented, potentially fueling racial profiling, job discrimination, and criminalization across a community that spans multiple generations of American-born residents.
About 40% of foreign-born students currently stay in the United States permanently. If skilled workers and international students start leaving rather than raising children in legal uncertainty, the country could face what the paper describes as a “reverse brain drain,” an outcome that works directly against immigration policies designed to attract and keep highly educated workers.
A policy built to reduce unauthorized immigration could, by these projections, leave millions of people born here growing up without a clear legal identity in the only country they’ve ever known.
Disclaimer: This article is based on a peer-reviewed demographic study. All population figures are model-based projections, not observed outcomes, and are subject to assumptions about future migration patterns. Nothing in this article constitutes legal advice.
Paper Notes
Limitations
Because the executive order had not been implemented at the time of publication, Van Hook and Kreisberg could not measure its actual effects on future migration behavior. Whether the order would deter new unauthorized arrivals or accelerate departures remains unknown. Sensitivity analyses run across a wide range of migration scenarios, including full stops on new unauthorized migration and doubled deportation rates, found that even under the most extreme assumptions, millions of births and residents would still be affected. A second limitation is that projections assume a nationwide policy change and do not model potential state-by-state variation in enforcement, though a Supreme Court ruling would likely resolve that question. A third is that the precise legal status denied children would hold remains undefined in the executive order itself, adding uncertainty to any downstream estimates of their rights and access to services.
Funding and Disclosures
This research was supported in part by grant P2CHD041025 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and by The Pennsylvania State University and its Social Science Research Institute. No conflicts of interest were disclosed.
Publication Details
“Ending Birthright Citizenship Would Have Disparate Impacts on U.S.-born Children of Asian and Latino Immigrants” was authored by Jennifer Van Hook and A. Nicole Kreisberg, both of the Department of Sociology and Criminology at The Pennsylvania State University. Van Hook also holds an appointment at Penn State’s Population Research Institute; Kreisberg holds a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy. Published as an advance publication in Demography, 2026. DOI: 10.1215/00703370-12530315.
The obvious solution is to end birthright citizenship when parents are here illegally, but establish it for permanent residents.
This article, unlike most StudyFinds reports, is highly political. Its timing and content clearly place it as supportive of one side in the current legal dispute over birthright citizenship. The original paper of course stands on its own, but the language of the StudyFinds report should be scrupulously neutral, and to the extent that the political arguments must be mentioned, should equally present both sides of those arguments. IMO no effort was made to achieve that editorial standard.