United States v. Wong Kim Ark
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), was a United States Supreme Court decision that set important precedent about what determines citizenship.
Facts
Wong Kim Ark was born in 1873 in San Francisco, California. He worked as a laborer. His parents were immigrants from China, and were not United States citizens.
In 1894, Wong sailed to China on a temporary visit. When he returned to the US in August 1895, he was denied permission to enter the country because American officials held that, despite having been born in the United States, he was not a citizen.
Issue
Congress had enacted a law, known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting persons of the Chinese race from coming into the United States or becoming naturalized US citizens. Chinese immigrants already in the US were allowed to stay, but they were ineligible for naturalization, and if they left the US, they could not return.
However, the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified after the American Civil War, said the following concerning citizenship: 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 Supreme Court, in the Wong Kim Ark case, was called upon to decide whether an American-born person of Chinese ancestry could constitutionally be denied US citizenship and excluded from the country.
Majority opinion
The court ruled, in a 6-2 decision, that Wong Kim Ark was in fact a US citizen, and that the United States government could not deny citizenship to anyone born in the United States — even children of foreigners.
The 14th Amendment's citizenship clause, according to the court's majority, had to be interpreted in light of English common law tradition that had excluded from citizenship at birth only two classes of people: (1) children born to foreign diplomats, and (2) children born to enemy forces engaged in hostile occupation of the country's territory. The majority held that the "subject to the jurisdiction" phrase in the 14th Amendment specifically encompassed these conditions — and that since neither of these conditions applied to Wong's parents, Wong was a US citizen, regardless of the fact that his parents were not US citizens (and were, in fact, ineligible ever to become US citizens because of the Chinese Exclusion Act).
Since Wong (according to the majority opinion) was a US citizen from birth, the restrictions of the Chinese Exclusion Act did not apply to him. An act of Congress, the majority held, does not trump the Constitution; such a law "cannot control [the Constitution's] meaning, or impair its effect, but must be construed and executed in subordination to its provisions."
Minority opinion
The court's minority disagreed strongly with the majority view. Chief Justice Melville Fuller, in a dissenting opinion joined by Justice John Harlan, argued that the history of US citizenship law had broken with English common law tradition after independence, and that the principle of citizenship by descent (that is, the concept of a child inheriting his or her father's citizenship regardless of birthplace) had been more pervasive in US legal history.
In the view of the minority, excessive reliance on birthplace as the principal determiner of citizenship would lead to an untenable state of affairs in which "the children of foreigners, happening to be born to them while passing through the country, whether of royal parentage or not, or whether of the Mongolian, Malay, or other race, were eligible to the presidency, while children of our citizens, born abroad, were not."
The dissenters acknowledged that other children of foreigners — including freed slaves — had, through the years, acquired US citizenship through birth on US soil. But they still saw a difference between those people and US-born individuals of Chinese ancestry, because of (1) strong cultural traditions discouraging Chinese immigrants from assimilating into mainstream American society, (2) Chinese laws of the time which made acquiring a new citizenship or renouncing allegiance to the Chinese emperor a capital crime, and (3) the provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act making Chinese immigrants already in the US ineligible for citizenship.
Effect
Wong Kim Ark's case was subsequently cited in two major Supreme Court decisions on citizenship: Perkins v. Elg, 307 U.S. 325 (1939) (involving a US-born woman whose Swedish parents took her back to Sweden with them when she was a baby), and Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967) (involving a naturalized US citizen who subsequently moved to Israel and voted in an Israeli election).
US citizenship law since (and, arguably, before) Wong Kim Ark has long acknowledged both jus soli (citizenship through place of birth) and jus sanguinis (citizenship inherited from parents).
In response to illegal immigration in the United States, bills have been introduced from time to time in Congress which have sought to reinterpret the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment and deny citizenship at birth to US-born children of foreign visitors or illegal aliens. No such bill has ever come close to being enacted; even if one did, it would presumably be effective only if the Supreme Court were to decide to repudiate the precedent set by Wong Kim Ark.