They were proud citizens of a country that did not want them. It was Independence Day, in 1895, in San Francisco’s Chinese quarter. Men with long braids who were dressed in traditional Chinese attire hobnobbed inside a building on Clay Street that was decked out in bunting and American flags. The men, who were all born in the United States, and spoke fluent English, were helping to inaugurate a new organization, the Native Sons of the Golden State. As throngs jammed the street in front of the building, the Native Sons fired off Roman candles, pinwheels, and rockets, in celebration of America’s birthday. The next morning, an article published on the front page of the San Francisco Call reported that the men were all “anxiously waiting for the next election, so they can exercise their right to vote.” The writer imagined politicians mingling “in the dens in Chinatown in order to win the ‘American-cooly vote’ ” and predicted that “Chinese hands may come to cast the ballots that decide elections.” The article’s alliterative headline betrayed the newspaper’s scorn: “POSING AS PATRIOTS.”
When I first came across the article, while researching my book, “Strangers in the Land,” which was published last month, the Native Sons’ display struck me as both admirable and foolhardy. For much of the latter half of the nineteenth century, anti-Chinese bigotry had been roiling the West Coast. In 1882, Congress passed the first in a series of laws restricting Chinese laborers from entering the country. When Chinese immigrants continued to arrive, finding ways around the measures, white residents in dozens of communities up and down the Coast banded together to drive out their Chinese neighbors. Federal lawmakers had also recently inflicted a new humiliation on Chinese residents, requiring them to register themselves and be photographed, or risk arrest. Led by the Six Companies, a conglomeration of Chinese mutual-aid associations, Chinese residents across the United States had defied the law. Leaders of the anti-Chinese movement had called for mass deportations, only for federal officials to conclude that the government lacked the resources to carry them out. The Six Companies retained a legal team that helped to advance a case to overturn the registration requirement, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court, just to lose. By early May, 1894, a hundred and six thousand eight hundred and eleven Chinese residents, including nearly seventy thousand in California, had registered with the federal government.
There is perhaps no more accurate encapsulation of a country’s values than whom it is willing to include in its citizenry. Since the earliest days of the Republic, the answer to the question “Who gets to be an American?” has been contested, subject to the anti-democratic impulses of racism, suspicion, and paranoia. The Trump Administration’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship is merely the latest turn in that struggle. Last year, Hardeep Dhillon, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, shared some research with me that is instructive in this current moment. It involves a letter that she stumbled upon at the National Archives in San Bruno, California, which lends new significance to the Native Sons’ gathering in the long-running story of inclusion and exclusion in America. The letter is dated July 10, 1895, and written by John H. Wise, the customs official in charge of San Francisco’s port, to John G. Carlisle, the Secretary of the Treasury. (At the time, the Treasury Department was responsible for immigration enforcement.) Wise was staunchly opposed to Chinese immigration and had been sounding the alarm to officials in Washington about the threat posed by a native-born Chinese population. In the letter, he alerted Carlisle about this new organization, “composed of alleged native born Chinese,” and warned that it proposed “to demand rights for its members as citizens, to vote at elections, and take part in the politics of this country.”
Wise had been conferring with George D. Collins, a San Francisco lawyer who had been pressing a legal theory that the children of Chinese immigrants were “at the moment of birth subject to a foreign power,” because their parents were Chinese subjects. The Fourteenth Amendment, enacted after the Civil War, decreed that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Collins argued that native-born Chinese Americans did not qualify.
Wise, in his letter, urged that the Department of Justice retain Collins and swiftly bring a test case before the Supreme Court against “some of the alleged native born Chinese, now knocking for admission.” Less than two months later, the S.S. Coptic arrived into San Francisco Bay, carrying a hundred and eight Chinese and fifteen Japanese passengers in steerage. Among them was Wong Kim Ark, a cook in his twenties who was born in San Francisco and had lived in the city and elsewhere in California, but had returned to China for a visit. Customs officials barred Wong from landing and took him into custody, even though he had an affidavit signed by three witnesses attesting to his American birth. In a subsequent court filing, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco, Henry Foote, acknowledged that Wong was born in San Francisco but asserted that he has been “at all times, by reason of his race, language, color and dress, a Chinese person” and not an American citizen. His would become the test case. (Collins would submit a brief in support of the Justice Department’s position.) The case took several years to make its way through the court system. Finally, in 1898, in a 6–2 decision, the Supreme Court affirmed Wong’s claim to American citizenship. Justice Horace Gray’s opinion for the majority offers a lengthy explanation of common-law doctrine and other legal precedents but also emphasized another point: excluding native-born children would mean denying 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.” This idea was beyond the pale.
The decision enshrined the Fourteenth Amendment’s principle of birthright citizenship in legal precedent, but the fight over who should be included in America’s family of citizens has continued. The tension can be traced in part to the vagaries of the Constitution’s original text, where the phrase, “citizen of the United States,” appears three times but is never defined. Early on, the Founders were focussed on population growth, so it made little sense to impose barriers to entry on citizenship. A law governing naturalization, passed in 1790, was both extraordinarily broad and stunningly circumscribed. It required that people reside in the United States for just two years and be of “good character,” but it also stipulated that only “free white persons” were eligible. In this way, a fence was erected, but purely for certain people. The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868, clarified the status of four million formerly enslaved Black people and guaranteed them “equal protection of the laws.” Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist and orator, who was formerly enslaved, became an unexpected champion of “the Chinaman,” as many called the new arrivals, on the lecture circuit. He advocated their immigration and naturalization, as a new element in America’s “composite nationality.” Douglass cast a stirring vision of the United States as a “perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family.”
A century and a half later, the country is still laboring to live up to Douglass’s ideal. In the book “You Are Not American,” published in 2021, Amanda Frost, a legal scholar at the University of Virginia, documents the country’s long history of depriving groups or individuals perceived to be undesirable of citizenship, a practice that she writes has been “primarily reserved for those who appeared ‘un-American’ in some way to government officials—be it their dress, manners, race, accent, marriage partner, religion, traditions, or even their choice of reading material.” Frost’s catalogue of “citizenship stripping,” as she calls it, includes examinations of not just Wong Kim Ark’s troubles with immigration authorities but the subsequent travails of four of his Chinese-born sons, who claimed American citizenship through him. Each of them journeyed across the ocean to enter the United States and experienced lengthy detentions and tedious interrogations; only three of them succeeded in entering the country. Among other examples, Frost also writes about incarcerated Japanese Americans renouncing their citizenship as a way of escaping confinement in concentration camps on the West Coast during the Second World War, and about the mistaken deportations of Mexican Americans during the sweeps that took place during Operation Wetback, in the nineteen-fifties.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. Under the innocuous-sounding heading of “Protecting the Value and Meaning of American Citizenship,” the White House order eliminates birthright citizenship for children without at least one parent who is a citizen or permanent resident, arguing that these children are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, as required in the Fourteenth Amendment. Oral arguments focussed narrowly on the issue of nationwide judicial injunctions, rather than the substance of the case; a ruling on Trump’s radical attempt to redraw the contours of citizenship may have to wait for a different hearing.
