American by Birth

de Carl Nackenoff, Julie Novkov

"In his infamous opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) Chief Justice Taney had denied that any American descended from Africans, whether free or slave, could claim citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause repudiated this principle. The Fourteenth Amendment's connection to birthright citizenship, however, is not built exclusively through the lives and fortunes of black citizens. It requires an understanding of the Chinese experience of migration to the United States, and Wong Kim Ark v. United States (1898) lies at the center of this story. Wong Kim Ark, a man in his mid-twenties who had been born in San Francisco to Chinese parents, was refused entry into the United States upon returning from a visit to China. By 1898, the strict policy forbidding most Chinese from entering the United States was well established, and Wong Kim Ark did not claim to fall into one of the narrow exceptional categories like merchant, diplomat, or student. Rather, he claimed that his birth in San Francisco rendered him a citizen. By a vote of six to two, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. The landmark case established the principle that jus soli (geographically defined birthright citizenship) extended even to the children of US residents who were themselves barred from naturalization on racial grounds. In recent years, birthright citizenship in the United States has provoked renewed controversy. In a political moment when Americans are deeply divided over immigration, there is a special need to understand anew the history behind the longstanding principle that even the children of undocumented immigrants are citizens when they are born in the United States"--