The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution grants citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States, regardless of whether their parents are citizens, permanent residents, unauthorized migrants, or transient visitors. Limited exceptions exist, such as children born to accredited foreign diplomats, who are not subject to US jurisdiction. This longstanding interpretation of birthright citizenship is now the subject of a legal challenge. In Trump v. Barbara, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in April 2026 on an Executive Order seeking to restrict the application of the Clause, with a decision expected by early July.
It is widely held in legal circles that birthright citizenship is strictly a constitutional question. Even broad immigration debates are often framed in humanitarian, cultural or political terms, focusing on legal and illegal immigrants, border security, social tensions, and family unification and integrity. Yet beneath these debates lies a resource question that receives far less attention: who bears the cost of producing human capital, and who ultimately receives its benefits?
Human capital refers to a person’s potential to create wealth through employment, entrepreneurship, or other economic activities. Numerous studies have documented the economic contributions of working-age migrants. For instance, research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2017) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) consistently finds that adult migrants often generate net wealth over their lifetimes, particularly when they have higher levels of education and skills.
Generally, migration involves a tripartite analysis of the migrant, the recipient state, and the sending country that supplies migrants. Building on migration studies, but without any intention to commodify humans, the central thesis of this commentary treats adult migrants as human capital developed by the sending country using its domestic resources, while the recipient state receives the adult migrant for free and reaps a substantial economic windfall. While migrants improve their personal circumstances, source countries frequently lose out on their investment.
However, even for receiving states, the economic model fails for birthright immigrant children and unauthorized immigrants, both of whom are high-risk entrants with uncertain economic productivity.
To clarify the dynamics of wealth windfalls for the recipient nation, the following hypothetical model illustrates the economic asymmetries that arise from adult migration patterns. It also sheds light on contemporary debates over birthright citizenship and unauthorized immigration. The numbers in the model are for illustrative purposes only, though they are directionally accurate.
The Wealth Windfall Model
Suppose a migrant moves from Country A to Country B at age 25. Country A allocates its economic, social, healthcare, and educational resources to raise the migrant from birth to age 25. These expenditures include the costs of birth, pediatric care, food, clothing, and primary and secondary education. For highly skilled emigrants, such as physicians, engineers, and other professionals, Country A bears the additional cost of college and professional training. In the United States, the average cost to fully train a physician is estimated at approximately $1.1 million or more.
Assume that in Country A, the total investment required to raise an emigrant is $100,000 in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity, a better standard for measuring costs because it accounts for local conditions). All figures below are in PPP terms. This figure is significantly higher for highly skilled emigrants.
Country B receives the adult migrant as human capital at nearly zero cost, filtered through immigration laws. The migrant works in Country B for 25 years and contributes a gross value of $2 million to Country B’s GDP, averaging $80,000 per year. After taxes, the migrant’s net take-home is $1.5 million, which the migrant acquires as a private asset.
The migrant sends $1,000 in remittances annually to support his family in Country A, resulting in total remittances of $25,000 over 25 years.
Country A’s Loss (over a 50-year period from birth to the last remittance): Investment of $100,000 minus remittances of $25,000 equals a net loss of $75,000. Country A thus bears the full cost of human capital formation, with only a limited offset from remittances. It also loses the migrant’s productive value. Country A’s economic losses would be significant if it could employ potential migrants gainfully, such as physicians and engineers who move abroad. The sending country’s loss is greatest when skilled workers leave permanently and cannot be replaced domestically.
Country B’s Windfall (over the 25-year working period): acquires the migrant for free, whose gross GDP contribution is $2 million, less $25,000 in remittance outflows, yielding a windfall of $1,975,000. In addition, Country B benefits from taxes paid by the migrant, from the migrant’s consumption (housing, vehicles, food, and services), which supports local industries, and from any savings held in local financial institutions that contribute to domestic capital formation.
The numbers used in the model vary from case to case, depending on the migrant’s qualifications and income, the cost of raising an adult in the sending state, the standard of living in the receiving state, the length of employment, income, taxes paid, the amount of remittances, and the migrant’s expenses and savings.
The model does not imply that sending countries invariably lose from emigration. Remittances, diaspora investment, technology transfer, and return migration may partially or fully offset the developmental costs. The magnitude of the loss depends on how readily the sending country can replace emigrants or capture indirect benefits from its diaspora.
Profitable Migrants
Most developed countries seek migrants as externally developed human capital. The windfall model does not imply that emigrants are owned by their countries of origin or that states have a property interest in their citizens. The argument is purely about the transfer of human capital. Regardless of who directly bears the developmental costs, families, communities, or governments, the receiving state gains a productive adult whose formative investments have already been made.
The notion of brain drain has long been a familiar way to view migration. However, brain drain is merely a specialized form of a broader phenomenon: the transfer of individuals as a form of human capital. A physician emigrating is brain drain. A taxi driver emigrating may or may not be brain drain. Yet both involve the transfer of productive assets that the sending country developed using its domestic resources and then gifted them to the recipient state.
