According to a Rasmussen poll, indiscriminate birthplace citizenship is a federal policy that the majority of U.S. voters desire to see reformed. The poll, in 2011, posed the question "Suppose a woman enters the United States as an illegal alien and gives birth to a child in the United States. Should that child automatically become a citizen of the United States?" ^[1] Of likely U.S. voters surveyed on this question, 29% agreed that automatic citizenship should be granted, while 65% opposed granting it. ^[2]

Supporters of the policy of birthplace citizenship interpret the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution as extending citizenship to future newborns. Opponents of this interpretation argue that the purpose at time of ratification was to extend U.S. citizenship to the recently emancipated slaves, with the question of how babies obtained citizenship already having been settled decades before.