Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld birthright citizenship, which was a legal abomination. But that does not mean that America is doomed to a future of open immigration. To understand what we can and should do, we have to understand what went wrong with immigration in the United States. The answer is not Supreme Court decisions. What went wrong with immigration in the United States was the elected branches of government: legislative and executive policy. Over the decades, our legislators and presidents have let in tens of millions of people who should not be in the country. That needs to stop, and some of it needs to be reversed. So let’s start with a question: if we want to understand America’s immigration policy, where exactly do you think it broke down? The percentage of immigrants of the total U.S. population from 1850 to essentially 1930 was well north of 10%, quite high. Very few people think about immigration in that period as breaking America. It obviously created significant social problems, but nobody tends to think of that period in American life between 1850 and 1930 as a time that wrecked what America was. And then the share of immigrants in the U.S. population dropped sharply between 1930 and essentially 1970. Then it spiked again. If you look at the immigrant share of the U.S. population, it was 9.7% in 1850. In 1890, it rose to almost 15%. People don’t tend to think of this as a bad time for America because of immigration. Yes, there were social concerns, but overall, in retrospect, we don’t see this as a time when America was “being hollowed out.” From 1930 onward, that percentage declined sharply from well north of 10% to 4.7% in 1970. And now it has spiked up again to roughly 14% as of 2022. So what changed? We tend to think of immigration as a massive problem, but we didn’t think of immigration as a massive problem in 1900 when the percentage was about the same. We need a quick history lesson here on the nature of American immigration. What changed is the nature of American immigration, not the sheer number. America is a land of people who came to settle an unsettled wilderness, and they came from Europe, in large measure. There were no welfare programs. They didn’t come here to take advantage of existing welfare programs. In 1850, the top five foreign-born populations were Ireland, Germany, the U.K., Canada, and France. Move forward to 1880, and you can see that the pattern remains the same, except for massive Chinese immigration to the West Coast. But even that massive Chinese immigration to the West Coast was not in the top five in terms of foreign-born population. In 1880, when a substantial percentage of Americans were immigrants, the top five foreign-born populations were Germany, Ireland, the U.K., Canada, and Sweden. Move forward again: 1910. In 1910, the top five foreign-born populations were Germany, Russia, Ireland, Italy, and the U.K. — still mostly European immigrants. Move forward to 1990: Things have shifted quite a bit. It turns out that number one with a bullet is Mexico. A huge, huge percentage of immigrants were now coming from Mexico. In 1990, 4.26 million immigrants were from Mexico. The next highest number was 910,000 people from the Philippines. You may notice that neither of those countries is European. 740,000 from Canada, 740,000 from Cuba. Germany clocked in at a very low number five. So the source of the immigration had radically shifted. Now move forward to 2022. What you can see is that the entire country was blanketed with immigrants from India, China, the Philippines, El Salvador, and Mexico. In 2022, the top five foreign-born populations by country of origin were: 10.6 million immigrants from Mexico, 2.83 million immigrants from India, 2.23 million from China, 2.01 million from the Philippines, and 1.42 million from El Salvador. That is a giant shift in the nature of the places people are coming from. To pretend that gigantic numbers of Mexican immigrants are going to be the same as gigantic numbers of German, Irish, or British immigrants is silly. The same thing for India, the same thing for China. That is not a case against any individual immigrant. It is just a fact. When you import large numbers of people from cultures that don’t cohere with the core culture of the United States — which is an English/Protestant culture from the beginning — then it’s going to be harder to integrate those people. Add to that the fact that from the very beginning, our immigration programs were rooted in the idea that there was no welfare; you came here for the adventure. You came here because you wanted a better life, not because you wanted welfare benefits. Once you add welfare benefits on top, the kinds of people who are coming here change. This is the difference between opening a Michelin-star bakery — where your clientele is going to be a certain type of person — and opening a donut shop, and you put in the window “free donut”: there will be a different type of person who shows up to the donut shop. If you look at the history of American immigration, you can see why there was a gigantic wave of immigration and then a dip: congressional action. It is not as though Congress has not acted before. In 1882, Congress passed what was called the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1880, China was the number one source of immigration, raising concerns in Congress. Thus, in 1882, they passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which actually barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States for 10 years and was later extended to bar Chinese immigrants from naturalization entirely. By 1910, there was an incredible uptick in immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. So