The History of Birthright Citizenship

Wong Kim Ark was born in the U. S. and lived his whole life here. But when he returned from a trip to China in August of 1895, officials wouldn't let him leave his ship. Citing the Chinese Exclusion Act, which denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants, they told him he was not, in fact, a citizen of the United States. Today, the story of Wong Kim Ark, whose epic fight to be recognized as a citizen in his own country led to a Supreme Court decision affirming birthright citizenship for all. This episode originally ran as By Accident of Birth https://www.npr.org/2022/06/06/1103291268/by-accident-of-birth. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  We will learn something on election night, but not everything. There's a lot we will not know, especially when it comes to close races. And we'll know much more the next morning and the morning after that. So save yourself a little time scrolling and listen to Up First. We'll be there when you wake up each and every morning this week with the latest midterm election news.

• 0:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  A note to our listeners. This episode contains depictions of racist violence. Now, onto the show.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  All persons born or naturalized in the United States

• 0:43Speaker 03

  and subject to the jurisdiction thereof

• 0:44Speaker 04

  are citizens of the United States

• 0:46Speaker 05

  and of the state wherein they reside.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.

• 0:56Speaker 03

  Nor shall any state deprive any person of life

• 0:59Speaker 02

  liberty or property

• 1:00Speaker 05

  without due process of law.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection

• 1:06Speaker 05

  of the laws.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  Just walking down Grant Street, right through the Chinatown gate.

• 1:33Speaker 06

  This is Throughline editor Julie Kane, walking in Chinatown, San Francisco, on a cool Sunday afternoon. She's in one of the oldest Chinatowns in the world, a place where Chinese immigrants have been moving to for over 150 years. It takes up about 24 city blocks, winding up and down steep San Francisco hills.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  So I am walking up Sacramento Street. It is a beautiful day. I'm walking up a hill.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  You should probably hear my breathing.

• 2:10Speaker 06

  It's like a city within a city, and you can feel its history in the sights, sounds, smells, and flavors in every alley, on every corner.

• 2:20Speaker 04

  Hello?

• 2:22Speaker 06

  This place has a lot of stories to tell.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Sandra. Oh, Sandra, hi, I'm Julie. Julie, hi, nice to meet you. I know. I'm like getting names and I It's okay. I'm Sandra Wong.

• 2:33Speaker 06

  Sandra Wong. Our editor Julie, one of the many Julies you'll hear in this episode, is there to meet Sandra and a local historian of sorts named Julie Su.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  I'm Julie Diane Su and I'm a fourth generation San Franciscan.

• 2:48Speaker 06

  Julie Su is an attorney who grew up in San Francisco. She met Sandra Wong years ago. They were brought together by the story of one of Chinatown's most legendary residents, Wong Kim Ark.

• 3:00Speaker 04

  And I became interested or knew about the Wong Kim Ark case because my friend, who was working in Washington DC at the time for Janet Reno, asked me to put on the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the US Supreme Court landmark case, United States versus Wong Kim Ark. Well, we're here in front of his, where he was born. That's the recognized birthplace, the exact birthplace. It's different now.

• 3:30Speaker 06

  751 Sacramento Street. Back then, in the late 1800s, when Wong Kim Ark was born, it was a storefront with an apartment above the shop. Today, it's a school in the middle of a quiet side street, just downhill from the main tourist drag.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  So this is as close as we get to 751 Sacramento Street. It is now the site of the Nam Kiu Chinese School.

• 3:54Speaker 06

  The school is a beautiful red, green, and white building. It's designed in the classic Chinese style. Raised pavilions, ornate paneling covering the windows, curved shingles on the roof. This should probably be a site where tourists flock because of its connection to Wong Kim Ark. He was the defendant in a court case that would forever alter US immigration laws.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  I first heard about Wong Kim Ark at my father's funeral.

• 4:21Speaker 06

  This is Sandra Wong.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  It was a picture board of my father and all these pictures of him when he was young, throughout his life, along with this newspaper article that talked about the Wong Kim Ark case. And I remember reading it and thinking, this sounds like a big deal.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco, of parents domiciled there, went to China on a visit. Upon attempting to land on his return, he was refused the privilege and deprived of his liberty.

• 5:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  The United States versus Wong Kim Ark is one of the most important Supreme Court cases in US history, a case that would shape the relationship between immigrants and the US government and further define who gets to call themselves an American.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  The case came before the Supreme Court on appeal from the judgment of the District Court and was submitted in May 1896 as a test case under the clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Los Angeles Herald, July 24, 1898.

• 5:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  So what did this have to do with Sandra Wong and her dad? What was his relationship to Wong Kim Ark?

• 5:38Speaker 04

  There was a lot of things he didn't talk about. And when I remember finding out about it, I'm like, why now do I have to find out? I would have asked all these questions and I didn't have that opportunity.

• 5:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  She became obsessed with learning more about the story her father never told her. She went searching through all the records she could find.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Through documents, through the National Archive transcripts. You know, I remember seeing his picture as a little boy and reading about the testimony that he had to go through at his court hearing to enter.

