The Republican-controlled Congress could vote this week on whether to abandon America’s long tradition of “birthright citizenship” and move to a bloodline-based system of the sort long used in European countries such as France and Germany.

As part of a larger enforcement effort, some lawmakers are pushing to deny citizenship to American-born children of illegal immigrants. They say undocumented mothers are taking advantage of the law, coming to America to have their children and gain, through them, a legal foothold.

“It is not the way that aliens should become citizens of this country,” the chairman of the House immigration reform caucus, Rep. Tom Tancredo, said. “It’s not just a child. That is why they call it the anchor babies – all of the family becomes citizens.”

Members of his 92-member caucus are expected today to submit the proposal to the House Rules Committee. If the Rules Committee okays it, the proposal would be voted on with an immigration bill on Thursday. At issue is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

The House members who support Mr. Tancredo’s proposal, and some legal scholars, say there is no precedent establishing undocumented immigrants are subject to the “jurisdiction thereof” in America because of their illegal status. While an 1898 Supreme Court decision, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, determined it included legal immigrants, no similar ruling has been made on those who are undocumented. Estimates of children to illegal immigrants born each year in America run between 100,000 and 350,000.

An opponent to the enforcement-only style of immigration reform pushed by Mr. Tancredo, Rep. Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona who has proposed a temporary worker program, said he supports revoking birthright citizenship out of a sense of fairness.

“Congressman Flake does not believe it is fair to afford children of illegal immigrants automatic citizenship, when immigrants who play by the rules have to wait many years to earn citizenship,” a spokesman for Mr. Flake, Matthew Specht, wrote in an e-mail.

Mr. Tancredo, a Republican of Colorado, said the foothold his plan has gotten in the House, more solid than his previous attempts to promote the proposal, has surprised him. Still, he said, he could not determine whether it would move forward.

Critics say such a law will do nothing to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, now estimated at 11 million, but rather will create a new underclass.

“In America we say that all people who are born here start out with an equal chance,” the director of federal policy at the National Immigration Law Center, Josh Bernstein, said. “In the U.S. it’s who you are that counts and your parentage does not determine your future. It’s stunning that some people are seriously reexamining that question: Who is an American?”

The president of the Migration Policy Institute, Demetrios Papademetriou, said this movement to end a birthright policy comes at a time when European receiver countries of immigrants are liberalizing their policies toward citizenship. “I think it’s important to note one of the big differences between the U.S. and the Europeans, that you don’t have this anomaly where someone can be living legally for a generation or more and not have a stake in the society,” he said.

It’s not the first time, however, that attempts to revoke birthright citizenship have been made.

“This has a long history, mostly having to do with Asians,” an immigration historian and author of “Guarding the Golden Door,” Roger Daniels, said. “Just after the First World War there was a strong move coming from West Coast congressmen, representatives and senators to make the children of aliens ineligible to citizenship.”

That effort, however, he said, “never got anywhere,” and Mr. Daniels predicts a similar end to this proposal. The greater risk, he said, is the alienation of a key contingent courted by the Republican Party, Latino voters.

“It’s not going to go anywhere,” Mr. Daniels said. “It’s typical of the anti-immigrant forces to raise these questions as a form of agitation.”