the Immigration Act of 1917 was passed, creating a barred zone extending from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, from which no immigrants were permitted, and instituting literacy tests for people entering the country. In 1921, the Emergency Quota Act was the first federal law to set numerical limits on immigration. The goal was to keep people coming in at very low levels from countries we had already allowed entry. In 1924, the National Origins Act, the Immigration Act, tightened it still further, intentionally barring immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and banning virtually all immigration from Asia. You see a giant drop in the share of immigrants in the American population between then and essentially 1965. And then something seminal happened: the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which radically changed the nature of immigration in the United States. We went from a bunch of European immigrants to a bunch of immigrants from places like El Salvador, Mexico, China, and the Philippines, etc. That act was pushed by Senator Ted Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson and repealed the quota system entirely. That meant a radical uptick of immigrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and South America. It had a no-discrimination clause that said no person could be discriminated against in the issuance of any visa because of race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or residence. Previously, we had two types of visas: permanent and temporary. We had limits on temporary visas. But that was jettisoned under the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. It also created a seven-tiered preference system designed to reunify families of U.S. citizens and legal residents. This created massive illegal immigration because there was a cap that was placed on Western Hemisphere immigration, but there was no guest worker program. Instead, people started crossing the border en masse and just staying. Add on top of that the gigantic welfare systems that were created by LBJ’s Great Society programs and the accessibility of those welfare systems to illegal immigrants, and you get the free donut shop, where you have people coming across the border because the benefits here are great. You’ll not just get a better job; you will also have access to American systems. Everyone wants to get in; the United States is a great place. But you will draw a different type of clientele depending on whether you’re the free donut shop or the Michelin-star restaurant. When you change the math, when you pay people, when you give them free money so they don’t have to integrate, they don’t have to assimilate by nature, and you change the system pretending that all cultures are equally capable of mass migration to the United States, you end up with the current system of immigration in the United States. You’ll notice that throughout this litany of immigration history, the vast majority of this action is either bad congressional or presidential action — such as Joe Biden opening the border and widely refusing to enforce immigration law — or judicial actions that are likely reversible at the Supreme Court level today. So what is the solution?  Number one, you can enforce immigration law; it is the job of the executive branch. You don’t need an invalidation of birthright citizenship in order to enforce immigration laws. It is illegal to immigrate illegally. Number two, you can get rid of the possibility of government dependency for illegal immigrants: the job of the legislature and the judiciary. Number three, start by enforcing immigration laws. Our enforcement mechanisms on temporary visas need to be significantly stronger. When it comes to visa tests for permanent visas, we’d have to screen more carefully. You’d have to share our values, come from a system that shares them, and be able to prove it. If you’re coming from a place where you can’t prove it, you shouldn’t get in. You have to show that you’re going to be of net economic benefit to the United States, that you’re not going to be a welfare draw. When it comes to temporary visas, we would boot people as soon as the temporary visa has expired; we would actually follow up, which we don’t do right now. We would shut the border. We would start deporting people who are in the country illegally and are welfare-dependent or are engaged in illegal activity of any sort. We can crack down on birth tourism, which was the key issue with regard to birthright citizenship. We can criminalize people who come to the U.S. through birth tourism networks. Then there’s welfare. If you’re going to come in and be on welfare, you should not be able to come in. If you’re on welfare, you should be in line to get the boot again. We do not require congressional action here. The worst thing you can do is black-pill, because that removes responsibility from the executive and the legislature, saying, “The judiciary blew it for us; there’s nothing we can do. I guess we’re screwed now.” That’s not helpful. But the most important thing is that the Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday did not change the existing state of the law. They simply didn’t do the right thing — which sucks, it’s a blown opportunity — but the answers are still there. For conservatives and Republicans, immigration remains a winning issue because it is not that Democrats are so in love with the concept of birthright citizenship; it is that they are in favor of open borders. Congress can do something, and congressional and executive policy can do something. Democrats are celebrating because they want birthright citizenship to be the basis of mass migration. But there’s a lot we can do about it.

