Mexico, like the United States, automatically grants citizenship to children born on its territory, a policy that has taken on renewed significance amid US President Donald Trump's efforts to restrict birthright citizenship in the United States.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the United States is the only country that offers automatic citizenship to children born within its borders, as he seeks to deny the right to children whose parents are in the country illegally or have temporary legal status.
However, about three dozen countries, most of them in the Americas, guarantee birthright citizenship, including Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Honduras.
The issue has gained prominence as the US Supreme Court is expected to rule on the constitutionality of Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship, signed on January 20, 2025, the first day of his second term in office as part of his administration's broader immigration crackdown.
In an April post on Truth Social, Trump wrote that the United States was "the only country in the world" that allows birthright citizenship.
For Haitian migrant Vivianne Petit Frere, who now runs a successful restaurant in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, Mexico's citizenship policy has transformed her family's future.
Petit Frere fled Haiti in 2019, travelling through Brazil and crossing the Panamanian jungle to reach Mexico with hopes of eventually settling in the United States with relatives in Florida. Instead, she chose to remain in Mexico, where her granddaughter, Alexca, was born two years ago and automatically became a Mexican citizen.
The Haitian migrant has since established a thriving restaurant called Lakou Lakay, meaning "home" in Haitian Creole, become fluent in Spanish and is pursuing a degree in social work.
She said being born in Mexico would provide her granddaughter with greater opportunities and easier international travel than a Haitian passport would allow.
According to the United Nations' International Organization for Migration, at least 10 percent of Haitian women arriving in Mexico during a surge in migration in 2021 were pregnant. Tens of thousands of Haitians currently reside in Mexico, though there are no official figures on how many children born to non-citizens have obtained Mexican citizenship.
Mexico also allows parents of children who acquire citizenship by birth to become permanent residents, a provision that has benefited many Haitian families in Tijuana, according to Petit Frere.
Birthright citizenship in the United States is protected by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted after the Civil War to ensure citizenship rights for formerly enslaved people.
The principle was later extended to the children of immigrants through a Supreme Court ruling in the late 19th century, which held that nearly anyone born on US soil is a citizen regardless of their parents' legal status.
The issue has generated controversy elsewhere in the region. The Dominican Republic ended birthright citizenship for children of undocumented migrants in 2007 and retroactively applied the policy to 1929 six years later.
According to the Center for Migration Studies of New York, as many as 130,000 people remained stateless more than a decade later despite legislation passed in 2014 to address the issue following international criticism.
Petit Frere, who has begun the process of becoming a Mexican citizen, now works as a community organiser with the Haitian Bridge Alliance, advocating for Haitian migrants in Mexico.
She said the children of immigrants often go on to achieve remarkable success and expressed hope of pursuing further studies in international migration in the future.