• 6:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  After all her research, here's the story she pieced together. Wong Kim Ark brought Sandra's father, Wong Yook Jim, to San Francisco from China in the 1920s. Wong Kim Ark claimed Sandra's father as his son, but it's possible her dad was his grandson. So this would make Wong Kim Ark...

• 6:40Speaker 04

  My father's grandfather. So that would be my great-grandfather.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  I feel like it's a bit of a loss because, you know, I wasn't able to talk to my dad about it. And I would have loved to have asked him questions and to hear it through him.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  I would have loved that.

• 6:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  Finding out the truth was bittersweet. And there's a question Sandra still thinks about. Why didn't her dad tell her?

• 7:08Speaker 04

  You know, there are secrets. I don't know if people don't want to talk about it because of the pain, you know, various reasons. Maybe there's shame.

• 7:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  Pain, shame. Maybe it's because at the center of this story is one troubling fact. Wong Kim Mark, Sandra's great grandfather, was born in the United States. Yet, as a young adult, he was prevented from returning to San Francisco, his birthplace, after visiting family in China because of, quote, "his race, language, color, and dress."

• 7:46Speaker 04

  As I read through the files and him going back and forth and all of a sudden to be told that, you know, you're not, you don't have a right to come here. I mean, can you imagine how you would feel and just being so incensed? And that would definitely, you know, make you fight, I would think.

• 8:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  And he did fight. With help from the Chinese-American community, Wong Kim Mark's case made it to the Supreme Court.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  He fought for his right to be here. He fought for what he believed in.

• 8:21Speaker 06

  He fought for his birthright citizenship. The idea that, with some small exceptions, if you're born in the United States, then you're automatically a citizen. A concept that isn't foreign for many of us. I immigrated to the US from Iran as a child. But my son, who was born in Maryland, is the first person in my entire family to be a US citizen because he was born here. Many of the staff on Throughline are either first, second, or third-generation immigrants who have some experience with the complexities of this legal principle. It's easy to think that it's always been this way. But the question of who is an American has always been up for debate. And the answer to that question is always a product

• 9:06Speaker 06

  of the political, social, and economic realities of when it's being asked. It's an issue that's still contested today.

• 9:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order denying birthright citizenship to children born in the US who do not have at least one parent who is a US citizen or lawful permanent resident. More than 20 states have sued the Trump administration in response, contending that his action disregards over 125 years of legal precedent. And a federal judge has already blocked President Trump's executive order.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  The federal judge says that is blatantly unconstitutional. Trump says that ruling will be challenged.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  When pressed by CBS's Margaret Brennan on the US being founded by immigrants, Vance said. Just because we were founded by immigrants doesn't mean that 240 years later that we have to have the dumbest immigration policy in the world.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  That would mean overturning a portion of the Constitution's 14th Amendment. Birthright citizenship began in 1898 with the Supreme Court case US versus Wong Kim Ark.

• 10:29Speaker 06

  In this episode of Throughline from NPR, we're going to experience Wong Kim Ark's story and learn how his legal battle changed the debate about who gets to be an American.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  This is Zachary from Longmont, Colorado, and you are listening to Throughline from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from ProLon. Want to look and feel your best this fall? ProLon's five-day fasting-mimicking diet is a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15% off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com/NPR.

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• 12:03Speaker 04

  Happy fall. Yes, the days are getting shorter and colder, and the rain can be a drag. But this is also the perfect time of year to get cozy. Life Kit has lots of ideas so you can embrace the change of seasons, with episodes on everything from making soup to exercising outdoors. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Part one, In the Land of My Birth.

• 12:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  In August of 1895, a ship called the SS Coptic approached the coast of Northern California.

• 12:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  On that boat was a passenger from San Francisco, a young man returning from visiting his parents' homeland of China.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  That steamship journey took about a month, and he would have ridden in steerage near the engine room, which is where most of the Chinese immigrants traveled.

• 13:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  He was a cook named Wong Kim Art.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  He would have slept on a bunk, crammed in with everyone else on steerage, and they overcrowded these boats. It would have been certainly a fairly squalid way to travel and very difficult in terms of limited food and water.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  I think when he saw San Francisco Bay emerge out of what was likely the foggy morning, he must have been thrilled to think, I'm finally back home, and I can get off this boat and go back to my home in San Francisco.

• 13:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  But that's not what would happen.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  When this steamship bearing Wong Kim Ark arrives, the general manager is forbidden to allow him to leave the steamship.

• 14:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  A U.S. customs agent declared that Wong Kim Ark was not allowed to step foot onto U.S. soil. At this point, the Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect. And so if you were a Chinese laborer, you were not allowed to enter. Wong Kim Ark argued with the customs official.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  He said, yes, I'm a laborer, I'm a chef, but I'm a citizen. And here's the proof, he had his certificates. He knew that he was born in the United States and that meant he was a U.S. citizen. But he also must have had a little fear about that because he filed a certificate of identity before he left that had a picture of him and said, I was born in the United States and a U.S. citizen. And he had three white witnesses, white people, because that's all the only kind of witness the U.S. government would accept, who were willing to say he was born in the United States and they'd known him from childhood. So he was prepared.