Everyone holds a grudge against some product so poor it’s unusable. The pan to which everything sticks; the deodorant that transforms the smell of sweat into a chemical weapon; the vile beer you haven’t raised to your lips since you were 19; much of the Disney Star Wars catalog. CNN’s coverage of the Supreme Court is similarly dismal. There are exceptions that ought to be acknowledged up front. Chief legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid traffics mostly in straightforward summaries and scoops, and senior legal analyst Elie Honig is among the most evenhanded and able in the entire industry (his takedown of disgraced Manhattan District Attorney and unwitting Trump 2024 campaign co-chair Alvin Bragg made for a particularly enjoyable and richly deserved demonstration of his fair-minded aptitude.) But by and large: dismal. Tuesday was particularly instructive. The Supreme Court released a pair of decisions celebrated by conservatives on the topics of campaign finance and transgender athletes before striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to do away with birthright citizenship in its most highly anticipated opinion of the term. It was a representative finale, as the Court has spent months serving up mixed bags that have driven the president to his wit’s end. Among the other subjects he’s suffered losses on: tariffs, mail-in ballot deadlines, and the employment status of Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook. Nevertheless, a panel on Tuesday’s edition of Inside Politics breaking down this final spate of cases appears to have been assembled for the express purpose of advancing a preposterous narrative about the Court’s supposed partisan bent. After The New York Times’ Tyler Pager observed that Trump was likely to lash out over the birthright citizenship ruling, host Manu Raju insisted that the Court “did allow him to push the bounds of what he can do.” Moments later, the discussion turned to National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the aforementioned campaign finance case in which the Court held that the congressionally-imposed limits on the amount of money that can be spent by political parties in coordination with candidates violate the First Amendment – and devolved into a stunning demonstration of its participants’ juvenile hackery. Raju characterized it as “a big win for Republicans, who were pushing to gut the post-Watergate rules.” You get all that? Republicans are desperate, to the point of violent metaphors to bring back Watergate-style corruption. Never mind the facts of the actual case, which had nothing to do with the scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office, or that the ruling cuts both ways. Just take CNN at its word. It only got worse from there. NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe complained that while “people” want to see money taken “out of politics,” the Court has moved “in the totally opposite direction.” As a liberal, her misunderstanding of the American constitutional order – the judiciary is designed to be a check on the political branches, not a super-legislature that rubber stamps the whims of the “people” at any given point in time – is to be expected. As a professional political commentator, it’s embarrassing. Not to be outdone, Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck marveled that “this Supreme Court” is “unapologetic” about “overruling its own precedent,” and parroted Justice Elena Kagan’s protest that “we’re supposed to have good reasons for overturning these precedents” before repeating Rascoe’s inane point about public sentiment. Arbitrary, undue restrictions on political speech don’t qualify as a “good reason” in Vladeck’s book? Spare a prayer for this man’s poor students. They’re paying over $80,000 a year in tuition to be misinformed by a slack-jawed blowhard. Chief Supreme Court analyst and Fredo Corleone of Nina Totenberg’s Joan Biskupic picked up the torch from there to gush over Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the trans athlete case, in which she argued: “how terrible it was going to be in terms of fairness on the competitive field.” Huh? She went on to declare that interpersonal tension between the justices could be chalked up to the fact that “the conservative members of the Court were chosen for certain reasons, and they were chosen for their vigilance on the kinds of rulings that-” “And their reliability,” chimed in Vladeck. “-not just President Trump might want, but the Republican Party would want. That was the whole point,” concluded Biskupic. “Well, the word reliability, I think, is an important one because it’s exactly why the Court is constantly criticized. Because overturning precedent is not just a matter of throwing away trash,” declared chief legal analyst Laura Coates. “ It really is if the American public has chosen these nine Supreme Court justices in terms of a body that is supposed to provide the consistency, reliability so people can manage their lives accordingly, every time you overturn precedent, you undermine the ability of the American public, let alone the voting public, to understand the world in which they live and operate, and the balance of power. And so if they are in the business of deciding what we just said no longer applies, then how can the American public be in the habit of understanding what laws and rights they retain, and what will end up on the fire heap.” What you’re not supposed to notice is that it’s the conservative majority that just rescued one of the public’s most cherished rights from the fire heap. Or that the progressive chattering class only extolls the sacred value of stare decisis when it serves their political interests. At the root of this parade of misfires, distortions, and outright lies — all of which were promulgated in only about 15 minutes of airtime — is the fact that it’s the Left that approaches legal questions in exactly the shameful manner that it pretends the Right does. It’s the Democratic appointees to the bench who vote as a bloc on every single high-profile, politically sensitive case. It’s they who were appointed to promote a worldview rather than uphold the law. And it’s their cheerleaders in liberal media who have worked tirelessly to delegitimize Article III in the eyes of the public. The cost of that campaign? Its participants’ dignity and professional pride. They’re all too happy to pay up. *** Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.

Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro wants the White House. On Wednesday, that ambition was on full display as he tap-danced around a direct question about his party’s newest crop of Israel-bashing socialists — brushing off the widening rift as a distraction from his own brand of buttoned-up “pragmatism.” Pressed by MS NOW’s Willie Geist on whether hard-Left firebrands out of New York and Colorado risk becoming the face of the Democratic Party nationally, Shapiro punted. “Do you worry, though, governor, about some of these candidates in these high-profile races in New York and now in Colorado will be elevated as representative of Democrats nationally with some of their extreme views?” Geist asked. “I mean, look — here in Pennsylvania, folks know what pragmatism results and getting stuff done looks like, because they see me, they see other Democrats who are doing that in our commonwealth. Look, I want to work with anyone to get stuff done,” Shapiro replied. Shorter Josh Shapiro to the Jew-hating communists who've taken over the Democrat Party: Please, please, eat me last pic.twitter.com/lmJdXJ6WkW — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 1, 2026 Shapiro refused to confront the elephant — or camel — in the room. That elephant has a name, or rather several. Brad Lander, the self-styled “liberal Zionist” who in his victory speech accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid” and declared that Americans were “paying for Netanyahu’s wars with our tax dollars.” New York U.S. House candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier showed up to a Times Square rally the day after Hamas butchered 1,200 Israelis — October 8, 2023 — and later refused to condemn the attacks at a candidate forum, instead lecturing moderators about “75 years of occupation.” She spent her New York primary campaign branding Israel an “apartheid state.” Another New York U.S. House candidate, Claire Valdez, marched with the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace for years, reportedly co-sponsored Mamdani’s “Not on Our Dime!” legislation targeting charities that fund West Bank settlements, and falsely accused her opponent, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, of being bankrolled by AIPAC — a claim her own campaign finance filings blew up. And now Colorado’s Melat Kiros, fresh off toppling 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette while calling for a total arms embargo on the Jewish state and refusing to label the Boulder firebombing an act of antisemitism. All were cheered on by Mayor Mamdani’s growing socialist machine. None drew so much as a syllable of pushback from Shapiro on air. It’s not hard to see why. Shapiro, still nursing the sting of getting passed over for Kamala Harris’s ticket in 2024 — a snub widely chalked up to Democratic squeamishness about his faith — knows exactly how combustible this topic is for a man eyeing 2028. Distance yourself too loudly from the socialist wing and risk the base. Cozy up and risk everything else. Except Shapiro’s own recent Israel commentary has hardly been a profile in courage. On the “All-In” podcast, he accused Benjamin Netanyahu of “leading around” and “bullying” Trump into confronting Iran — the same “bully” label he’s slapped on Trump himself over Venezuela and Canada, but somehow reserved for Israel’s prime minister when Tehran was the target. Critics, including the Zionist Organization of America, called the framing straight out of the “Jews control America” playbook — a particularly bitter irony for a governor whose own home was firebombed on the first night of Passover last year. NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck summed up Shapiro’s comments well when he wrote, “Josh Shapiro to the Jew-hating communists who’ve taken over the Democrat Party: Please, please, eat me last.”

Babies born in the second half of 2026 will receive a special Social Security card commemorating America’s 250th anniversary, the Social Security Administration (SSA) announced on Wednesday. Children born in the United States between July 2 and December 31, 2026, will receive this one-of-a-kind card featuring the Freedom 250 logo in black ink, which still functions as a standard Social Security card. The cards will serve as the first official federal documents issued to millions of American children. “Freedom 250 is a celebration of America’s storied history and the monumental moments that have shaped our nation, including the creation of Social Security over 90 years ago,” Commissioner Frank J. Bisignano said.  The cards are part of the Enumeration at Birth program and will be issued at hospitals, birthing centers, or requested by licensed midwives during the birth registration process. Parents do not need to apply for the card, pay extra fees, or complete additional paperwork, according to Fox News. Babies born before or after the July 2 to December 31 window will receive a standard Social Security card without the Freedom 250 logo. The SSA also warned Americans about scammers attempting to duplicate the limited-edition cards. The agency said it would “never call, text, or email you requesting payment to obtain a commemorative card.” “Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, we are strengthening Social Security, improving service, and building an SSA to serve Americans today and in the future,” Bisignano said.

As America heads into the Fourth of July weekend marking America’s 250th birthday, the city hall of Columbus, Ohio, is celebrating differently. Columbus is hoisting the flag of Somalia, a foreign government, on Wednesday and celebrating its independence, according to a government department’s social media feed. “Happy Somali Independence Day!