Wong Kim Ark: The Chinese Man Who Won Birthright Citizenship for Everyone
黃金德：为所有人赢得出生公民權的華人
【Preface: Today, The New York Times (《紐約時報》) published “The Past and Present of the Wong Kim Ark Case and Birthright Citizenship.” Wong Kim Ark, born in 1873 in San Francisco (三藩市) to parents from Guangdong (廣東), traveled multiple times between China and the United States after he became an adult. In 1895, upon returning from China, he was denied entry by Customs on the grounds that he was “not a U.S. citizen.” The U.S. government argued that although Wong Kim Ark was born in the United States, his parents were “foreign residents” restricted by the Chinese Exclusion Act (《排華法》) and so he should not automatically receive U.S. citizenship. Undeterred, Wong Kim Ark sued the federal government and persevered for more than three years, ultimately winning a Supreme Court ruling affirming that he enjoyed the birthright citizenship established by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This was a landmark victory for Chinese Americans in U.S. history.】
Below is an excerpt from The New York Times Chinese Edition (紐約時報中文版), Tuesday, February 11, 2025
The Past and Present of the Wong Kim Ark Case and Birthright Citizenship
By Amy Qin
In August 1895, a young cook named Wong Kim Ark disembarked in San Francisco after a long journey from China aboard the steamship Coptic, only to be refused entry by U.S. Customs officials.
They said he was not an American citizen—even though Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown, just a short distance from the port where he was being detained. Officials later argued that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil did not apply to him because neither he nor his parents were “subject to U.S. jurisdiction” at the time of his birth.
Wong Kim Ark did not back down. Instead, he sued—and won.
In his case, the Supreme Court affirmed the Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship for nearly everyone born in the United States, a right deeply rooted in common law. Since the 1898 ruling, that broad understanding of birthright citizenship has remained the law of the land.
Now, with the Trump administration clamping down on immigration, it hopes to overturn the Wong Kim Ark decision—and with it, birthright citizenship more broadly.
On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order announcing that the government would no longer recognize as citizens the children of undocumented or temporary visitors born in the United States.
That order has sparked a flurry of lawsuits, mostly from Democratic attorneys general and civil rights organizations. Last week, a federal judge indefinitely blocked it, calling it “patently unconstitutional.” The Justice Department has appealed one of the injunctions.
The Trump administration is pushing for a new interpretation of the 1898 ruling, drawing on the views of a small group of legal scholars, including attorney John Eastman. Eastman became famous for drafting a plan to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results.
It remains unclear whether the Supreme Court—conservative-leaning though it may be—would be willing to hear such a case. Still, the latest moves could set the stage for a protracted legal battle that critics of birthright citizenship hope will erode a longstanding precedent.
“Wong Kim Ark is settled law, or at least one could say it’s widely recognized as a settled legal principle,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia who specializes in immigration and citizenship law. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be overturned.”
Wong Kim Ark’s case also arose at a time of intense national anxiety about immigration.
His parents were among a wave of Chinese laborers who began arriving in the mid-19th century in search of economic opportunity. His father ran a grocery store near Chinatown in San Francisco, and Wong Kim Ark was born in an apartment above that store in 1870.
The growing influx of Chinese laborers on the West Coast soon sparked economic competition and virulent racism. Mobs often terrorized these immigrants, sometimes lynching them, and depicted them as unassimilable, inferior, and disease-ridden.
Federal laws mirrored these biases. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred most Chinese people from entering the U.S. and denied them the ability to become naturalized citizens.
Around that time, Wong Kim Ark’s parents took him back to China. But the lure of higher wages in America quickly drew him back.
Despite the Chinese Exclusion Act, he was still able to reenter because legislators in 1868—two years before his birth—had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that enslaved Africans and their descendants were not U.S. citizens.
For Wong Kim Ark and his supporters, the amendment’s broad language—especially the phrase “all persons”—meant that anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen, even if they were Chinese, as in Wong Kim Ark’s case. On his earlier trips, he was admitted back into the U.S. after proving his San Francisco birth.
But the government, determined to close what it viewed as a loophole, went looking for a test case and found one in Wong Kim Ark.
Government lawyers seized upon another phrase in the amendment—“subject to the jurisdiction thereof”—arguing that since Wong Kim Ark’s parents were Chinese citizens under the dominion of the Chinese emperor at the time of his birth, their son was likewise subject to a foreign power.
Wong Kim Ark’s lawyers cited congressional debates to argue that the amendment's framers intended to give birthright citizenship broad application. The jurisdiction clause provided very limited exceptions, including the children of foreign diplomats, enemy armies occupying U.S. territory, and, initially, certain Native Americans (Congress extended citizenship to all Native Americans in 1924).
The lawyers also had a key insight: If Wong Kim Ark lost, then the U.S.-born children of European immigrants could also be stripped of their citizenship.
It was not certain how the Supreme Court would rule. Two years earlier, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court upheld “separate but equal,” sanctioning Jim Crow laws that segregated and disenfranchised Black people in the South. The justices also had upheld several provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Acts.
