By 2050, a single policy change now before the Supreme Court could leave 3.4 million people living in the United States without citizenship, born on American soil to parents who arrived legally, on student visas and work permits, doing everything, as demographers at Penn State put it, exactly the right way. The 6.4 million unauthorized births the new modeling projects over the next 25 years would not mostly come from families who crossed borders without documents. A substantial and somewhat overlooked portion would come from the children of software engineers on H-1B visas, postdoctoral researchers on J-1s, and graduate students on F-1s who simply haven’t waited long enough in the green card queue. The gap between arriving legally and acquiring permanent residency can span a decade or more, and that gap, under the proposed policy, is where citizenship disappears.
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, made birthright citizenship part of the constitutional fabric of the United States. The Supreme Court is due to hear arguments challenging that interpretation in April.
Jennifer Van Hook, a distinguished professor of sociology and demography at Penn State who directs the university’s Population Research Institute, and her colleague Nicole Kreisberg, an assistant professor of public policy, built three scenarios to model what happens if that interpretation changes. The first, a status quo baseline, assumes the current law holds and all children born on U.S. soil become citizens. The second strips citizenship from children born to two undocumented parents. The third, which mirrors the language of the policy being argued before the court, goes further: it also removes citizenship from children born to two parents on nonimmigrant visas, including students and temporary workers, or to one undocumented and one nonimmigrant parent. That third scenario is where the numbers change most sharply, and where the story for Asian immigrants diverges dramatically from the story for Latino immigrants.
Latinos, by sheer population size, account for the largest absolute numbers. Under the broadest scenario, they would represent 93 percent of the unauthorized U.S.-born population by 2050.
But the relative surge among Asian communities tells a different story, and in some ways a more counterintuitive one. The researchers found 41 unauthorized births per 1,000 Asians currently without legal status, compared to 17 per 1,000 Latinos in the same situation. A fivefold proportional increase. The reason, Van Hook and Kreisberg found, is structural: roughly half of all Asians who arrive on student visas end up staying permanently, and they are arriving, in the researchers’ framing, in the middle of the family-building years of their lives. The wait for a green card, particularly for nationals of India and China, routinely stretches ten to twenty years. During that time, under the new policy, any children born to them would accrue no citizenship at all.
To build the projections, Van Hook and Kreisberg first estimated the existing undocumented population by comparing American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau against legal residency figures from the Department of Homeland Security, then cross-referenced census and immigration data from countries including Mexico to compensate for the well-documented undercounting of undocumented individuals in official surveys. They then modeled demographic change forward to 2050, factoring in age- and group-specific fertility, mortality, and migration rates under each scenario.
The economic dimension of their argument draws on a July 2024 Congressional Budget Office report, a nonpartisan projection, which estimated that the immigration surge of the first half of the 2020s would add roughly $8.9 trillion to U.S. GDP over the following decade, largely through wages subject to payroll and income taxes. Van Hook’s argument is not simply humanitarian. It is, at least in part, a structural one about where the American labor force is going. The country depends heavily on a highly educated workforce for its information economy, she argues, and building legal barriers into the childhoods of millions of children born to that workforce undermines the investment already made in training them.
The brain drain possibility compounds that concern. If skilled workers on temporary visas learn that children born during their tenure in the United States will have no legal status, some will make different calculations about where to build their lives. As Van Hook put it, “Higher education pours a lot of resources into educating students, including our international students.” Pushing those students out of the country immediately after that investment closes the loop badly, she said.
The asymmetry between absolute and relative impact matters for how the policy gets discussed. When critics assess who bears the burden of ending birthright citizenship, the focus almost always lands on undocumented Latino families, partly because the numbers are largest there and partly because that is the political framing the debate has inherited. But the Penn State modeling suggests the policy, as written, reaches well beyond that population.
Kreisberg noted that what the Scenario 2 modeling captures is the creation of an undocumented population from families who navigated legal pathways. They got the visa. They paid the fees. They are in the queue. Their children, under the proposed change, would be born stateless in the country where their parents are lawfully present.
History offers some context for how unusual that outcome would be. The 14th Amendment was written partly in response to the Dred Scott decision, which had held that no Black person could be a citizen of the United States regardless of birth. The amendment was designed to close exactly that kind of legal gap by making the soil itself determinative. Whether the current Supreme Court will read its language as permitting restrictions on that principle is something the country won’t know until the arguments are made in April. What the Penn State projections do, regardless of how the legal question is resolved, is make the demographic scale of the answer visible before the ruling arrives.
The projections stop at 2050. Whatever the number actually looks like in that year will depend on fertility rates, migration patterns, and the behavior of families who haven’t made their decisions yet. But the modeling gives policymakers something they rarely have when courts reshape foundational law: a reasonably specific sense of who gets created, and who gets left out, by the line they are drawing.
DOI: 10.1215/00703370-12530315
If birthright citizenship ends, will it apply to children already born?
The Penn State study models future births from the point a policy change takes effect, not existing citizens. However, the broader legal uncertainty is real: depending on how any executive order or court ruling is worded, questions about retroactive application could arise. The researchers focus on the forward-looking population effects, which are themselves substantial enough to warrant attention before the court rules in April.
Why do Asian immigrants face a higher relative increase than Latino immigrants?
It comes down to visa type and timing. Large numbers of Asian immigrants arrive on temporary student and work visas and then spend years, sometimes more than a decade, waiting for permanent residency. The proposed policy would strip citizenship from children born during that waiting period, even though the parents are in the country legally. The rate of unauthorized births per 1,000 Asians without legal status would be more than double that of Latinos in the same category, because such a large share of Asian immigrants are legally present but not yet permanent residents when they have children.
Is the 6.4 million figure a worst-case scenario or a likely outcome?
It reflects the broadest scenario the researchers modeled, which mirrors the language of the policy currently being argued before the Supreme Court. That scenario removes citizenship from children born to undocumented parents and from children born to parents on nonimmigrant visas. The 5.3 million figure applies to the narrower scenario affecting only children of two undocumented parents. Which scenario becomes law, if any, determines which number is closer to reality.
Could ending birthright citizenship cause a brain drain?
The Penn State researchers raise this possibility explicitly. Highly skilled workers on temporary visas who know their children will have no citizenship may choose to relocate before having families, taking their skills and their training elsewhere. The Congressional Budget Office projected in 2024 that recent immigration would add $8.9 trillion to GDP over a decade, driven heavily by educated workers in taxable employment. A policy that encourages that population to leave before their children are born could chip away at that projection.
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