The opponents of birthright citizenship hang their arguments, such as they are, on the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” In 1898, which was only thirty years after the amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court ruled definitively on the meaning of that phrase in the case of Wong Kim Ark, a man born in California to Chinese immigrants who were precluded from becoming citizens by the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Court ruled that the only babies born in the U.S. but not “subject” to its jurisdiction in this sense were those born to “foreign sovereigns” or diplomats (for example, if a French ambassador happened to give birth in the U.S.); or those born on a foreign-government-owned ship within U.S. territorial borders; or those born to “enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory.” The “single additional exception,” the Court said, was the case of children born to certain Native American tribes, based on treaty relations that they then had with the federal government. In sum, Wong’s was a landmark case, not an obscure one, and the Court referred back to it in the decades that followed; its majority opinion in a 1957 case, for example, notes that a baby born to parents in the United States illegally “is, of course, an American citizen by birth.” Legislators shared that understanding of birthright citizenship when Congress incorporated the Fourteenth Amendment’s language into federal law, in 1940 and 1952.
Author: Amy Davidson Sorkin
Published at: 2025-12-08 22:24:27
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