“How about offering an award for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that.” That is not a quote from President Donald Trump or Justice Sam Alito; it is a quote from the late Democrat icon Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) back in 1993.
Some of the same Democrats aggressively defending the modern warped definition of birthright citizenship were opposed to it a few decades ago, before it became Democrat Party dogma that cheap labor and illicit votes were more important than anything else, and that illegal immigration was therefore sacred. Leaving aside all of the many reasons to criticize Harry Reid’s career, he laid out the case against “birthright citizenship” brilliantly back in 1993. And yet in 2026, there are even supposedly conservative justices who feel they cannot say that any foreigner who walks across the border and gives birth is not the parent of a U.S. citizen.
You can watch the clip from over three decades ago below. In it, Reid argued, “If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that, right? Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and [a] guarantee of full access to all public and social services this society provides. That’s a lot of services.”
WOW. Senator Harry Reid, a DEMOCRAT, introduced a bill in 1993 to END birthright citizenship for illegal aliens.
But if Trump wants to do it, Democrats call it “rAcIsT”pic.twitter.com/W8yf4fM5QX
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 3, 2026
At the time, for context, Reid was pushing his Immigration Stabilization Act, which was supposed to reduce mass migration and protect American workers from illegal alien competition. In that 1993 clip, he went on, “Is it any wonder that two-thirds of the babies born at taxpayer expense in …county-run hospitals [in] Los Angeles are born to illegal alien mothers? Just when the American people think nothing can be more absurd than the way we deal — or rather, don’t deal with illegal immigration, they discover that we have a political asylum system that would qualify us for Sen. Proxmire’s Golden Fleece Award a thousand times over.” During the 1970s and 1980s, Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.) jokingly assigned his invented award to projects he considered particularly wasteful of taxpayer money.
Related: Chinese Air Force Base Bombers Were Birthright Citizens, Parents Are Illegal Aliens
In a 1994 opinion piece, Reid again slammed policies that Democrats now claim are necessary. “The federal government has been grossly irresponsible in its neglect of mounting immigration problems, even as these problems place unbearable burdens on states like California,” he insisted. “Taxpayers simply cannot continue to sustain new populations the size of San Diego or the state of Nevada every year.”
Ironically, Reid later shifted his rhetoric on immigration in order to continue moving up the ranks of the Democrat Party into the Obama years, as the Center for Immigration Studies describes. He was willing to do and say whatever it took to retain power, including agreeing to measures he himself once labeled insane. That’s Democrats for you. But his earlier points remain valid, even if he himself later backtracked on them.
Notably, the Department of Homeland Security just announced that the Chinese-American attempted bombers of U.S. Central Command headquarters are birthright citizens, and their parents are still illegal aliens. By 2030, a million Chinese Communists could be voting in American elections thanks to “birth tourism,” whereby Chinese mothers travel to American territories to give birth.
As strange as it is to say this, Harry Reid was right — in 1993. No sane country would have a birthright citizenship system like ours.
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