The team’s good showing so far has garnered support from all sides, even though, as the Guardian noted, birthright citizenship helped land at least three players on the USMNT, including top scorer Folarin Balogun.
Balogun was born in New York City in 2001 to Nigerian parents who were traveling to the U.S. from London. As a result, he was granted U.S. citizenship.
On Wednesday, a reporter asked Johnson how to square the team’s success with the current efforts to effectively do away with birthright citizenship as guaranteed in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment — and he put a lot of dressing on his word salad of an answer.
“Like all good things, it can be abused, and birthright citizenship goes back to the root of the country, the history of the tradition,” he said. “You look at the original intent of the Constitution and the founders and what they were doing, of course … they were facing a very different set of circumstances than we’re facing now.”
Johnson then claimed that birthright citizenship has “been abused in recent years” because “people have been literally just come over the border just to have a baby so that they can, you know, avail themselves of the social welfare system of America,” which he called “the most benevolent nation in the history of the world.”
Trump issued an executive order to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and temporary residents on the first day of his second term. It was challenged in court, and the Supreme Court heard arguments against the policy earlier this spring.
Although justices seemed skeptical back in April, Johnson predicted the majority conservative court would look at the arguments “as originalists, as they are, as textualists,” and added, “I think they’re also going to consider the factors that are at issue and the strength and stability of the country.”
Johnson eventually returned to the reporter’s original question about the dichotomy between the administration celebrating the U.S. team’s World Cup wins and its anti-immigration stance.
“So I don’t think it’s inconsistent at all. I think we can celebrate immigration — legal immigration. We are a nation of immigrants, as we all recognize,” he said.
“My grandfather came over on a boat from Sicily with eight siblings, and started a fruit stand — and I’m the Speaker of the House,” he added. “Only in America.”
Johnson said that while America embraces legal immigration as “part of our history,” he stressed that the folks who come here need to “follow the spirit and the letter of the law,” as well as “assimilate to our country and not try to transplant Sharia law and all these other cra… things, and change who we are.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Trump’s birthright citizenship order could come any day now. The USMNT’s next game is on Thursday against Turkey.