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| Now, on to the news: President Donald Trump said in an interview with Axios on HBO that he plans to sign an executive order ending "birthright citizenship" for the children of non-American citizens who are born on U.S. soil, a move that would undoubtedly be challenged in courts on its constitutionality. |
14th Amendment explained |
| The 14th Amendment transformed U.S. citizenship, but it did not settle every question. The year was 1868, and millions of former slaves were now free people. Congress asked: Who should black Americans be going forward in the context of the Constitution? |
| Former slaves pressed the nation to include them as full fledged participants in the body politic. The result of this scene was a new provision, the first to define citizenship in the Constitution: Birthright would guarantee to all Americans their place as members of the nation. |
| Two years later, in 1870, Congress took the next step with the 15th Amendment and also guaranteed to people of African descent the ability to become naturalized citizens, even if born outside America. This new citizenship regime extended to all those birthed on U.S. soil. Or did it? |
| The question of how far birthright citizenship might reach was posed in the 1890s in the lives of Chinese-Americans. U.S. customs officials doubted that Chinese-Americans, even as they were born on our soil, were citizens. Their foreign-born parents, it was said, retained a political allegiance to the emperor of China. |
| The 14th Amendment excluded from the privilege of birthright U.S.-born children who were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. It's an odd phrasing, but some officials argued that the children of Chinese immigrants were deemed to also be indelibly foreign, regardless of where they were born, and thus not subject to power of the U.S. state. |
| When San Francisco native Wong Kim Ark presented himself at his hometown port after a trip to China, he was refused entry as a non-citizen. Wong thought otherwise, and his case took him all the way to the Supreme Court where, in 1898, the justices declared that despite his parents' status as non-citizens, Wong was a citizen by virtue of birth. A constitutional amendment that has been crafted to resolve the status of former slaves now extended to the children of immigrants. |
| President Donald Trump appears poised to use his executive power to instruct federal agencies to regard the children of immigrants — non-citizen parents — as also non-citizens. If this prospect brings to mind the case of Wong Kim Ark, it should. We are right to think that more than a century ago, the Supreme Court examined this question and settled it for all time. |
| The president might test the terms of the 14th Amendment and the ruling in Wong Kim Ark — this is what such an executive order would do. Ultimately, the Supreme Court is likely to decide what the 14th Amendment means today, just as the justices did in Wong Kim Ark's time. The outcome will settle the question, though we cannot say in what way. |
| Martha S. Jones, the Society of Black Alumni presidential professor and professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of "Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America." You can follow her on Twitter: @ marthasjones_ |
 | | Trump baby kisses | | Gary McCoy/Shiloh, Ill./PoliticalCartoons.com | |
What our readers are saying |
| The headlines should read: "Trump declares intention to use dictatorial-like powers to void the 14th Amendment." |
| This is the second time in less than a week that President Donald Trump has stated his intention to act unilaterally. The first time came in the wake of the Pittsburgh shooting, when he suggested changes to the death penalty to have mass shooters be quickly given that sentence. These are the words, and actions, of a dictator, not a president. |
| — Steve Justino |
| Thank you, President Trump. |
| It's about time someone used common sense and did something to stop the immigration mess that the Democrats have put upon our nation. Keep up the good work. |
| — Gary Swank |
| Crickets from the Republicans who said President Barack Obama trampled all over the Constitution — which he didn't — while Trump rewrites it. |
| — David Christopher |
| Just more Trump pre-election hand waving and shiny object, red meat for his base. He can't change the Constitution with an executive order. The only way to change it is for Congress to amend the Constitution, and that's never going to happen. |
| — Steve Byers |
What others are saying |
| Michael Anton, The Washington Post : "The framers of the 14th Amendment added the jurisdiction clause precisely to distinguish between people to whom the United States owes citizenship and those to whom it does not. Freed slaves definitely qualified. The children of immigrants who came here illegally clearly don't. Those framers understood, as did America's Founders, that birthright citizenship is inherently self-contradictory. A just government in the modern world rests on the social compact, a freely entered agreement among free citizens. That compact's scope and authority extend only to those who have consented to its terms and whose membership has been consented to by all other citizen-members. A compact that anyone can join regardless of the wishes of its existing members is not a compact." |
| Alex Nowrasteh, The American Conservative : "There is little legal debate over the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment that reads: '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.' In the 1898 case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court ruled that children born to non-citizen Chinese immigrants are citizens. It did not matter that Chinese immigration was illegal at the time or that they were not allowed to naturalize — being born here conferred citizenship. That's because immigrants, both legal and illegal, are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States government. ... Any other interpretation would mean that the U.S. government didn't have legal power over tourists or illegal immigrants here, a crazy notion." |
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