• 14:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  But that preparation didn't add up to much because

• 15:00Speaker 04

  unbeknownst to Wong, while he was in China, the U.S. government had decided it wanted to bring a test case, challenging birthright citizenship, particularly for the children of Chinese immigrants. So they chose him and they didn't let him get off that boat. But they were looking for a test case. And he was a perfect test case. He didn't set out to be anybody's test case.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  That ever since the birth of said Wong Kim Ark, at the time and place herein before stated and stipulated, he has had but one residence, to wit, a residence in said state of California in the United States of America. And that he has never changed or lost said residence or gained or acquired another residence and there resided claiming to be a

• 15:55Speaker 02

  A citizen of the United States. Wong Kim Ark's parents were one of a tiny minority of Chinese immigrants coming into the United States in the 1860s and 70s. We don't know exactly when they arrived, but we know they arrived at least before Wong Kim Ark's birth.

• 16:12Speaker 06

  This is Amanda Frost. Amanda is a law professor at the University of Virginia and has practiced immigration law for years.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  And I'm the author of a book entitled, "You Are Not American: Citizenship Dripping From Dred Scott to the Dreamers."

• 16:29Speaker 02

  They came from the Pearl River Delta area, from these trade ports of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Canton, were opening up to the world.

• 16:39Speaker 06

  And this is Carol Makinoff.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  I am Richter Professor Emerita in the Political Science Department at Swarthmore College.

• 16:47Speaker 06

  Carol co-wrote a book all about Wong Kim Ark.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  The name of the book is American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship.

• 16:57Speaker 06

  Wong Kim Ark's parents, Wei Li and Wong Si Ping, came to the United States, like many Chinese immigrants, looking for work. Most of these immigrants were men coming to build the railroads, or to work as agricultural fieldhands, or to search for gold in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Wong Kim Ark's parents did something different.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  They were engaged in provisioning. They were merchants.

• 17:21Speaker 06

  They opened what was basically a grocery store in San Francisco.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  They were largely servicing a Chinese clientele.

• 17:29Speaker 06

  And at some point in the early 1870s, the records aren't totally clear, they welcomed a new baby into the world: Wong Kim Ark.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  He later told immigration inspectors he was born in the middle room on the second floor at 751 Sacramento Street in Chinatown, in the residential apartments over his parents' store. All the time he was in the United States, he lived within about a quarter mile of the place where he was born.

• 17:56Speaker 06

  This is probably because Chinese people were not welcome in many other parts of San Francisco. And this pattern followed in other cities with growing Chinese populations. In response, Chinatowns popped up in cities all over the US. It was a way for Chinese immigrants to band together, form communities, and try to keep themselves safe in an increasingly hostile country. But sometimes, these enclaves became a target.

• 18:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  On the evening of October 24th, 1871, in Los Angeles, an angry group of white men descended upon a neighborhood where some of the city's very small population of Chinese residents lived.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  And they dragged men from their beds, and hung them, and shot them, and stabbed them, and stole from them. And out of this tiny population, 18 men were lynched that night.

• 18:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  Many historians believe it's the biggest mass lynching event in American history.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  So this was a shocking event, I'm sure, for Wong Kim Ark and his family. And I assume they must have heard about it, because, of course, they were living in Chinatown in San Francisco, in the same state and not so far away.

• 19:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  And maybe they thought, this can't happen here. San Francisco was much bigger, more cosmopolitan, and had a much bigger Chinatown.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  But if that's what they thought, they were wrong. Because in 1877, a very similar attack, pogrom, racial pogrom, occurred in San Francisco, in Chinatown.

• 19:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  In what started as a labor strike, a group of angry men, driven by the idea that Chinese immigrants were taking their jobs by working for less, marched towards Chinatown and started setting buildings on fire.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  They killed four men that night. It must have been terrifying.

• 19:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  Anti-Chinese violence had landed on the doorstep of Wong Kim Ark's family. Eventually, they packed up their store and moved back to China.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  We don't know exactly why Wong Kim Ark's family left, but you can imagine that that pogrom, that attack on the Chinese population in the few blocks where they lived must have terrified them and been part of the reason they left.

• 20:34Speaker 06

  Where did all this anger towards Chinese immigrants come from? Most people in the US probably would have never encountered a Chinese immigrant. Yet, in the last half of the 19th century, anti-Chinese sentiment was everywhere.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  At first, Chinese immigrants were welcomed. They were helping to build America. They were building the transcontinental railroad, and they were key. They were extraordinarily important. And they helped to mine the gold and the precious metals in backbreaking difficult work throughout the West. But then, as so often we see in this nation, there was an economic downturn, and they were scapegoated and blamed for the lack of jobs and the poor economy.

• 21:16Speaker 06

  There really wasn't much truth to this idea. Chinese immigrants made up a very tiny percentage of the population of the United States in the 19th century. But this narrative, pushed by politicians and printed in the newspapers, became increasingly accepted.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  This country was coming out of the Civil War, the end of slavery. And the white workers were told, "The Chinese are the new slaves, and they will undermine your work because they will take jobs at lower pay. They're willing to work in slave-like conditions." And they used that as an excuse for violence.

