Immigration > Birthright Citizenship

Congress Has Established That People Here Illegally Are Not Residents

The 1898 decision in Wong Kim Ark made “residency” and being “domiciled” the operative terms, and Congress has since made clear what they mean.

Button Gwinnett | April 24, 2026

You can read here about how the Supreme Court, in the seminal 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision, ruled on some aspects of birthright citizenship. The Court ignored the ratifiers’ intent for both the original Constitution and the 14th Amendment and instead focused on English common-law terms. By doing so, they opened a portal through which alien invaders would one day pour into the United States without the consent of its people and in defiance of the laws of Congress.

There is hope this portal may be closed and the invasion stemmed without further Amendment to the Constitution. One key is to eliminate “anchor babies,” putative birthright citizens who in nearly all cases have no connection whatever to the Republic or its people. In the extreme, these include “birthright tourists,” pregnant women who intentionally enter the US at the end of their pregnancy, deliver a child on US soil, then return home to raise that “US citizen” child as the foreigner it is.

This key lies in the several laws Congress enacted between 1898 and today. The underpinnings of the Court’s decision in Wong saw it arrogate to itself the authority to decide the meaning of “domiciled,” “under the jurisdiction therefore,” residence,” and visitor” meant with respect to immigration.

We can recall that Article I, Section 8, confers plenary power on Congress to establish a uniform rule of naturalization. It also implicitly defines the aboriginal citizenry (“We the People of the United States”) as the citizens of the several states when the Constitution was ratified. The Wong Kim Ark court found that Congress had not used this power sufficiently to resolve Wong’s citizenship. However, since that time, Congress has acted.

SCOTUS determined that Wong’s parents were “domiciled” in California. However, the Constitution never mentions that word. Instead, it mentions variations of “reside,” as in, “the state in which they reside,” or “a resident of these states at the adoption.”

Congress began to provide a legal definition of permanent legal residency beginning with the Alien Registration Act of 1940 and subsequent immigration laws establishing rules for obtaining and maintaining an Alien Registration Card (green card). We can infer from these laws that any alien present in the US without this card is not a resident of the United States and may be subject to arrest and removal for various reasons. The law governing lawful alien admission and permanent residency is available here.

The Constitution assigns no authority whatsoever to the Supreme Court to decide what constitutes permanent residence in the US or who qualifies as a permanent resident. Only Congress has that authority. An honest court must be compelled to accept Congress’s definition of “resident.” In today’s legal environment, any alien present in the United States without a permanent resident card is either a visitor or an invader and is ineligible to give birth to US-citizen children.

In addition, since the Wong Kim Ark decision, Congress has determined who are visitors to the US vs who are invaders, beginning with the Immigration Act of 1917, which introduced the first formal visa system. The present visa law can be found here. It is instructive to note that the current visa law clearly distinguishes immigrant visas from nonimmigrant visas:

(a) Immigrants; nonimmigrantsAdvertisement if(page_width_onload

© American Thinker