Birthright citizenship, as a common law principle, was a cornerstone of the American Republic at its founding.Footnote ¹ Like many “universal” rights at the time, it was presumed to apply to white people, routinely denied to enslaved people, and deeply contested for free people of color. After the Civil War, amid the effort to rebuild a fractured Union and answer the decades-long Black freedom struggle, Congress sought to affirm and extend the principle of birthright citizenship in the U.S. Constitution. In 1868, Congress recognized the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, extending citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. The language of the Fourteenth Amendment was clear: “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.”Footnote ² This included—as the congressional record reveals—the children of immigrants regardless of race, nationality, or desirability of their parents.Footnote ³

As this forum shows, in the years that followed the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification, critics sought to narrow its scope, arguing that not all children born to immigrants (particularly to Chinese and other Asian immigrants) on U.S. soil were entitled to its guarantees. They argued that having the “right” parentage should matter, alleging that children born to undesirable immigrants—who were either barred from naturalization under federal law or presumed to be merely passing through—could not rightfully claim citizenship by birth. They most forcefully challenged the citizenship status of the children of Chinese immigrants, who became the central target of efforts to strip birthright citizenship following the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court confronted these efforts directly in 1898, in the landmark case United States v. Wong Kim Ark—and shuttered these exclusionary interpretations.

In 1895, Wong Kim Ark, a twenty-four-year-old man born in San Francisco, returned to the United States after visiting his wife, Yee Shee, and family in China. At the port of entry, he was detained by John Wise, the customs collector in San Francisco, who declared that Wong—despite his birth on U.S. soil—was not a citizen, but an alien subject to exclusion under the Chinese Exclusion laws. Wise’s argument was not new. Years earlier, he had made a similar claim in the case of In re Look Tin Sing, when he detained a fourteen-year-old boy born in California. The lower court rejected his argument.Footnote ⁴ Still, Wise pressed on, insisting that children of Chinese ancestry had no right to birthright citizenship. Wong Kim Ark, with assistance, mounted a legal challenge with far-reaching reverberations. In October 1895, his lawyers filed a writ of habeas corpus in federal court. Thomas D. Riordan, an attorney retained by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, an organization that had long advocated for the rights of Chinese immigrants, led his defense. Riordan argued that Wong was being unlawfully “imprisoned, detained, confined, and restrained of his liberty”—a violation not only of due process, but also of the birthright citizenship defined under the Fourteenth Amendment. At its core, the case rested on the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment: that the Constitution guaranteed citizenship to anyone born within the territorial bounds of the United States, regardless of race, ancestry, or desirability.

In district court, U.S. Attorney Henry S. Foote, joined by legal scholar George Collins, set forth a sweeping argument. Defending Wise, who had reinterpreted the U.S. Constitution to provoke a test case, Foote and Collins framed alienage not as a legal status, but as an inherited, permanent condition. In their view, children born in the United States to Chinese immigrants were not citizens at all but the subjects of a foreign power.Footnote ⁵ If the court accepted their argument, Wong Kim Ark would lose not only the right to re-enter and remain in the country of his birth but also the rights that flowed from that citizenship—property ownership, the vote, and many other legal protections. The implications of Wong Kim Ark’s case also extended beyond him and raised the possibility of intergenerational harm. Wong’s children, born abroad but U.S. citizens under jus sanguinis—the principle that children acquire their parent’s legal status as a “right of blood”—stood to lose their status as U.S. citizens too if their father was stripped of U.S. citizenship.^{Footnote 6} More broadly, a ruling against Wong threatened the birthright citizenship of millions, particularly children born to immigrant parents who had not yet naturalized. For Asian immigrants—especially those excluded from naturalization under the racial restrictions of the 1870 Naturalization Act—the stakes were even higher. Asian American children born in the United States risked being stripped of any claim to U.S. citizenship altogether.