• 21:53Speaker 06

  Their attempt to drive out Chinese immigrants from the United States. And this effort didn't just come in the form of violent mob attacks. It was cemented into law. In 1882, Congress passed a bill called the Chinese Exclusion Act.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  From and after the expiration of 90 days next after the passage of this act, and until the expiration of 10 years next after the passage of this act, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended.

• 22:27Speaker 06

  And this law creates a new legal invention.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  Before any Chinese passengers are landed from any such vessel, the collector or his deputy shall proceed to examine such passengers, comparing their certificates with the list and with the passengers. And no passenger shall be allowed to land in the United States from such vessel in violation of law.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  It creates a racial distinction that says that the Chinese are a different race, which should not be allowed to immigrate or naturalize. There are some exemptions built into the law, which provide exemptions for like students and diplomats and merchants.

• 23:22Speaker 06

  This is Jason Oliver Chang.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  I'm Associate Professor of History and Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut.

• 23:30Speaker 06

  Jason says that as soon as the law passed, customs officials around the country began looking for Chinese laborers who might be in the US in violation of the law.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  They would inspect their hands to see if they were calloused and say, are you really an upper-class merchant? Or are you a laborer who's pretending? And so they would have these very, you know, demeaning, humiliating kinds of approaches to really enforce the racial rule of the land. There was a sense too that the Chinese couldn't assimilate.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  And that Chinese immigrants weren't willing to assimilate.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  So we had these constant kinds of battles for the lived reality of citizenship.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  The Chinese population was forced by laws as well as social conventions to live in isolated ways, to live in Chinatowns, in ethnic enclaves. The children were barred from attending schools, anti-masogeneration laws barred marriage, the federal law barred Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens.

• 24:29Speaker 06

  There was also the Page Act, which barred all Chinese women, except for the wives of merchants, from entering the United States. There was also the Giri Act that required all Chinese immigrants to constantly walk around with identification papers.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  So there was this sense that the Chinese wouldn't assimilate, but of course, it was the laws and policies and practices of the nation that made it so difficult for them to assimilate. But that also made it easy to view them as others, as people who are not like us.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  These were important messages that also aligned with a broader kind of sense that the West was for white people.

• 25:04Speaker 06

  And for many Chinese people in the US, the message was clear.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Their job in the United States was over.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Their introduction for the railroads was over.

• 25:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  When Wong Kim Mark's family left the United States after the 1877 anti-Chinese riots in San Francisco, they never came back, but he did.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  So he reported that he went back to China with his parents around 1877, when he was around eight years old. He came back, he said, at age 11 with an uncle, and he began working as, first like a dishwasher and then a cook, first in the mining communities in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and then later in Chinatown.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  It must have been a very rough life for him. He was clearly not being educated at that point, if he ever got much education. And also, it must have been very lonely. He had come from a small village, Ong Sing Village, where he'd been living with a younger

• 26:12Speaker 04

  Brother and his parents and now he was back in the United States, a country he did know well, having grown up his first eight years in the United States. But he hadn't been for several years and he was in a strange new community, working. It must have been a lonely and isolating time for him there, too. We also know from a picture where he's wearing sort of a smock and his hair is standing up on end. And you realize, you know, that he probably didn't have a lot of opportunities to shower. He was working probably hot, difficult, hard jobs as a chef in a kitchen. So that gave you a sense, too, of the hardships of his life. He lived in the United States until he was about 20, when he went back to China because he wanted to find a wife. He wanted to get married.

• 26:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  Something that would have been really challenging in the US because there were so few Chinese women and because Chinese men were legally barred or socially discouraged from marrying outside their race.

• 27:08Speaker 04

  So he really had no choice but to go back to China and get married. And indeed, he did. He went back and married a woman named Yi Shi, who was about 17 years old. And he got married to her and she moved in with his mother and brother in Angxing Village in Guangdong Province in China.

• 27:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  But he didn't stay long. After several months, he returned to the United States to work. And he repeated this process again a couple of years later, going back to China to visit his wife and his growing family. But in 1895, on what he must have expected to be another uneventful trip from China to San Francisco.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  Sure, he thought it would go smoothly because he'd landed back in the US twice before, once in the last five years, and he'd been admitted as a US citizen.

• 27:55Speaker 06

  He had no idea that he would soon be stuck on a steamship off the coast of California, within sight of his hometown, told by his own government that he was not allowed back into the country of his birth, that all of a sudden, he was not a citizen.

• 28:10Speaker 04

  And they basically claimed that if your parents were not citizens, then even if you were born in the US, you were not a citizen of the United States and you could be barred entry or

• 28:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  From the United States.

• 28:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, Wong Kim Ark fights back in court.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Jade Nguyen. I'm in Stanford, California, and you're listening to The Throughline from NPR.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from ProLon. Want to look and feel your best this fall? ProLon's five-day fasting-mimicking diet is a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15% off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com/npr. This week on Short Wave. What is something found on both true crime TV shows and real-life investigations? Hmm, questionable forensics?

• 29:53Speaker 05

  And it's almost always accepted by lay jurors as providing an objective, scientific truth.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Interrogating junk science. That's on Short Wave from NPR.

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• 30:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  They're fundamental. Learn more at selc.org.

• 30:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part two. The Test Case.

