Is the United States "the only country" with birthright citizenship? No, that's not true: Dozens of countries, most of which are in the Western Hemisphere, have similar laws regarding birthright citizenship, according to the CIA World Factbook. The statement was made in a December 2024 interview with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, but he has said the same thing as far back as 2018.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X on December 8, 2024. It opened:
President Trump says it's still his plan to END birthright citizenship: "We're the only country that has it!"
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Dec 9 17:53:33 2024 UTC)
The 45-second clip posted to X featured Trump promising to end birthright citizenship. At the 00:17 mark, he said, "We're the only country that has it."
The video was a fragment from a one-hour, sixteen-minute interview on "Meet the Press" that aired on NBC on December 8, 2024. The full transcript is available here (archived here). According to the transcript, Trump claimed the U.S. was the "only country" with birthright citizenship three times during the interview:
Well, we're going to have to get it changed. We'll maybe have to go back to the people. But we have to end it. We're the only country that has it, you know...
You know we're the only country that has it. Do you know if somebody sets a foot, just a foot, one foot, you don't need two, on our land, 'Congratulations you are now a citizen of the United States of America.' Yes, we're going to end that because it's ridiculous...
Do you know -- well, if we can, through executive action. I was going to do it through executive action but then we had to fix COVID first, to be honest with you. We have to end it. It's ridiculous. Do you know we're the only country in the world that has it? Do you know that? There's not one other country.
In the United States, birthright citizenship derives from the 14th Amendment (archived here), ratified on July 9, 1868 (archived here). According to the nonprofit immigration group American Immigration Council, this right "guarantees that every child born 'within the jurisdiction of the United States' is a U.S. citizen, regardless of their parent's immigration or citizenship status."
However, the U.S. is not the "only country" with this law, as Trump claimed.
According to the CIA World Factbook (archived here), roughly three dozen countries have similar provisions as of this publication. For example, the list includes Argentina (archived here) and Brazil (archived here). Birthright citizenship, also known as jus soli (archived here), exists in Canada (archived here), too, although that comes with some exceptions (archived here).
Trump has repeated that the U.S. is the only country with birthright citizenship since at least 2018 (archived here).
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Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning Donald Trump can be found here.