The Supreme Court ruled six to two in Wong Kim Ark’s favor, delivering a decisive rebuke to the idea that alienage or legal status was inherited by children born on U.S. soil.^{Footnote 7} The court’s majority rejected Wise’s theory that Chinese ancestry—or any foreign lineage—could disqualify a child born in the United States from belonging to it and held that anyone required to obey U.S. law was under the nation’s jurisdiction. The dissenting justices gave an interpretation that aligned with the federal government’s efforts to strip birthright citizenship: birthright citizenship should not extend to “the children of foreigners, happening to be born to them while passing through the country.”Footnote ⁸ For Wong, the decision meant he could return to and remain in the United States. For the nation, it marked a profound reaffirmation that all children born on U.S. soil were natural born citizens.

However, the impulse to tether citizenship to ancestry, race, and desirability rather than place of birth endured. Since the debates that shaped the Fourteenth Amendment, it has resurfaced time and time again to disenfranchise the children of immigrants. In January 2025, 127 years after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Wong Kim Ark, the idea found fresh expression in Executive Order (EO) 14160, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” under President Donald J. Trump.Footnote ⁹ Defying established practice and long-standing precedent, EO 14160 states that children born in the United States cannot claim the “privilege” of birthright citizenship if their mothers are “unlawful” or “temporary” immigrants—and if their fathers are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents. The order mandates government agencies to stop issuing documents that recognize the citizenship of such children.Footnote ¹⁰ It also revives and old idea discredited by the courts: that some children, by virtue of their parentage, can be born in the United States and still not be U.S. citizens.

The decision in Wong Kim Ark’s case marked the culmination of a three-year legal battle and reflected two decades of sustained efforts to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of Chinese immigrants following the Fourteenth Amendment. This forum returns Wong Kim Ark and debates over the Fourteenth Amendment to their historical contexts, offering a broader lens through which to view their meaning—not only as a legal doctrine and precedent but as sites of contestation over the rights of immigrant communities and their place in American society. We ask: How might scholars move beyond doctrine to engage the individuals and institutions that sought to unravel or preserve birthright citizenship at the turn of the twentieth century? How can we remain attentive to legal principles and their application to immigrant communities? How can centering the agency of both immigrant and nativist communities—their legal strategies, their knowledge of the state—offer a more expansive framework for understanding legal status as a contested and deeply political terrain? While addressing these questions, we remain attentive to the experience of Chinese immigrants, who stood at the center of the legal battles over birthright citizenship and the rights it conferred following the Fourteenth Amendment.

The forum opens with three essays that lay the groundwork for understanding the significance of citizenship and alienage in the nineteenth century. Beth Lew-Williams charts the shifting relationship between citizenship and alienage in the wake of the Fourteenth Amendment. By recounting the daily indignities of alienage that Chinese immigrants endured, she reveals all that was at stake when Wong Kim Ark fought for birthright citizenship. Hardeep Dhillon excavates the historical context in which the federal government challenged birthright citizenship in the case of Wong Kim Ark. She reveals that federal employees sought to use their discretionary authority and judicial power to strip Chinese Americans of birthright citizenship and block their access to the ballot box. Their efforts, she argues, were integral to conservative attempts to erode Reconstruction-era reforms, including the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, after the Civil War. Heather Ruth Lee revisits the year 1888, a time when the mobility rights and privileges of U.S. citizens of Chinese ancestry were less certain than those of some privileged aliens. In her approach, Lee highlights the agency of Chinese persons fighting for their legal rights by exploring their “vernacular” understanding of the law.

The final two essays in the forum examine the complexities of U.S. citizenship and alienage after Wong Kim Ark. Anna Pegler-Gordon explores the ways in which birthright citizenship documentation was used to verify and undermine Chinese American claims to U.S. citizenship, unsettling presumed boundaries between citizenship and alienage. Maddalena Marinari examines two Supreme Court cases from 1925, which gave more rights to non-citizens than citizens when it came to family reunion, to show that Wong Kim Ark was not just about citizenship. It was also about class and family formation. Together, these essays trace the ideological and legal battles over citizenship from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth, revealing the evolving logics of exclusion, including their persistence and endurance. They remind us that efforts to redefine national belonging are not abstract debates. They are battles, driven by racism and fear, with real life consequences for immigrant communities whose children hang in the balance.