Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is taking us back to the 1800s |
Wong Kim Ark, pictured 1904. His 1898 Supreme Court case established the legal precedent for birthright citizenship.
Wong Kim Ark’s fight for citizenship is before the Supreme Court again.
Opening arguments started on Wednesday in a Supreme Court case over President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship, the right Wong fought for and won.
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Until Trump attacked birthright citizenship, most people had probably never heard of Wong, the Chinese San Francisco native whose 1898 Supreme Court case established the legal precedent for birthright citizenship.
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In the late 1800s, anti-Chinese sentiment was high in the U.S., fueled by an economic downturn. The xenophobic scapegoating led to the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the country and Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens.
In 1895, Wong returned to the U.S. after traveling to China, and immigration officials in San Francisco blocked him from reentering the country, citing the Exclusion Act.
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Wong sued, asserting that he was a citizen under the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 and gave citizenship and legal rights to formerly enslaved African Americans and their descendants.
The decision for the courts was whether those rights for African Americans applied to others. Lower courts sided with Wong, and the case went to the Supreme Court.
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The ruling hinged on the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
Wong won, but the 14th Amendment’s wording is the heart of the Trump administration’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship.
Several states sued to block Trump’s executive order barring citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors. A case from New Hampshire is now before the Supreme Court. During the opening hearing on Wednesday, justices appeared to have doubts about the Trump administration’s arguments.
The legal case tests whether Trump has the authority to issue such an executive order and whether courts have misinterpreted the 14th Amendment to include anyone born in the U.S.
Constitutional questions aside, this is all really just an extension of the xenophobia and racism Wong faced in the 1800s.
The discriminatory laws that Wong lived under are gone, but their sentiments are still with us.
Thursday in Open Forum
It might be easier to get into Yosemite National Park now that its reservation system has been scrapped by the Trump administration, but you might find yourself in a traffic jam if you visit, especially during peak times.
That’s what happened in mid-February when crowds spiked to see the annual Firefall waterfall display, Robert Binnewies said in his Open Forum.
Binnewies is a former superintendent of Yosemite and is a critic of how the park is being managed.
In his Open Forum, Binnewies said that during his time as superintendent, a management plan was approved that called for minimizing traffic and development within the park. The goal was to reclaim the natural scene “uncluttered by piecemeal stumbling blocks of commercialism, machines, and fragments of suburbia.”
Then Ronald Reagan was elected president, and as Binnewies wrote, the “plan began to gather shelf-dust.”
Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.
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Reagan’s interior secretary, James Watt, had a suggestion for development in Yosemite Valley that luckily was never implemented.
Find what it was in Binnewies’ Open Forum.
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