• 30:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  In August of 1895, Wong Kim Ark was sitting on a steamship, detained and watched over by guards. He was there because, according to the government, he was not a US citizen, even though he had documentation showing he was born in San Francisco. It must have been a lonely, bitter feeling to be just a few miles from his hometown, rejected by his own government. But he wasn't alone. Almost immediately, a group of people started working to get him out.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  So I'm guessing they had lots of contacts and networks who were aware of who was coming in and what was happening on those steamships. The group was known colloquially as the Chinese Six Companies.

• 31:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Chinese Six Companies, also known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  It was a group of representatives from all the different regions of China who were immigrants to the US, living in the US, who had made it in the United States. They had some money, they had some resources. And when the Chinese Exclusion Act went into effect, they mobilized. And they said, we are going to fight back.

• 32:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  They frequently hired lawyers, white lawyers, to help Chinese laborers who were subject to deportation under the law.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  And so the Chinese Six Companies hired a lawyer for Wong Kim Ark, a well-known lawyer named Thomas Riordan, and he files a habeas petition on Wong Kim Ark's behalf.

• 32:19Speaker 05

  A petition for a writ of habeas corpus was filed on behalf of Wong Kim Ark, alleging that said Wong Kim Ark is unlawfully confined and restrained of his liberty on board of the steamship Coptic and prevented from landing into the United States.

• 32:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  So while Wong Kim Ark sat imprisoned on the steamship, his case headed to a California District Court.

• 32:43Speaker 05

  The question to be determined is whether a person born within the United States, whose father and mother--

• 32:49Speaker 02

  were both persons of Chinese descent and subjects of the Emperor of China, but at the time of the birth were both domiciled residents of the United States is a citizen.

• 33:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  The district court was faced with a monumental decision, one that hinged on a single sentence in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  14th Amendment, Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States.

• 33:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution after the Civil War to achieve, quote, "equal protection of the laws." It was intended to make sure newly emancipated Black Americans had full, equal citizenship and rights. Some of the most impactful Supreme Court cases have hinged on this amendment. There's Plessy versus Ferguson, which upheld the constitutionality of segregation. Brown versus Board of Education, which reversed that. Even Roe versus Wade, which guaranteed the right to abortion. Wong Kim Mark's case focused on a specific part of the 14th Amendment, the Citizenship Clause.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  All persons born or naturalized in the United States

• 34:06Speaker 05

  and subject to the jurisdiction thereof

• 34:08Speaker 02

  jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state

• 34:12Speaker 05

  wherein they reside

• 34:13Speaker 02

  and of the state wherein they reside.

• 34:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  That phrase, jurisdiction thereof, it's key because the court had to decide what makes a person a US citizen. Do all people born on US soil fall under its jurisdiction, its laws? Or is jurisdiction about where your loyalties lie? Are Chinese people living in the United States really subject to US laws? Or should they be considered subjects of the Emperor of China? And then, what does this legal argument mean for all immigrants across the country? Could this same logic be applied to birthright citizens from Europe?

• 34:55Speaker 04

  Given the attention that this case drew in the local press, it seems that everyone understood that this was going to be the big challenge.

• 35:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Julie Novkov is the dean of Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany SUNY, and co-author of "American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship."

• 35:19Speaker 04

  It was going to have a broader impact than whatever was going on in San Francisco.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  One of the most important Chinese cases for many years, being the application of Wong Kim Ark to land as a native son.

• 35:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  Wong Kim Ark was still stuck on a steamer off the coast while his case played out in court. It had been months, and he was right in the middle of a bigger battle between the US government and Chinese Americans.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  The case of Wong Kim Ark promises to become historic, for the question raised is whether a Chinese born on American soil is a citizen of the United States.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  So although there had been previous rulings that had touched on this issue, this one did immediately garner quite a lot of attention, even before the ruling came down.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  The decision of several hundred other cases depends upon its outcome.

• 36:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  Finally, in the fall of 1895, the court came to a decision.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  He wins. He wins.

• 36:24Speaker 03

  From the law as announced and the facts as stipulated, I am of the opinion that Wong Kim Ark is a citizen of the United States within the meaning of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. He has not forfeited his right to return to this country. His detention, therefore, is illegal. He should be discharged, and it is so ordered.

• 36:52Speaker 06

  The experiment of blending the social habits and mutual race idiosyncrasies of the Chinese laboring classes with those of the great body of the people of the United States has been proved by the experience of 20 years to be in every sense unwise, impolitic, and injurious to both nations.

• 37:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  Wong Kim Ark was technically free, but his victory was short-lived.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  So the government doesn't give up, but the government immediately says, "We're appealing this." And in fact, Wong Kim Ark is only allowed off that steamship because he posted a $250 bail. And those records are lost to history, but I'm guessing that the Chinese Six Companies produced that $250. He was kept for four and a half months, and he was only released on January 3rd, 1896.

• 37:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  The government appealed the case up to the Supreme Court. They did this because they wanted to enforce and expand the Chinese Exclusion Act. Even the president at the time, Grover Cleveland, was in full support of excluding Chinese immigrants.

