The USMNT Just Rendered an Executive Order Absurd on Live Television

The Party of Small Government Just Tried to Build a National ID System

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In August of 1895, a cook named Wong Kim Ark returned to San Francisco aboard the SS Coptic and was told he could not come home. He had been to China to see his family. He carried papers. He had made the trip before without incident.

This time, customs officials decided he was not American, even though he had been born on Sacramento Street in 1873 to parents who ran a small shop. He spent five months on the ship and in a shed on the waterfront while lawyers argued about him.

His case reached the Supreme Court three years later. The 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark is the reason the Fourteenth Amendment reads the way most Americans think it reads. Every kid handed a birth certificate in a hospital hallway since then owes something to a cook who refused to disembark quietly.

I thought about him on Tuesday when the Court ruled 6 to 3 in Trump v. Barbara. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, called citizenship “the right to have rights.” He said the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to “every free-born person in this land.” “We keep that promise today.”

The Court struck down the executive order Trump signed on his first day back in office. Kavanaugh went a different way on statutory grounds. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch wrote separate dissents. On the constitutional question, the vote was 5 to 4. One seat. That is how close the country came to unwriting Wong Kim Ark on a Tuesday morning.

Then I thought about something else.

Folarin Balogun scored twice against Paraguay in the opening World Cup match. He added another goal against Bosnia and Herzegovina last week.

The Team That Shouldn’t Exist

In the summer of 2001, Florence Balogun boarded a flight from London to New York for a brief family visit. She was seven months pregnant. When the time came to fly back home to England, airline staff took one look at her advanced bump, shook their heads, and invoked a rigid safety policy.

She was barred from boarding. Forced to stay in New York, she gave birth to a baby boy in a Brooklyn hospital. By virtue of a single clause ratified in 1868, that infant became an American citizen.

He is the ultimate poster child for what legal scholars call “birthright serendipity.” He is also the exact target of a sprawling, relentless political war.

When he pulled the shirt to celebrate the second goal, the camera stayed on him for a long time. The stadium in California roared. The crawl at the bottom of the screen mentioned nothing about executive orders.

The head coach is Argentine. Mauricio Pochettino brought his staff with him. Miki D’Agostino from Argentina. Toni Jiménez and Jesús Pérez from Spain. His son Sebastiano, who carries Argentine and Spanish passports. Tim Weah, whose father George won the Ballon d’Or and then became president of Liberia, was eligible to play for four countries and chose the one on his American passport.

Sergiño Dest was born in the Netherlands. Gio Reyna was born in England. Christian Pulisic could have played for Croatia. Cristian Roldan could have played for Guatemala or El Salvador.

Almost half the twenty-six-man roster is either an immigrant, a dual national, or the kid of someone who came here. The team that beat Bosnia 2–0 on Wednesday and plays Belgium in the Round of 16 is a walking, sprinting, headed-in-goal counter-argument to the legal theory that lost by one vote.

Aaron Sorkin could not write this. It is too obvious.

Meanwhile, in the Dairy Aisle…

Trump lost the case. He said so himself on Truth Social, about an hour after the ruling.

screenshot from Truth Social

Then he pivoted immediately to demanding Congress pass a statute doing the same thing. That is the tell. The point was never the executive order. Trump knew he would lose. The executive order was an eighteen-month political ad.

It ran from January 2025 until Tuesday. It generated newspaper coverage every week for a year and a half. It bought the administration eighteen months of headlines that were not about cost of living.

Because cost of living is the actual thing. This was a deflection plain and simple.

Grocery prices in June of 2026 are still up substantially since 2021.

The True Unemployment Rate according to the Ludwig Insititute is 24.6%

image credit lisep.org

Rent is eating more than half the paycheck for one in four American renters, a record high. Health premiums keep climbing. Childcare in most of the country costs more than in-state tuition. Republicans want you to have more kids. They will not tell you where to put them.

If you were the party that ran on affordability and then delivered nothing on it, you would want the news cycle to be about something else.

ANYTHING ELSE!

Preferably something that lets you fly the flag while you do it.

A losing constitutional case is a fantastic distraction, because the loss itself becomes another news cycle. You get to be indignant. You get to demand legislation. You get to name enemies. You get to divide and conquer. You never EVER have to talk about milk.

“But…Other Countries Don’t Do This”

The arguments made in favor of the executive order deserve to be picked apart on their own terms.

The first argument is that the rest of the world does not do this. That is technically correct. About thirty-five countries grant citizenship to anyone born on their soil, and almost all of them are in the Americas. Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and most of the Caribbean, including the country my parents were born in, Trinidad and Tobago.

Europe and Asia largely do not do it. The United Kingdom ended it in 1983. Ireland in 2004. Australia in 1986. India in 1987. New Zealand in 2005. On paper, America is an outlier.

