2013/ STA TEL ESS IN THE UNITED STA TES 445 unauthorized immigrants are automatically awarded U.S. citizenship at birth if born in the United States. 4 The incidence of statelessness would be exacerbated exponentially if the lack of nationality continues into subsequent generations. Proposals to amend the rule of territorial birthright citizenship in the United States-the jus soli-aim to deny citizenship to the children of persons who are in the country illegally. Citizenship for these children would instead follow the jus sanguinis, meaning citizenship by descent from a parent.5 These children would then, like their parents, be subject to "control" through deportation. The proposals rest on the assumption that the children of illegal migrants would retain the nationality of their parents, and thus would not present problems of statelessness. But as this Article will demonstrate, some children born in the United States would in fact be stateless, with no recognized nationality at birth. This is true even though the great majority of undocumented persons in the United States themselves come from jus soli nations with ius sanguinis traditions governing births outside of the country.6 The prediction that restrictions on birthright citizenship in the United States could lead to statelessness has been acknowledged in some of the academic literature on this subject.7 But there is as yet no 4. Birthright citizenship comes from the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." U.S. CONST. amend. XIV, § 1. Birthright citizenship in the United States is discussed infra Part III.A. 5. The award of citizenship at birth, either by jus soli or jus sanguinis, accounts for the citizenship of ninety-seven out of every hundred people in the world. See Ayelet Shachar, The Worth of Citizenship in an Unequal World, 8 THEORETICAL INQUIRIES L. 367, 368 (2007) (analyzing the distributive-justice ramifications of citizenship entitlement through birthright). 6. Based on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimates, the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are from Mexico and Latin America: 60 percent (6.7 million) from Mexico, 12 percent (1.3 million) from Central America, 5 percent (575,000) from South America, and 3 percent (350,000) from the Caribbean. MICHAEL HOEFER, NANCY RYTINA & BRYAN C. BAKER, DEP'T OF HOMELAND SEC. OFFICE OF IMMIGRATION STATISTICS, ESTIMATES OF THE UNAUTHORIZED IMMIGRANT POPULATION RESIDING IN THE UNITED STATES: JANUARY 2009, at 4 (2010), available at These http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/ois illpe 2009.pdf. statistics are provided at the end of this Article in the Appendix. 7. See, e.g., GERALD L. NEUMAN, STRANGERS TO THE CONSTITUTION: IMMIGRANTS, BORDERS, AND FUNDAMENTAL LAw 183-87 (1996) (discussing the mutuality of obligation between those who must obey the laws of the United States and those whom the U.S. government must protect); PETER H. SHUCK & ROGERS M. SMITH, CITIZENSHIP WITHOUT CONSENT: ILLEGAL ALIENS IN THE AMERICAN POLITY 136-37 (1985) (arguing that citizenship by birth is inconsistent with the American concept of consent for membership and thus membership by birth should be constrained); ROGERS M. SMITH, CIVIC IDEALS: CONFLICTING VISIONS OF CITIZENSHIP IN U.S. HISTORY 470-72 (1997) (viewing U.S. history as hierarchies aimed to minimize racial, ethnic, and gender minorities).