Joe Rogan has 15 million listeners per episode. He reaches more Americans in a single podcast than most cable news networks reach in a week. And on Thursday, he looked into the camera and said what a significant chunk of the country has been thinking for years but hasn’t heard anyone with a platform this large say plainly.
“If you are illegal, and then you come here specifically to have a baby, and then you can stay, too — that’s kind of crazy. That’s a crazy law.”
No caveats. No apology in advance. No carefully worded preamble about respecting all sides. Just a man stating what strikes him as obvious — that a law allowing someone who entered the country illegally to gain a permanent foothold by giving birth on American soil doesn’t make sense.
His guest, author Michael Malice, put it even more directly: “If birthright citizenship went away, a lot of this would be solved.”
The Law Nobody Voted For
Birthright citizenship comes from the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. Its purpose was to ensure that formerly enslaved people — born on American soil, denied citizenship by the Dred Scott decision — would be recognized as citizens. It was a correction of a historic injustice, written in the aftermath of a civil war fought over whether Black Americans were people or property.
It was never intended to create a system where foreign nationals could cross the border illegally, give birth, and use the child’s citizenship as an anchor for the entire family’s residency. The framers of the 14th Amendment were addressing slavery, not immigration. The concept of “birth tourism” — flying to America specifically to deliver a baby on U.S. soil — didn’t exist. The concept of illegal immigration as we know it didn’t exist. The border as we know it didn’t exist.
But the law doesn’t care about intent. It cares about text. And the text has been interpreted for over a century to mean that anyone born on American soil is automatically an American citizen, regardless of the parents’ legal status. That interpretation has created an incentive structure that Rogan — and millions of Americans — recognize as absurd.
The Incentive Problem
The issue isn’t birthright citizenship in the abstract. Nobody is arguing that children born to American citizens on American soil shouldn’t be citizens. The issue is the incentive it creates for illegal immigration.
When a child born in the United States is automatically a citizen, that child becomes eligible for every benefit American citizenship provides — welfare, Medicaid, public education, and eventually the ability to sponsor family members for legal immigration. The parents, though illegal, gain a connection to the country that makes deportation practically and politically more difficult.
Malice laid out the policy argument: “If you’re not eligible for welfare, you’re not eligible for Medicaid, you could pay your taxes and income, but you’re not getting the benefits — people understand that argument, maybe.”
It’s a practical framework. Remove the incentive, and you remove a significant driver of illegal border crossings. Not all of it. But enough to change the calculus for the people making the journey — and for the cartels and smuggling networks that profit from facilitating it.
The Global Outlier
Malice noted that the United States is virtually alone among developed nations in granting automatic citizenship to anyone born on its soil regardless of parental status. Most of Europe doesn’t do it. Japan doesn’t. South Korea doesn’t. Australia doesn’t. China, as Rogan noted, certainly doesn’t.
Canada does — and Canada is dealing with its own immigration crisis that has become a major political issue. But among the world’s major democracies, birthright citizenship without parental citizenship requirements is the exception, not the rule.
The argument that ending birthright citizenship is extreme or unprecedented falls apart when you look at the rest of the developed world. Most countries require at least one parent to be a citizen or legal permanent resident for a child born on their soil to receive citizenship. That’s not radical. That’s standard practice in functioning democracies.
The Rogan Effect
The reason this matters isn’t the argument itself — the birthright citizenship debate has been happening in policy circles for years. The reason it matters is who’s saying it and who’s hearing it.
Rogan’s audience is enormous, young, male-skewed, and politically diverse. He reaches people who don’t watch cable news, don’t read policy papers, and don’t follow congressional debates. When Rogan calls something “a crazy law,” it lands differently than when a senator says it on the floor. It lands in gyms, in cars, in earbuds during commutes. It lands in conversations between people who would never describe themselves as politically engaged but who trust Rogan’s instincts because he speaks like a normal person processing information in real time.
That’s the Rogan effect. He doesn’t persuade through argument. He persuades through normalcy. When the most popular podcaster in America says birthright citizenship is crazy, it makes the idea of reforming it feel less like a fringe position and more like common sense.
The Mamdani Bonus
Rogan also weighed in on New York City’s new socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, after examining his budget proposal. His assessment was characteristically blunt.
“He’s a f—ing psychopath. The amount for migrants is crazy. There should be zero dollars for illegal immigrants.”
Zero dollars. For a man whose audience includes millions of New York-area listeners, that’s a statement that carries weight. Mamdani is already struggling with a budget crisis he inherited and is proposing to solve through tax increases and police cuts. Having the most influential media figure in the country call him a psychopath on a podcast heard by more people than live in New York City isn’t going to help.
Rogan isn’t a politician. He’s not running for anything. He doesn’t have a party to protect or a base to manage. He’s a guy with a microphone, an audience, and the freedom to say what he thinks without checking with a communications director first.
And what he thinks — about birthright citizenship, about taxpayer money for illegal immigrants, about the laws that make all of it possible — is what tens of millions of Americans think.
They just hadn’t heard anyone say it this clearly. Now they have.