On the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, there is an 1883 poem by Emma Lazarus that includes the phrase “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

America is the country that put that on a monument in the harbor. It advertised for the job. It sold itself for two centuries as the country that would take you in when the country you came from would not.

Every country you are comparing it to made a different marketing decision. When your entire national brand is the huddled masses, you do not get to point at Denmark and say Denmark does not do this.

The second argument is that the system is being abused by people flying here to give birth. Solicitor General John Sauer, arguing the case in front of the Supreme Court, was asked by Chief Justice Roberts how big the birth tourism problem is.

His answer, on the record, was “No one knows for sure.” The highest estimate anyone has produced comes from the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration. Their number is twenty to thirty-three thousand births a year.

Penn State researchers put it between five and ten thousand. The CDC reported 9,576 births in 2024 to women listing a foreign address. Take the biggest number. Twenty-six thousand out of 3.6 million is less than one percent. Penn State put the number closer to five thousand, or 0.14 percent. The rounding error on the abuse is smaller than the abuse.

The third argument is the anchor baby. That people have babies here to import their whole family. A child born in the United States cannot sponsor a parent for a green card until the child turns twenty-one. Not eighteen. Twenty-one.

If the parent is undocumented at the time, they usually hit a ten-year bar for unlawful presence and have to leave the country before they can apply. If a baby was born in Brooklyn today for the express purpose of bringing her mother in, the earliest that mother could hold a green card is 2047, and only if she has not been living here illegally in the meantime. That is not a plan. That is a joke about a plan.

Please Hold While We Verify Your Parents

Even setting the politics aside, imagine for a minute that they had won. The executive order was not aimed at birth tourists specifically. It swept much wider. It targeted every baby born to a parent without citizenship or a green card. That is a much bigger group.

Roughly 3.6 million babies are born in the United States every year. Every one of those births, under the executive order’s regime, would trigger a new question.

Are the parents citizens?

Are the parents legal permanent residents?

Are the parents temporary visa holders?

Are the parents undocumented?

Someone has to check. Someone has to keep the records. Someone has to issue whatever document replaces the birth certificate for the roughly 255,000 babies born each year to noncitizen parents, according to Migration Policy Institute estimates.

Now imagine your house burns down. Or a flood takes the file cabinet. Or your parents divorced, and your mother has the papers in a storage unit in Toledo. You are fifty-eight and applying for Social Security. The clerk needs proof of your parents’ status at the moment of your birth in 1968. Good luck.

Gerald Neuman, a professor of immigration and nationality law at Harvard, put it plainly. If you have a birth certificate showing you were born in the United States, that is how you prove your citizenship. That single document is a small miracle of low-friction government. The alternative is a paper chase for every family in the country.

Immigration attorney Margaret Stock estimated back in 2012 that proving citizenship for a child born overseas cost about sixteen hundred dollars per baby. Her updated 2025 estimate with the National Foundation for American Policy puts the number closer to three thousand. Multiply either by 3.6 million babies a year and you have the beginning of a paper chase the country has never seen.

Then remember which political coalition claims to hate bureaucracy. Then remember that the only stable long-term answer to the paper chase is a national ID card. Which is the thing the same coalition has spent forty years opposing as the mark of the beast.

There is a name for this in comedy. It is called a bit.

There is a name for it in history, too. Martha Jones’s book *Birthright Citizens* tells the story of free Black Baltimoreans in the 1830s and 1840s arguing in courtrooms that they were citizens by virtue of being born on American soil. They lost most of those cases. They kept filing anyway.

The Fourteenth Amendment, when it came into effect in 1868, did not invent birthright citizenship out of thin air. It codified a fight that had already been running for forty years. Wong Kim Ark, in 1898, made the codification stick against the largest exclusion regime the country had ever built at that point. Every time somebody tries to unwind it, they are picking a fight with two centuries of American courtroom stubbornness.

What Makes Someone American?

If the politicians had their way, America would be an exclusive country club where you have to show three generations of membership dues just to get past the front gate. But that isn’t the contract.

There’s no single origin story here. Some of us are American from the first breath. I became one on purpose, and it cost me everything I had before it.Birthright and choice are two sides of the same coin. Nobody needs a bureaucrat’s permission to belong here.

That is the supreme cheat code of our history. It’s the realization that our national identity isn’t a fragile antique we have to protect in a glass case, but a living machine fueled by anyone hungry enough to run it.

Watch the national soccer team and you’re watching the whole world on one field, playing like the house is on fire. They don’t need a court ruling to tell them they belong. They already know.

So when politicians try to turn citizenship into a weapon, they’re forgetting exactly who they’re talking to — two hundred years of people who fought it out in courtrooms, built businesses, worked the line, arrived by birth certificate, by visa, or by boat.

You can keep your executive orders, your Truth Social rants, and your fake distractions from the price of milk.

We are here, we belong here, and we aren’t going anywhere.

Happy 250th, America

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