• 37:59Speaker 06

  This has induced me to omit no effort to answer the earnest and popular demand for the absolute exclusion of Chinese laborers having objects and purposes unlike our own.

• 38:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  So the government did it. It appealed the case all the way up to the US Supreme Court. And the Solicitor General, the lawyer who represents the government in front of the Supreme Court, was right out of central casting.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  A man named Holmes Conrad. And Holmes Conrad was tall, patrician. He looked like exactly the kind of person that could be trusted to convey the law clearly and accurately to the justices.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  His reputation at the time was that he was an excellent lawyer, an excellent representative of the US government. But if you dig a little deeper into the background of Holmes Conrad, you see some really interesting personal details.

• 39:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  Holmes Conrad came from a prominent slave-owning family. He had spent the Civil War as an officer, fighting for the Confederacy. And here's some nice irony for you. Because he fought for secession during the Civil War, Conrad actually had his citizenship revoked.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  So for at least a little period of time, a short period of time, Holmes Conrad, too, was not a citizen of the United States. He wouldn't have been able to vote or hold office.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  It's interesting to think that, at least for a brief period of time, he shared this issue with Wong Kim Ark about whether he would be considered a citizen of the United States.

• 39:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Meanwhile, Wong Kim Ark, after being detained those horrible four months on ships, was back to his hardscrabble life in San Francisco. He was earning money and sending it to his wife and kids in China. And all the while, the government was trying to beat him in court, questioning his citizenship. Yet, behind the scenes, he's got an all-star, high-powered legal team on his side, paid for by the Chinese Six Companies.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  They had lawyers on retainer. Some of these lawyers were extremely well-positioned. Some of them had had positions in the federal government. Some of them had argued before the Supreme Court. Some of them were working for the railroads. And the businessmen wanted the Chinese that they had brought over to get into the country.

• 40:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  For this case, they hired two accomplished white lawyers.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  One was Maxwell Evarts. In a way, he wore a dual hat. He was hired by the Chinese Six Companies, paid by them to represent Wong. But the railroad, which he also worked for, clearly supported him.

• 40:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Many big businesses had a keen interest in the Wong Kim Ark case. They needed labor, cheap labor, to expand and be profitable. So they jumped to support Wong Kim Ark's case.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  The second lawyer was a man named J. Hubley Ashton, who had worked for President Lincoln. And both men deeply believed in Lincoln and the Reconstruction Era's mission of not just ending slavery, but establishing racial equality.

• 41:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Evarts and Ashton had argued cases before the Supreme Court before. But

• 41:23Speaker 02

  I would have to think that they were pessimistic at this point.

• 41:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  The two of them were coming off a loss in a high-profile case involving a Chinese client. Going into this case, they had every reason to doubt the outcome, an outcome that would be potentially devastating for Wong Kim Ark and thousands like him.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  He surely knew that if he lost, he would be forced to leave the United States, the country in which he'd been born and spent most of his life.

• 41:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, Wong Kim Ark heads to the Supreme Court.

• 42:10Speaker 02

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• 42:44Rund Abdelfatah?

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• 42:52Speaker 02

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• 43:01Rund Abdelfatah?

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• 43:08Speaker 02

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• 43:26Speaker 02

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• 43:49Speaker 03

  Part three, jurisdiction thereof.

• 43:55Speaker 06

  On March 5, 1897, on a Friday afternoon, the day came, the case of United States versus Wong Kim Ark began.

• 44:07Speaker 06

  They're in the Capitol Building because there was no Supreme Court Building at this time. And they were in front of these nine black-robed men with Chief Justice Fuller in the middle, who was very short, so he was sitting on an elevated chair. Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller was the leader of the nine justices that made up the Supreme Court. And let's just say, they had a bit of a reputation.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  The Fuller Court is known among constitutional scholars as one of the most racist iterations of the Supreme Court that has existed across the span of American history. They're responsible for Plessy versus Ferguson, responsible for building the infrastructure that supports the development of Jim Crow in the South in the 20th century. And they actively, in some cases, support white supremacy and white supremacists. And the court is also not, not always all that wonderful to the Chinese specifically. Many members of the court were on record as being hostile to Chinese immigrants.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  The argument took place over two different days, Friday, March 5, 1897, and Monday, March 8, 1897.

• 45:29Speaker 06

  So the United States government, represented by Holmes Conrad, swung first.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  He would have argued, as he did in his brief, that the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to all born in the United States, has a caveat, or he would have said an exception, which is only those who are born in the United States and who are subject to its jurisdiction are automatically birthright citizens of the United States. The case turned upon the meaning of the language, "subject to the jurisdiction thereof", jurisdiction being of two kinds, territorial and political. And so Holmes Conrad would have grasped on to that language and said, "Well, Wong Kim Ark, sure, he was born in the United States. We can't refute that. But we do not think he was subject to the jurisdiction of the United States

• 46:20Speaker 02

  because his parents were loyal to the Emperor of China and so was their son by sort of automatic transmission. And so that means the son cannot automatically acquire citizenship based on birth.

