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“In the summer of 2015, the majority of Republican candidates for President announced their opposition to birthright citizenship. The constitutional dimensions of that right revolve around two cases decided at the end of the nineteenth-century, Elk v. Wilkins (1884) and United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). The first held that an American Indian man born in the United States was not a citizen under the fourteenth amendment; the second, that a Chinese American man born in the United States was indeed a citizen under the amendment. This Article juxtaposes the history of these decisions. By showing the distinctive constitutional and political status of Native peoples, this history makes clear the unconstitutionality of efforts to limit birthright citizenship and the consistency of Elk with the egalitarian ideals of the Fourteenth Amendment. Further, by providing new facts about the litigants, lawyers, and communities in these cases, this history provide new perspectives on the meaning of citizenship and its role in judicial and administrative law. Although John Elk’s non-Native lawyers presented him as seeking to assimilate and abandon his tribe, Elk was part of a Winnebago community and likely sought only freedom from the federal government’s aggressive policies of land acquisition and domination. While Wong Kim Ark’s lawyers were products of an organized Chinese migrant community, Wong also likely sought citizenship less as a quest for full assimilation than as an effort to maintain his transnational family in the face of exclusionary immigration policies. Wong’s citizenship, however, permitted his Chinese-born son to migrate to the United States, be drafted into the Army in World War II, and make a career with the Merchant Marines. The histories also show the limits of judicial action, as Congress quickly undermined the effect of each opinion, and the divergent opinions both contributed to expanded administrative power. Together, these histories challenge idealized concepts of citizenship, freedom, and individual action that remain with us today, and provide a richer understanding of race, constitutional doctrine, and administrative structure in the United States.”
Explains the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizenship provision, as a story of black Americans' pre-Civil War claims to belonging.
For the first time, the remarkable story that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped." Award-winning author Ekrich recounts an extraordinary family drama of betrayal and loss--but also of resilience, survival, and redemption.
In this abridged edition for the Landmark Law Cases and American Society series, American by Birth is now available in a format designed for students and general readers and includes a chronology outlining the key points in the case plus a bibliographical essay. American by Birth explores the history and legacy of Wong Kim Ark and the 1898 Supreme Court case that bears his name, which established the automatic citizenship of individuals born within the geographic boundaries of the United States. In the late nineteenth century, much like the present, the United States was a difficult, and at times threatening, environment for people of color. Chinese immigrants, invited into the United States in the 1850s and 1860s as laborers and merchants, faced a wave of hostility that played out in organized private violence, discriminatory state laws, and increasing congressional efforts to throttle immigration and remove many long-term residents. The federal courts, backed by the Supreme Court, supervised the development of an increasingly restrictive and exclusionary immigration regime that targeted Chinese people. This was the situation faced by Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco in the 1870s and who earned his living as a cook. Like many members of the Chinese community in the American West he maintained ties to China. He traveled there more than once, carrying required reentry documents, but when he attempted to return to the United States after a journey from 1894 to 1895, he was refused entry and detained. Protesting that he was a citizen and therefore entitled to come home, he challenged the administrative decision in court. Remarkably, the Supreme Court granted him victory. This victory was important for Wong Kim Ark, for the ethnic Chinese community in the United States, and for all immigrant communities then and to this day. because the Supreme Court’s ruling inscribed the principle in constitutional terms and clarified that it extended even to the children of immigrants who were legally barred from becoming citizens.
This collection of 12 original essays brings together two themes of American culture - law and race. Cases discussed include Amistad, Dred Scott, Regents v. Bakke and O.J. Simpson.
Shortlisted for the Mark Lynton History Prize Citizenship is invaluable, yet our status as citizens is always at risk—even for those born on US soil. Over the last two centuries, the US government has revoked citizenship to cast out its unwanted, suppress dissent, and deny civil rights to all considered “un-American”—whether due to their race, ethnicity, marriage partner, or beliefs. Drawing on the narratives of those who have struggled to be treated as full members of “We the People,” law professor Amanda Frost exposes a hidden history of discrimination and xenophobia that continues to this day. The Supreme Court’s rejection of Black citizenship in Dred Scott was among the first and most notorious examples of citizenship stripping, but the phenomenon did not end there. Women who married noncitizens, persecuted racial groups, labor leaders, and political activists were all denied their citizenship, and sometimes deported, by a government that wanted to redefine the meaning of “American.” Today, US citizens living near the southern border are regularly denied passports, thousands are detained and deported by mistake, and the Trump administration is investigating the citizenship of 700,000 naturalized citizens. Even elected leaders such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are not immune from false claims that they are not citizens eligible to hold office. You Are Not American grapples with what it means to be American and the issues surrounding membership, identity, belonging, and exclusion that still occupy and divide the nation in the twenty-first century.
"Vivid storytelling built on exacting research." —Bill Keller, New York Times Book Review In 1735, struggling printer John Peter Zenger scandalized colonial New York by launching a small newspaper, the New-York Weekly Journal. The newspaper was assailed by the new British governor as corrupt and arrogant, and as being a direct challenge against the prevailing law that criminalized any criticism of the royal government. Zenger was thrown in jail for nine months before his landmark one-day trial on August 4, 1735, in which he was brilliantly defended by Andrew Hamilton. In Indelible Ink, Pulitzer Prize–winning social historian Richard Kluger has fashioned the first book-length narrative of the Zenger case, rendering with colorful detail its setting in old New York and the vibrant personalities of its leading participants, whose virtues and shortcomings are assessed with fresh scrutiny often at variance with earlier accounts.