Supreme Court precedent illustrates the continuing tensions at home between America’s founding as a nation of immigrants and an inevitable period of backlash.
Protesters line up outside the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship hearing.
“Birthright citizenship is ours!” demonstrators shouted. outside the supreme court in washington d.c.
WASHINGTON – In 1898, the Supreme Court upheld the citizenship of the son of a San Francisco-born Chinese citizen, despite a national backlash against Chinese immigrants who helped build the transcontinental railroad and provided other backbreaking labor for the expanding nation.
Forty-five years after Wong Kim Ark’s victory, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the justices were asked to overturn that decision and strip Japanese Americans born in the United States of their citizenship.
Now, as immigration returns as a major cultural and political divide, courts are once again being asked to decide who is a natural-born American citizen.
On April 1, the justices are scheduled to debate President Donald Trump’s policy that children of parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily are not entitled to citizenship, a central issue of Trump’s 2024 campaign.
The birthright citizenship case Trump v. Barbara illustrates the continuing tensions within the country between America’s founding as a nation of immigrants and its period of reaction.
“There’s always a debate in this country about what immigration policy should be, and I think this issue is often tied to that broader debate, for better or for worse,” said Amanda Tyler, a constitutional law scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
more: Will a majority-Catholic Supreme Court listen to the Church on immigration?
Lawyers fighting Trump are obligated to obtain citizenship under the 14th Amendment
Cecilia Wang, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who is fighting the Trump administration in the high court, knows that history and her place in it.
Ms. Wang said her American citizenship was made possible by 14 years.th The proposed amendments guaranteed birthright citizenship and revised laws that restricted Asian immigration.
Without these changes, she said, her parents might not have been able to come to the United States from Taiwan to attend graduate school. And when she was born, they weren’t naturalized yet, so her citizenship turned on on the 14th.th Fixed.
“That the ACLU’s Chinese-American legal director stood up to defend what Wong Kim Ark and his courage established is a testament to exactly how Wong Kim Ark and the 14 others worked.”th The Constitutional Amendment shaped the America we all live in today,” said Cody Wofsey, attorney with the ACLU Immigrant Rights Project.
What is the 14th Amendment?
14th This amendment (one of three constitutional amendments adopted after the Civil War) would overturn the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, which precluded African Americans from obtaining citizenship.
But the citizenship clause is not limited to the status of black people.
The proposed amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and who are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States are nationals of the United States and the state in which they reside.”
Sandra Leiason, a constitutional law professor at Western State Law School, said some lawmakers opposed the language because they didn’t want to grant citizenship to Chinese born in the United States.
Fourteen years later, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first time Congress had enacted legislation restricting immigration based on race or national origin.
That was the background in which the Supreme Court considered Wong Kim Ark’s status.
Who is Wong Kim Ark?
Mr. Wong was born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents who were barred from becoming citizens and later returned home, but in 1894 he traveled to China for a temporary visit.
When he returned to California, Wong was not allowed to set foot on American soil.
The federal government argued to the Supreme Court that “Wong Kim Ark was attempting to exploit the 14 secrets.”th “It’s an amendment that circumvents Congress’ clear intent when enacting the Chinese Exclusion Act,” said Cesar Cuauhtemoc García Hernández, an expert on immigration law at the Ohio State University School of Law.
However, the court held that 14th The amendment’s protections also extend to the children of “resident aliens” who “reside in the United States, regardless of race or color.”
Liasson, who wrote for the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal about the role of white supremacy in the birthright citizenship debate, said it was notable that the Supreme Court sided with Wong Kim Ark despite the Chinese Exclusion Act.
“This case was decided at a time when there was tremendous xenophobia and racism against Chinese people,” she said, “and yet the Supreme Court said, ‘That has nothing to do with this case. This is about the substance of the 14 cases.'”th What does “correction” mean?
Birthright citizenship was debated again during World War II
Similar arguments were made against Japanese Americans during World War II.
In 1942, when the government was forcibly relocating and interning Japanese Americans to the West Coast, xenophobic groups wanted to strip American-born Japanese Americans of their citizenship. A lawyer for Native Sons of the Golden West called Wong Kim Ark’s sentence “one of the most harmful and unfortunate sentences ever handed down.”
In its submission, the group asserted that “Japanese born in the United States are still Japanese.”
9th The Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this challenge during oral argument, even though it had ruled against the civil rights of Japanese Americans in other cases being considered at the same time.
And the Supreme Court refused to intervene.
“I would like to place this case in the context of a long-accepted principle: the long-standing principle of birthright citizenship,” said Tyler, who detailed the case in a filing opposing Trump’s policies.
Tyler said that even when the federal government was “literally imprisoning Japanese Americans based on nothing but ancestry,” “no one seriously challenged the citizenship of Japanese Americans born on U.S. soil.”
President Trump called for restrictions on birthright citizenship
In this case, President Trump is asserting Article 14.th This amendment has long been misunderstood and is a powerful incentive for immigrants to enter the country illegally.
Curbing immigration, President Trump’s top domestic priority, dominated every night of the 2024 Republican National Convention and was a major focus of his ad campaign. On the first day of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to deny citizenship to infants born in the United States where at least one parent is not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.
more: President Trump wants to abolish birthright citizenship. How many people will it affect?
In his acceptance speech, President Trump said the “massive invasion” at the southern border had spread misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction across the United States.
“Today, our cities are full of illegal aliens,” he says. “Americans are being squeezed out of the workforce and their jobs are being taken away.”
Rise and fall due to immigration
Stephen Yale Rohr, a longtime immigration law scholar and former Cornell Law School professor, said Americans have gone back and forth on immigration issues, depending in part on the strength of the economy and the number of immigrants coming in.
The last time this country saw immigration on its current scale was in the early 1900s, when Congress responded by imposing quotas.
Yale Rohr also noted that President Trump’s campaign promise to limit immigration came after President Joe Biden admitted more than 2 million immigrants under humanitarian programs.
“When you see this many immigrants coming to the United States in such a short period of time, people start to worry,” he said.
Competing Strains of American Identity
Facing record numbers of migrants at the border, Biden sought to address the fact that both legal and illegal immigration is increasing globally due to civil wars and climate change. And the issue is so politically explosive that the two parties have not been able to agree on how to manage the situation since 1990.
“If we had a functioning immigration system, we would be better able to handle the large number of people trying to come to the United States,” Yale Lohr said.
Reyerson, a professor at Western State Law University, said the nation’s founding ideals of pluralism and equal opportunity have often clashed with an undercurrent of xenophobia and white supremacy.
“We’ve always had competing strains of American identity that have increased and decreased over time,” she said.
