In 1898, at the height of anti-Chinese hysteria, a young cook won a landmark supreme court case that guaranteed citizenship to anyone born on US soil, regardless of race or ancestry. Millions of children from immigrant households have since become United States citizens as a result of his legal battle.
The constitutional right that Wong Kim Ark helped cement has come under growing assault from conservatives. Mere hours after being sworn into office for a second presidential term last Monday, Donald Trump signed a slew of executive actions to fulfill his campaign promises, the chief among which was ending birthright citizenship. In a sweeping directive, Trump directed federal agencies to refuse citizenship to children born in the US if neither parent is a citizen or permanent resident.
Legal experts and community organizers say that, after nearly 130 years, Wong’s story still raises important questions about identity and belonging, and exposes the xenophobic rhetoric often intertwined with immigration enforcement.
“The Wong Kim Ark case affirmed that birthright citizenship is universal, that it applies to even the most disfavored immigrant groups,” said Amanda Frost, a professor of immigration and citizenship law at the University of Virginia who is an expert on Wong’s case.
Wong was born in 1870 in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown. As one of only 518 US-born Chinese babies that year, Frost said, he grew up in the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred most Chinese nationals from entering the US and becoming naturalized citizens. Anti-Chinese sentiment and mob violence swept across the country.
In 1896, upon his return from a trip to China, Wong was detained by customs officials who insisted that he was not an American citizen due to his parents’ Chinese nationality.
It’s important to note, Frost said, that the supreme court was not “sympathetic to Chinese immigrants”. The justices had, just two years earlier, legalized racial segregation in public spaces in Plessy v Ferguson. They sided with Wong, Frost said, because denying birthright citizenship to children of immigrants meant that descendants of European immigrants would be affected too.
Ratified in 1868, the 14th amendment first established birthright citizenship to allow formerly enslaved Black Americans to become citizens. Three decades later, the supreme court ruled in a 6-2 decision that the 14th amendment “includes the children born within the territory of the United States of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States”.
“The real story behind Wong Kim Ark’s case is the collaborative action by the Chinese community,” said David Lei, a San Francisco-based historian and board member of the Chinese Historical Society of America.
The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), a historic institution also known as the Chinese Six Companies, raised money from Chinatown residents and business owners for Wong’s legal defense. (Wong’s case was among more than 20 lawsuits the CCBA sponsored as an effort to fight against the Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory laws, Lei said.) The organization hired the most qualified lawyers, two former deputy attorneys general and a co-founder of the American Bar Association, to represent Wong in front of the supreme court.
For years, Trump has condemned birthright citizenship as the “biggest magnet for illegal immigration” and a “crazy, lunatic” policy. In 2012, he promoted the racist “birther” theory against then president Barack Obama, falsely alleging that he was born in Kenya and ineligible to be president. In 2020, he questioned the eligibility of Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential bid by citing the immigration status of her parents.
His executive order, which denies citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and some temporary visa holders, drew widespread condemnation and a spate of legal challenges. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, saying the executive order would create a “permanent subclass of people”. Democratic attorneys general from 22 states also sued the administration, and a federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the directive.
More than 150,000 newborn children would be denied citizenship each year if the executive order is allowed to stand, according to the Democratic-led states.
But challenges to birthright citizenship have never been successful largely because the Wong Kim Ark ruling “has remained the law consistently”, said Ming Chen, a professor at UC Law San Francisco and faculty director of the school’s Center for Race, Immigration, Citizenship, and Equality.
The executive order “is another attempt through political means to change a pretty sacrosanct legal precedent”, Chen said, adding that a constitutional right cannot be repealed without changing the constitution.
The focus of Trump’s missive has been on the children of undocumented immigrants, who he said were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US, and therefore fall within the exception to universal birthright citizenship. But the order also bars citizenship from children whose mothers are “visiting on a student, work or tourist visa” – unless the father is a citizen or permanent resident. In targeting people living legally in the US, Chen said, the rationale behind ending birthright citizenship has extended beyond merely restricting illegal immigration.
“It’s cutting off the possibility that a community can ever become American,” she said. “That’s a radical re-envisioning of what America looks like.”
Wong’s case is not entirely a story of legal triumph for a harshly maligned racial group. Even after the supreme court ruling, the government continued to deny his citizenship. In 1901, less than four years after the decision, an immigration official in El Paso arrested Wong, who had been in Mexico, and tried to deport him on grounds of violating the Chinese Exclusion Act, according to Frost’s research. It took Wong four months to prove his citizenship and return home. In 1910, Wong’s oldest son was detained, and soon deported, upon arriving in San Francisco because immigration officials refused to believe he was related to Wong. Decades later, Wong himself returned to China, though some of his descendants still live in California.
The enduring fight to preserve birthright citizenship is also a fight for core American values, Frost said.
“For us as a nation,” she said, “birthright citizenship is so vital both as a way of erasing – or trying to erase – the vestiges of slavery and acknowledging we’re a nation of immigrants where every child is born under the same status.”
