July 03, 2026

Good morning! Today is Friday, July 3rd 2026, and this is The American Conservative's Morning Brief. Andrew Day unpacks the Supreme Court's 6–3 ruling upholding birthright citizenship, arguing that while Trump's executive order was struck down, the constitutional split was really 5–4 and the national debate over citizenship has only just begun. Chart Westcott challenges the familiar phrase "a nation of immigrants," making the case that America is better understood as a nation of assimilants, where the true miracle was never arrival but the transformation of strangers into fellow countrymen. and now for the details. We begin with this week's Supreme Court ruling on birthright citizenship. In a six-to-three decision, the justices upheld near-universal birthright citizenship, striking down President Trump's executive order that would have ended the practice for the children of illegal aliens and temporary residents. As Andrew Day writes for The American Conservative, the ruling changed everything, and yet nothing. The system remains as it has been since the late 1890s, but Day argues the context has shifted dramatically. He cites Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, who told TAC that mass immigration is incompatible with the goals of a modern society in ways it wasn't a century or two ago, pointing to smartphones, social media, and the welfare state as obstacles to assimilation. Day highlights arguments from author Ann Coulter, who insists the Fourteenth Amendment, crafted after the Civil War to guarantee citizenship for freed slaves, was never meant to cover the children of illegal aliens or temporary residents. Day also identifies a silver lining for conservatives. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, though joining the majority, based his opinion on a federal statute rather than the Constitution itself, meaning the constitutional split was actually five to four. That leaves open the possibility that Congress could one day redefine birthright citizenship by statute. Day concludes that Trump's order has already shifted the range of acceptable opinion, opening a national debate on the nature of citizenship that even the Washington Post editorial board has acknowledged. Staying with questions of citizenship and national identity, as America approaches its two hundred fiftieth birthday, Chart Westcott offers a reflection in The American Conservative on what he calls one of the most persistent myths in modern American politics: the phrase "a nation of immigrants." Westcott argues that America is more accurately described as a nation of assimilants. Immigration, he writes, is merely the act of arrival. Assimilation is the act of becoming. What made the American experiment remarkable, in his telling, was never the ability to attract newcomers but the capacity to transform strangers into fellow countrymen. Westcott takes on the long-running debate over whether America is fundamentally a creed or a nation, and argues that the two cannot be separated. The Constitution, he notes, was not written for humanity in the abstract. As John Jay observed in Federalist Two, it was written for a people already bound by common habits and affections. Drawing on Lincoln at Gettysburg, on Theodore Roosevelt's insistence that there be no divided allegiance, and even on Malcolm X's observation that mere citizenship is not the same as belonging, Westcott makes the case that assimilation is not exclusion but the pathway to full membership. He challenges the modern slogan that "diversity is our strength," writing that diversity itself is simply a fact. What matters is whether a nation possesses the cultural confidence to turn diversity into unity, out of many, one. Those are today's highlights. For the full stories and more, visit theamericanconservative.com. Thank you for starting your morning with us.