• 46:33Speaker 06

  That was the first piece of Conrad's argument. But then he made a bigger, bolder claim.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Also said to the Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is itself unconstitutional. And his reason for that was he said the South was coerced into ratifying the 14th Amendment in 1868, and therefore it was never validly a part of the Constitution. And we can see in that argument, of course, that he's trying to litigate the Civil War. He's trying to say the Reconstruction Amendment should not be law. We should turn back the clock.

• 47:07Speaker 06

  Conrad was making this argument in 1897 in front of the Supreme Court, over 30 years after the ink on the 14th Amendment had dried.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  And in fact, the lawyers for Wong Kim Ark call him on that. And they say in their brief, "This nation's..." build so much blood to fight for the end of slavery and to establish the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments and change our nation and change our constitution. And you should not accept the argument that these amendments are invalid.

• 47:36Speaker 06

  The government made its argument. Then it was Wong Kim Ark's lawyers' chance to counter.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  Well, in very simple terms, Wong Kim Ark's lawyers have two main claims. One is that this principle of birthright citizenship is a longstanding principle in common law, not just American common law, but English common law.

• 48:09Speaker 06

  Their second claim is that this common law principle was adopted in the 14th amendment.

• 48:15Speaker 04

  And therefore, if you look at the history of this principle, if you look at how it has played out over time, if you look at what the 14th amendment was attempting to do and how discussions around it unfolded, and then you look at subsequent developments in lower federal court cases and a couple Supreme Court cases, there's plenty of grounding there to support the idea that the descendants of Chinese born in the United States are entitled to birthright citizenship.

• 48:49Speaker 06

  Millions of immigrants from Europe and around the world had moved to the US in the 19th century. They were encouraged to come and populate the West through laws like the Homestead Act. And their children, who were born here, were de facto citizens. They could vote, at least the men could, start companies, and they were making up more and more of the population. So the Supreme Court was suddenly having to address a fundamental issue. If the sons and daughters of Chinese are not citizens, then what of the sons and daughters of the English, the Irish, the Germans, the...

• 49:26Speaker 02

  French, other people who have come to the United States. If you are not a citizen upon being born on this soil, then none of those others are citizens either.

• 49:38Speaker 04

  That principle is universal, and if you undercut it for the descendants of Chinese, you're basically undercutting the foundations of quite a few American citizens.

• 50:05Speaker 04

  So, the length of time between the oral argument and the ruling was over a year. So, the case was argued March 5th and March 8th, 1897, and the final Supreme Court decision wasn't announced until March 28th, 1898. And that was an extraordinarily long period of time. It would be extraordinary today. It was even more so then. If you had been looking at this case, not necessarily knowing what was going to happen, only knowing what you know about the fuller court going into it, I think you could be forgiven for being a little bit uncertain about which way this one was going to go. So, you can imagine the fear that Wong Kim Ark might have been feeling as month after month went by without a decision. And it's the sign the Supreme Court was really struggling with what to do in this case and how to decide it.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  And his lawyers were probably also greatly concerned.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  But they were brilliant lawyers, and they told the Supreme Court, if you rule for the government, that the children of emeritus are not citizens, you will take away citizenship from hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, including lots of white people. And the court heard that loud and clear and even noted that in its opinion. That to deny citizenship to one group would be to deny... Citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, and other European parentage who have always been considered and treated...

• 51:26Speaker 05

  As citizens of the United States.

• 51:36Speaker 06

  It took over a year, but finally, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in the case of U.S. vs. Wong Kim Ark.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  On March 28th, they issued a ruling, six to two, because they were down a member, so only eight members. And Justice Gray authors the opinion.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  And he finds that Wong Kim Ark and all others similarly situated are indeed entitled to birthright citizenship.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Regardless of the immigration status of their parents, are citizens of the United States.

• 52:17Speaker 05

  It is conceded that if he is a citizen of the United States, the Acts of Congress, known as the Chinese Exclusion Acts prohibiting persons of the Chinese race and especially Chinese laborers from coming into the United States do not and cannot apply to him.

• 52:38Speaker 05

  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.

• 53:09Speaker 05

  Justice Gray.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  The court focused on that language, said "all persons." This is intended to apply to every And it's not intended to be so restrictive as to take away citizenship or bar citizenship from the children of immigrants. And remember, the United States is a nation of immigrants. It's not like there's just a few people who are born to non-citizen parents. It's a significant percentage of the country every year is born to immigrant parents.

• 53:37Speaker 06

  Quick note: All persons did not necessarily include Native Americans. And that's because tribes recognized by the US government were considered sovereign nations with their own governments and court systems.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  And then the court threw in at the very end, they said, "And if we were to rule any other way, we would take citizenship away from lots of children of not just the quote unquote obnoxious Chinese," which is how the court often referred to this group, "but also the children of English immigrants and German immigrants and French immigrants."

• 54:11Speaker 06

  The court ruled that citizenship is determined by whether or not someone is born on US soil, not by blood or race.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  That, I think, also pragmatically led them to say, "No, Wong Kim Ark, we're ruling for you, not so much because we're sympathetic to children of Chinese immigrants, but because we can't undo the citizenship of the children of immigrants in this country."