According to the latest global data compiled by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), international migration flows remain highly concentrated. In 2024, only 3.7 percent of the global population of over 8 billion migrated to other countries, compared with 2.9 percent in 1990. Thus, over 96 percent of people live where they were born.
Over nearly 35 years, between 1990 and 2024, the United States was the top immigrant-receiving country, with 52.4 million immigrants. In the same period, the other four top countries were Germany with 16.8 million, Saudi Arabia with 13.7 million, the United Kingdom with 11.8 million, and France with 9.2 million. In some Gulf States, immigrants constitute the majority of the population, though without civil and political rights.
On the supply side, India ranks first, with 18.5 million individuals sent to other countries worldwide between 1990 and 2024. The other four top sending countries in the same period are China with 11.7 million, Mexico with 11.6 million, Ukraine with 9.8 million, and the Russian Federation with 9.1 million.
In most developed countries, the sought-after migrants may include physicians, nurses, entrepreneurs, engineers, taxi drivers, chefs, and sometimes even low-skilled workers. Contemporary migration flows include Filipino nurses, South Asian physicians and engineers moving to the United States and Europe, as well as millions of South Asian laborers working in the Gulf states.
These examples illustrate that migration involves not only the movement of people with diverse cultures, religions, national origins, and occupations, but also the transfer of human capital from one country to another.
The windfall model demonstrates the benefits of acquiring a fully developed adult worker. The birthright citizenship section below explores how the model fails for immigrant children and unauthorized migrants, forcing the recipient state to assume the very costs it seeks to avoid by legally screening adult migrants for potential wealth-generating education and skills.
Birthright Citizenship, Child Migration, and Unauthorized Immigration
Ultimately, the human capital transfer model hinges on the migrant’s age at the time of border crossing. Recipient states derive their greatest economic advantage when much of the developmental investment has already been made in a foreign country. The recipient state gains access to the migrant’s productive years without compensating the sending country. It is against this raw fiscal backdrop that contemporary legal friction over birthright citizenship, child migration, and unauthorized immigration must be understood.
A newborn or young child arriving in the recipient state has a different economic profile. The recipient state assumes the costs of childhood healthcare, schooling, social services, and other developmental investments before any productive contribution is realized. According to estimates published by the US Department of Agriculture, the cost of raising a child to age 18 in the United States may exceed $300,000 for a middle-income household, excluding higher education.
Thus, birthright citizenship and child immigration undermine the paradigm of productivity associated with legally filtered adult migrants, who are treated as human capital. From a purely fiscal perspective, a migrant child is a risky long-term investment rather than a more certain, immediately productive asset. However, empirical evidence shows that the US-born children of immigrants—the second generation—often become strong fiscal contributors over their lifetimes. According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2017), second-generation immigrants often surpass both their parents and the native-born population in educational attainment, earnings, and net tax contributions.
A somewhat related framework highlights concerns about unauthorized immigration. Legal immigration allows recipient states to screen applicants based on age, education, skills, health status, language proficiency, and anticipated economic contribution. Unauthorized immigration bypasses this screening process, even though unauthorized adult migrants developed in foreign countries are also potentially human capital.
When opposing unauthorized immigration, the central economic concern is not merely legality but productive uncertainty. Without prior selection, the recipient state cannot accurately estimate the future productive value of unauthorized migrants. Yet, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (2024), undocumented immigrants in the U.S. paid approximately $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, including substantial contributions to Social Security and Medicare programs from which they are largely ineligible.
Conclusion
Immigration is often discussed in humanitarian, cultural, or political terms. Yet it also represents a large-scale international transfer of human capital, mostly from poorer to richer countries. For decades, contrary to political rhetoric, the economic benefits that migrants bring to host countries have been extensively documented.
Regardless of how immigration policies are formulated, the underlying economic logic remains the same: recipient states generally favor adult, legally vetted migrants whose productive potential can be assessed in advance and whose developmental costs have largely been incurred elsewhere. From the perspective of recipient states, adult migration is often one of the cheapest ways to acquire productive labor through well-developed immigration filters.
Birthright citizenship undermines the paradigm of ready-made productive capital. Instead of absorbing the upfront cost of raising and educating a child, especially when the parents are indigent, some policymakers target birthright citizenship, even though it is a constitutional right, because the child fails the immediate productivity test and is considered an investment risk. This economic reality explains why opposition to birthright citizenship rests on fiscal utility rather than legal grounds alone. The Supreme Court may consider many arguments in the birthright citizenship case, but it must treat the child as a constitutional person, not as an economic asset whose value must be proven first.
Ali Khan is the founder of Legal Scholar Academy and an Emeritus Professor of Law at the Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kansas. He has written numerous scholarly articles and commentaries on international law. In addition, he has regularly contributed to JURIST since 2001. He welcomes comments via email.