A little over a year later, however, the Court voted 6–2 to side with Wong Kim Ark. Writing for the majority, Justice Horace Gray explained that the Fourteenth Amendment’s “all persons” phrase “is of universal application, without regard to race or color, or any other qualification, save those within the limits defined by the Constitution.”
Since then, birthright citizenship has not only been widely accepted but also celebrated as a symbol of America’s commitment to a fundamental national ideal: that all people born in the United States, regardless of race, religion, or their parent’s immigration status, come into the world as equals.
Even so, especially in recent years, a small chorus of voices has emerged amid new waves of immigration challenging this consensus.
Attorneys for the Trump administration argued in recent court filings that birthright citizenship should be granted only if the parents are lawful residents in the U.S. when their child is born, as was the case with Wong Kim Ark’s parents.
They further contend that undocumented immigrants and those in the U.S. on temporary visas—tourists and students, for example—remain politically beholden to foreign governments and “subject” to those governments’ “jurisdiction,” making their U.S.-born children ineligible for automatic citizenship.
Rogers Smith, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, is among the few legal scholars advocating a narrow interpretation of the 1898 ruling. “That decision did not address the children of illegal immigrants,” he said. “That’s an ambiguity.”
Smith adds that he personally supports granting citizenship at birth, even for the children of undocumented immigrants. And like most legal scholars, he agrees that under the Fourteenth Amendment, the president—in this case, Trump—cannot decide the matter by executive order.
Most legal experts believe it is unlikely that the current Supreme Court would want to revisit a century-old precedent.
Unlike many other issues, birthright citizenship has not historically been a particularly partisan matter. John Yoo, the well-known conservative law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, supports a broad reading of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.
There are signs, however, that sentiments may be changing.
Judge James C. Ho of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, once a potential Supreme Court nominee, has strongly argued that nearly all children born in the United States should be citizens. But in an interview last fall, he seemed to back away from that expansive view, citing another argument that the Trump administration has recently adopted in its legal briefs.
“Birthright citizenship obviously does not apply in cases of war or invasion,” he told interviewers. “As far as I know, no one has ever argued that children born to invaders automatically receive citizenship.”
Some scholars see a darker motive. Harvard history professor Erika Lee says Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship should be viewed in the broader context of his efforts to curtail immigration, just as Wong Kim Ark’s case was grounded in a time of intense anti-Chinese sentiment.
“I think the similarities between then and now are quite striking,” she said.
Until recently, the Wong Kim Ark decision remained largely unknown in public discourse. Even his descendants knew little about their history-making ancestors. Now, renewed debate over that decision might redefine what it means to be “American” and who is entitled to claim that identity.
As for Wong Kim Ark, though he emerged victorious in court, he, like many Chinese Americans, was long subjected to lengthy interrogations by federal immigration officials to prove his citizenship.
Eventually, he returned to China.
A brief overview of the historical background of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act as supplements for the story of Wong Kim Ark from The New York Times report
By Haikuo Tiankong (海闊天空)
The First Chinese Immigrants
In the early 19th century, Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States, including students, sailors, merchants, servants, and laborers. The first wave came during the 1850s Gold Rush. After the Gold Rush, Chinese laborers—considered a source of cheap labor—easily found work as farmhands, gardeners, servants, and laundry workers, most notably as railroad workers building the Transcontinental Railroad (1863–1869).
Contributions of Chinese Immigrants to the U.S.
In 2011, the U.S. Senate, in Resolution 201, explicitly recognized the major contributions of Chinese immigrants: “Chinese Americans laid the critical foundation for the nation’s economic growth through their contributions to agriculture, mining, manufacturing, building, fishing, and canning, especially in the American West.”
Indeed, from 1863 to 1869, the Central Pacific Railroad hired 12,000 Chinese laborers—90% of its workforce. Even about fifty Chinese soldiers served during the Civil War (1861–1865), most of them fighting for the Union Army. After the Civil War, many Chinese laborers skilled in agriculture also worked on Southern plantations.
Anson Burlingame (安森·蒲安臣): The American Who Spoke for China
Anson Burlingame (1820, November 14 – 1870, February 23) was an abolitionist and a congressman from Massachusetts, appointed by President Lincoln as U.S. Minister to China in 1861. Burlingame traveled throughout China, learning about its history, culture, and people, and he spoke out bluntly against the unfair treatment that Western powers had imposed on China as a sovereign nation since the two Opium Wars.
The Burlingame Treaty (《蒲安臣條約》) and Mutual Free Migration Between China and the U.S.
After his term ended, Burlingame was named by the Chinese government in 1867 as the envoy representing China to the United States and the European powers. Thus, the first official diplomat in Chinese history to represent China was an American, Anson Burlingame. He was tasked with renegotiating treaties between China and those nations. On behalf of China, and under principles of equality, fairness, and reciprocity, Burlingame signed the Burlingame Treaty with the United States, granting China “most-favored-nation” status, establishing friendly relations, promoting bilateral trade, and allowing free migration between the two countries.
