America started doing so at the end of the civil war. The constitution was amended then to overturn the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which held that black people were not Americans. The 14th Amendment ensured that freed slaves and their children would henceforth be citizens.

A federal judge in Washington state dealt the first blow to President Donald Trump’s aspirations of rewriting the Constitution and throwing away a century-old legal precedent in his quest to eliminate birthright citizenship.