Big Jim P wrote:The Archregimancy wrote:
Not according to the legal precedent set by the 1898 Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark.
The Supreme Court found that Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to non-citizen Chinese immigrants, was a US citizen on the basis of his birth in the United States; this despite Congress a series of 'Chinese Exclusion Acts' that heavily restricted the ability of Chinese labourers to enter the United States, and denied them both the right of permanent residency and the right to become naturalised citizens.
Wong was detained when he re-entered his native United States following a visit to family in China on the basis that he was incapable of being a US citizen given that the Exclusion Acts denied citizenship and residency to both Wong and his parents; the Supreme Court ruled 6-2 that the Exclusion Acts couldn't overrule Wong's 14th Amendment right to citizenship on the basis of his birth in the United States.
I note that the above link sharing the opinions of 'nationally syndicated radio show host Mark Levin' makes no reference to U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. The 19th-century opinion from 'Senator Lyman Trumbull, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a powerful supporter of the Fourteenth Amendment' used as an attempt to bolster the argument indeed predates U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark by some 32 years.
Then I stand corrected.
For reference, the key part of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, as it relates to the present debate, is as follows:
Section VI:
No one doubts that the [14th] amendment, as soon as it was promulgated, applied to persons of African descent born in the United States, wherever the birthplace of their parents might have been; and yet, for two years afterwards, there was no statute authorizing persons of that race to be naturalized. If the omission or the refusal of congress to permit certain [169 U.S. 649, 704] classes of persons to be made citizens by naturalization could be allowed the effect of correspondingly restricting the classes of persons who should become citizens by birth, it would be in the power of congress, at any time, by striking negroes out of the naturalization laws, and limiting those laws, as they were formerly limited, to white persons only, to defeat the main purpose of the constitutional amendment.
The fact, therefore, that acts of congress or treaties have not permitted Chinese persons born out of this country to become citizens by naturalization, cannot exclude Chinese persons born in this country from the operation of the broad and clear words of the constitution: 'All persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.'