Anti-Chinese Sentiment After the Panic of 1873
Following the Panic of 1873, anti-Chinese sentiment grew in the United States. On the one hand, large companies exploited Chinese immigrants as cheap labor; on the other, labor unions demonized them as people who stole jobs from white workers. This surge in anti-Chinese hostility resulted in escalating violence (such as the 1877 San Francisco riot) and a variety of scapegoating policies targeting Chinese immigrants.
The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
On May 6, 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act (signed by Republican President Chester A. Arthur), which prohibited Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States for ten years. The ban was made permanent in 1902 and extended in 1924 to prohibit all classes of Chinese and other Asian immigrants.
Many Southern States Adopted Anti-Chinese Laws
From the 1880s to the 1920s, numerous states also passed so-called “Alien Land Laws,” forbidding Asians from owning land: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The Chinese population in the United States dropped from 105,000 in 1880 to 89,000 in 1900 and then to 61,000 in 1920 (Source: Wikipedia).
Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943
After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, China and the United States became allies. Pearl S. Buck’s Citizens’ Committee and President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat) then urged Congress to repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act, an initial step toward eliminating racial discrimination. However, under existing immigration laws at the time, the quota for Chinese immigrants was limited to only 105 visas per year.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965
During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., President Kennedy, and President Johnson, Congress successively passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Before the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, roughly 94% of annual immigration quotas were allocated to European white immigrants (Source: Wikipedia). Hence, fellow Chinese Americans should remember that without the equal rights movement, 99% of those of us now living in the United States could not have come here to study, work, and settle down.
Bearing Witness to History—What Will We Choose?
Our ancestors taught us to uphold benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trust—and to remember where our blessings come from. Lu Xun once described a kind of ignorance that feasts on metaphorical “bloody steamed buns,” even serving as accomplices to tyranny. We now live in a time when lies abound, right and wrong are inverted, money and power collude, unscrupulous forces seize what they want, and constitutional government is trampled underfoot. Each one of us is a witness to history. If we question our conscience, heaven and earth bear witness—what choice will we make?
A Brief Biography of Wong Kim Ark
Wong Kim Ark (黃金德) was born in 1873 in San Francisco to parents from Taishan (臺山), Guangdong. His father was a small merchant. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution took effect in 1868, and Wong Kim Ark was born five years later.
In 1889, Wong Kim Ark returned with his parents to Wengxing Village (翁星村) in Taishan, where he married a young woman from the nearby Ye family. In July 1890, he bid farewell to his parents and new wife and returned alone to the United States to make a living. As someone born on U.S. soil, he was readmitted into the country, though one immigration officer questioned the veracity of his claim of American birth. Once back in California, his wife gave birth to their first son. Under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, however, laborers like Wong Kim Ark were not permitted to bring their wives to the United States.
Longing to see his parents, wife, and child, Wong Kim Ark took another voyage across the Pacific in November 1894 to reunite with them in his hometown of Taishan, seeing his eldest son for the first time and conceiving a second son with his wife. But when he tried to return in August 1895 aboard the Coptic, he was detained upon arrival in the port of San Francisco. Customs officials denied his entry, claiming that although he was born in the U.S., his parents were not U.S. citizens, so he was ineligible for American citizenship. During the legal proceedings, he was held aboard a ship in San Francisco Bay for five months.
Wong Kim Ark’s Ultimate Victory
With the help of legal counsel from the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (中華公所), Wong Kim Ark challenged the denial of his birthright citizenship and filed a writ of habeas corpus with the federal district court. On January 3, 1896, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Wong Kim Ark was an American citizen by virtue of being born in the United States. The government appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
On March 28, 1898, by a 6–2 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that “the citizenship which Wong Kim Ark acquired by birth within the United States has not been lost or taken away by anything happening since his birth.” The Court stated that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” should be interpreted “in accordance with the common law,” which covered nearly all children born in the United States, except the children of foreign rulers or diplomats, children born on public foreign ships, and children of enemy forces in hostile occupation of the country’s territory.
Although the Supreme Court affirmed Wong Kim Ark’s citizenship when his eldest son arrived from China in 1910 seeking recognition of citizenship by descent, immigration officials claimed there were inconsistencies in the hearing testimony and rejected Wong Kim Ark’s claim to paternity. His other three sons arrived in the United States between 1924 and 1926 and were recognized as citizens. His youngest son was later drafted into the U.S. military during World War II and went on to serve in the U.S. Merchant Marine.
Three Federal Judges Have Already Ruled Trump’s Actions Unconstitutional
On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship. Federal judges in Maryland and Seattle ruled it unconstitutional on February 5 and February 6, respectively. The Maryland judge was appointed by President Biden, and the Seattle judge was appointed by President Reagan. Today, February 10, 2025, a third federal judge in New Hampshire (appointed by President George W. Bush, a Republican) has also ruled Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship unconstitutional.
February 11, 2025
This translation is an independent yet well-intentioned effort by the China Thought Express editorial team to bridge ideas between the Chinese and English-speaking worlds.
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