Five-minute digest
United States v. Wong Kim Ark
Summary
Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese parents who lived there as merchants and were subjects of the Emperor of China. His parents returned to China in 1890. He visited China that year and came back without difficulty, but when he returned from a second visit in August 1895 the collector of customs at San Francisco refused to let him land, ruling that he was a Chinese laborer barred by the Chinese Exclusion Acts. A federal district court granted his petition for habeas corpus, and the United States appealed. The parties agreed on the facts, so the sole issue was legal: whether a child born in the United States to Chinese parents who were permanently domiciled there, and not in diplomatic service, became a citizen at birth under the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The government argued that citizenship follows the parents, as in the Roman law and the modern codes of Europe, and that the words "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" required full political allegiance, not merely the obedience owed by any resident. Since Chinese subjects could not become naturalized Americans, it said, their children could not owe complete allegiance to the United States. Wong's counsel replied that the English common law, inherited by the colonies and the states, made birth within the territory the test of nationality, and that the amendment's plain words confirmed that rule. On 28 March 1898 the Court affirmed, six to two. Justice Gray traced the rule of birth within the allegiance from Calvin's Case of 1608 through Blackstone, Story and American decisions, concluding that it governed before the amendment and was reaffirmed by it. The jurisdiction clause, he held, carried only the old exceptions: children of foreign diplomats, children born on foreign public ships or to enemies during hostile occupation, and children of members of Indian tribes, as in Elk v. Wilkins (1884). Statutes forbidding Chinese naturalization could not narrow the Constitution's words, and Wong had done nothing to lose his citizenship. Chief Justice Fuller, joined by Justice Harlan, dissented. He argued that the feudal doctrine of indelible allegiance had been rejected in America, that the founders followed the law of nations on nationality, and that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the amendment used the jurisdiction clause to require allegiance owed to no foreign power. The library text contains Gray's full opinion and the first portion of Fuller's dissent, ending where the excerpt is marked, with footnotes left out. The decision settled that children born on American soil to domiciled aliens are citizens, a rule Congress later restated in nationality statutes. The Chinese Exclusion Acts were repealed in 1943. How far the holding extends to children of parents not lawfully domiciled has been argued by scholars and litigated in federal courts in recent years.
Top Lessons
Reading new words in light of old law
The Constitution used the phrase natural-born citizen without defining it, and the Fourteenth Amendment spoke of persons born in the United States. Gray read both against the common law the framers knew, while Fuller argued that independence and the law of nations had displaced that inheritance.
Soil and blood: two theories of belonging
The case set two old principles against each other: citizenship by place of birth (jus soli) and citizenship by descent (jus sanguinis). Each has a long history and a reasoned defense, one emphasizing protection by the land of birth, the other the bond of family and chosen allegiance.
The limits of legislative power over citizenship
Congress could decide whom to naturalize, and it had barred Chinese immigrants from naturalization. Gray held that this power could not reach those whom the Constitution itself made citizens by birth, placing birthright citizenship beyond ordinary legislation.
One man's case, many people's status
Wong Kim Ark's petition concerned only whether he could land in San Francisco, yet the ruling fixed the status of every child born to domiciled aliens. Gray noted that the government's theory would have unsettled the citizenship of thousands of children of European immigrants as well.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“the Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens”
Frequently cited
“The Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, 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.”
“To hold that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution excludes from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.”
“Whatever considerations, in the absence of a controlling provision of the Constitution, might influence the legislative or the executive branch of the Government to decline to admit persons of the Chinese race to the status of citizens of the United States, there are none that can constrain or permit the judiciary to refuse to give full effect to the peremptory and explicit language of the Fourteenth Amendment”
“Nationality is essentially a political idea, and belongs to the sphere of public law.”
“The framers of the Constitution were familiar with the distinctions between the Roman law and the feudal law, between obligations based on territoriality and those based on the personal and invisible character of origin, and there is nothing to show that, in the matter of nationality, they intended to adhere to principles derived from regal government, which they had just assisted in overthrowing.”
Medical Lens
Gray's and Fuller's opinions are studies of nationality, allegiance and naturalization law, and say nothing about health or medicine.