• 54:40Speaker 06

  Wong Kim Ark, with the support of the Chinese Six Companies, had won his case. He was recognized by the US government as a birthright citizen, a ruling that his lawyers knew would have an impact on generations to come. And Wong Kim Ark could finally go back to his life in San Francisco.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Well, I would love to say it was a fully happy ending. His problems were not over in part because the US government didn't fully give up. It gave up on that formal legal argument, but I feel in some ways they just switched the battle to other venues. So Wong knew that if he wanted to leave the country again, he would have to prove to everyone's satisfaction, all of these white immigration inspectors. That he was the man who'd won the Supreme Court case, that he was Wong Kim Ark, that he was a citizen born in the United States. And that if they disbelieved him, he'd be stuck all over again in the steerage hold of a steamship, trying to argue he could enter his country. And that must have made him very leery to even think about leaving the United States.

• 55:42Speaker 06

  But Wong Kim Ark didn't need to leave the US to land in trouble with authorities.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  He was living in El Paso, Texas, just a few years later, after his win in October of 1901, living and working there. And he was arrested and charged with being a Chinese immigrant, not a native-born American, a Chinese immigrant who was illegally in the United States. He had to post a $300 bond.

• 56:07Speaker 06

  That's over $10,000 in today's money.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  And it took months before he could convince these officials, "I'm the guy who won the Supreme Court case establishing birthright citizenship. That's who I am. I am a citizen who gets to stay." This is the racial profiling of its time.

• 56:35Speaker 06

  Today, on the corner of Jackson Street and Grant Avenue in San Francisco, you'll find a huge mural depicting the faces of some famous Asian-American people. In the bottom is an image of a 30-something Wong Kim Ark. He's wearing all black. His eyebrows are raised and has a slight smile on his face. You could almost call his look hopeful. Hope, that can be easy to miss in this tale of struggle and resistance. But the truth is, Wong Kim Ark, decade after decade, continued to live his life between his homeland, the United States, and where his wife and children lived, China. He was even able to bring some of his offspring to live in the US.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Including Wong Yook Jim, who arrived in 1926, age 11, just a little boy. He endures this long trip and three weeks on Angel Island and all the questioning that the immigration inspectors put everyone through. But then he was admitted to the United States as a US citizen.

• 57:34Speaker 06

  Wong Yook Jim grew up in the US. He would eventually join the US military and worked as a merchant marine. He would get married to a Japanese-American woman and start a family.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  His children and grandchildren live in the United States today. So the family established itself in the United States. It was an enormous struggle, but they succeeded in doing so.

• 57:55Speaker 06

  Wong Yook Jim would name one of his daughters Sandra. Sandra Wong. Wong Kim Ark's great-granddaughter.

• 58:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Wong Kim Ark was, you know, born in San Francisco and he, you know, was discriminated against and he fought for his right to be here. He fought for what he believed in and he won, which was significant because it established birthright citizenship for everyone.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  And what is birthright citizenship?

• 58:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  To me, to the, to the regular person, if you are born here, you are a citizen.

• 58:39Speaker 06

  Wong Kim Ark would go back to visit China one last time in 1931. He was in his 60s. He never came home to the US. It isn't just on that street in Chinatown that Wong Kim Ark's image looms large. The ruling in the US versus Wong Kim Ark has remained firmly in place even though it has and will continue to be challenged. Wong Kim Ark's fight for recognition may not have made his life that much easier, but his sacrifices cleared a path for his descendants and for the descendants of millions of others.

• 59:21Speaker 06

  For my son, whose rights as a citizen are secured by birth, for the millions of others whose rights are secured by the soil and not by their skin color or ethnicity. And he helped make real the aspirational language of our nation's founding document. All persons born...

• 59:41Speaker 02

  or naturalized in the United States.

• 59:43Speaker 06

  and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

• 59:45Speaker 05

  are citizens of the United States. and of the state wherein they reside.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  Nor shall any state deprive any person of life.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  liberty or property.

• 1:00:00Speaker 05

  without due process of law.

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  or deny to any person within its jurisdiction. the equal protection.

• 1:00:06Speaker 05

  of the laws.

• 1:00:36Speaker 06

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 1:00:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 1:00:43Speaker 06

  This episode was produced by me.

• 1:00:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  and me and.

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  Lawrence Wu. Laine Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane. Victor Ibevez. Anya Steinberg.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Yolanda Sangwe. Casey Miner.

• 1:00:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

• 1:00:59Speaker 06

  Thanks to Casey Morrell, Don Gagné, Corey Turner, Blaze Adler-Ivanbrook, Lawrence Wu, Casey Miner, Amiri Tala, Christina Kim, and Devin Katayama for their voiceover work. Thank you to the Chinese Historical Society of America for all their help. Thanks also to Tamara Charney and Anya Grunberg.

• 1:01:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Special thanks to Sandra Wong and Julie Su.

• 1:01:22Speaker 06

  This episode was mixed by Josh Newell.

• 1:01:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes. Navid Marvi.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani.

• 1:01:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  We're going to be talking about the art of cinematic storytelling at the On Air Fest in Brooklyn on February 21st. Want to come? Go to onairfest.com and use the code THROUGHLINE40 to get 40% off your ticket.

• 1:01:51Speaker 06

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected].

• 1:01:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thanks for listening.

• 1:02:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.