Birthright Citizenship

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Speaker 2 A note to our listeners: this episode contains depictions of racist violence. Now, on to the show.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 8 No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.

Speaker 7 Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Speaker 6 Just walking down Grant Street, right through the Chinatown Gate.

Speaker 14 This is Through Line Editor Julie Kane, Kane, walking in Chinatown, San Francisco on a cool Sunday afternoon.

Speaker 14 She's in one of the oldest Chinatowns in the world, a place where Chinese immigrants have been moving to for over 150 years.

Speaker 14 It takes up about 24 city blocks, winding up and down steep San Francisco hills.

Speaker 6 So I am walking up Sacramento Street.

Speaker 15 It is a beautiful day.

Speaker 15 I'm walking up a hill.

Speaker 13 You should probably hear my

Speaker 16 my breathing.

Speaker 14 It's like a city within a city, and you can feel its history in the sights, sounds, smells, and flavors in every alley, on every corner. Hello.

Speaker 14 This place has a lot of stories to tell.

Speaker 6 Sandra. Oh, Sandra.
Hi, I'm Julie.

Speaker 2 Julie. Hi, nice to meet you.

Speaker 15 I know I'm like getting names and I think. It's okay.
I'm Sandra Wong.

Speaker 14 Sandra Wong, our editor, Julie, one of the many Julies you'll hear in this episode, is there to meet Sandra and a local historian of sorts named Julie Su.

Speaker 17 I'm Julie, Diane Su, and I'm a fourth generation San Franciscan.

Speaker 14 Julie Su is an attorney who grew up in San Francisco. She met Sandra Wong years ago.
They were brought together by the story of one of Chinatown's most legendary residents, Wong Kim Ark.

Speaker 17 And I became interested or knew about the Wong Kim Ark case because my friend who was working in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 17 at the time for Janet Reno, asked me to put on the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court landmark case, United States versus Juan Kim Arc.

Speaker 15 Well, we're here in front of his,

Speaker 15 where he was born.

Speaker 17 That's the recognized birthplace, the exact birthplace.

Speaker 15 It's different now.

Speaker 14 751 Sacramento Street. Back then, in the late 1800s, when Won Kim Arc was born, it was a storefront with an apartment above the shop.

Speaker 14 Today, it's a school in the middle of a quiet side street, just downhill from the main tourist drag.

Speaker 17 This is as close as we get to 751 Sacramento Street. It is now the site of the Nam Kyu Chinese School.

Speaker 14 The school is a beautiful red, green, and white building. It's designed in the classic Chinese style.
raised pavilions, ornate paneling covering the windows, curved shingles on the roof.

Speaker 14 This This should probably be a site where tourists flock because of its connection to Wong Kim Ark. He was the defendant in a court case that would forever alter U.S.
immigration laws.

Speaker 15 I first heard about Wong Kim Ark at my father's funeral.

Speaker 14 This is Sandra Wong.

Speaker 15 It was a picture board of my father and all these pictures of him when he was young throughout his life, along with this newspaper article that talked about the Wong Kim Ark case.

Speaker 15 And I remember reading it and thinking,

Speaker 15 this sounds like a big deal.

Speaker 18 Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco of parents domiciled there, went to China on a visit. Upon attempting to land on his return, he was refused the privilege and deprived of his liberty.

Speaker 2 The United States versus Wong Kim Ark is one of the most important Supreme Court cases in U.S. history.
A case that would shape the relationship between immigrants and the U.S.

Speaker 2 government and further define who gets to call themselves an American.

Speaker 18 The case came before the Supreme Court on appeal from the judgment of the district court and was submitted in May 1896 as a test case under the clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

Speaker 18 Los Angeles Herald, July 24th, 1898.

Speaker 2 So what did this have to do with Sandra Wong and her dad? What was his relationship to Won Kim Arc?

Speaker 15 There was a lot of things he didn't talk about. And when I remember finding out about it, I'm like, why, you know, why now do I have to find out? I would have asked all these questions.

Speaker 15 And I didn't have that opportunity.

Speaker 2 She became obsessed with learning more about the story her father never told her. She went searching through all the records she could find.

Speaker 15 Through documents, through the National Archive, transcripts.

Speaker 15 You know, I remember seeing his picture as a little boy and reading about the testimony that he had to go through at his court hearing to enter.

Speaker 2 After all her research, here's the story she pieced together. Wong Kim Ark brought Sanja's father, Wang Yuk Jim, to San Francisco from China in the 1920s.

Speaker 2 Wong Kim Ark claims Sanjo's father as his son, but it's possible her dad was his grandson.

Speaker 15 So this would make Wong Kim Arc my father's grandfather. So that would be my great-grandfather.

Speaker 15 I feel like it's a bit of a loss because, you know, I wasn't able to talk to my dad about it and I would have loved to have asked him questions and to hear it through him.

Speaker 15 I would have loved that.

Speaker 2 Finding out the truth was bittersweet. And there's a question Sandra still thinks about.
Why didn't her dad tell her?

Speaker 15 You know, there's secrets.

Speaker 15 I don't know if

Speaker 15 people don't want to talk about it because of the pain.

Speaker 15 You know, various reasons. Maybe there's shame.

Speaker 2 Pain.

Speaker 2 Shame. Maybe it's because at the center of this story is one troubling fact.

Speaker 2 Won Kim Arc, Sandra's great-grandfather, was born in the United States, yet as a young adult, he was prevented from returning to San Francisco, his birthplace, after visiting family in China because of, quote, his race, language, color, and dress.

Speaker 15 As I read through the files and him going back and forth, and all of a sudden

Speaker 15 to be told that, you know, you're not, you don't have a right to come here. I mean, can you imagine how you would feel in just being so incensed? And that would definitely,

Speaker 15 you know, make you fight, I would think.

Speaker 2 And he did fight. With help from the Chinese-American community, Wang Kimark's case made it to the Supreme Court.

Speaker 15 He fought for his right to be here. He fought for what he believed in.

Speaker 14 He fought for his birthright citizenship. The idea that, with some small exceptions, if you're born in the United States, then you're automatically a citizen.

Speaker 14 A concept that isn't foreign for many of us. I immigrated to the U.S.

Speaker 14 from Iran as a child, but my son, who was born in Maryland, is the first person in my entire family to be a US citizen because he was born here.

Speaker 14 Many of the staff on Through Line are either first, second, or third generation immigrants who have some experience with the complexities of this legal principle.

Speaker 14 It's easy to think that it's always been this way, but the question of who is an American has always been up for debate.

Speaker 14 And the answer to that question is always a product of the political, social, and economic realities of when it's being asked.

Speaker 14 It's an issue that's still contested today.

Speaker 2 On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order denying birthright citizenship to children born in the U.S. who do not have at least one parent who is a U.S.

Speaker 2 citizen or lawful permanent resident. More than 20 states have sued the Trump administration in response, contending that his action disregards over 125 years of legal precedent.

Speaker 2 And a federal judge has already blocked President Trump's executive order. The federal judge says that is blatantly unconstitutional.

Speaker 11 Trump says that ruling will be challenged.

Speaker 2 When pressed by CBS's Margaret Brennan on the U.S.

Speaker 20 being founded by immigrants, Vance said, Just because we were founded by immigrants doesn't mean that 240 years later that we have to have the dumbest immigration policy in the world.

Speaker 21 That would mean overturning a portion of the Constitution's 14th Amendment.

Speaker 19 Birthright citizenship began in 1898 with the Supreme Court case U.S. v.
Wong Kim Ark.

Speaker 14 In this episode of Dooline from NPR, we're going to experience Wong Kim Ark's story and learn how his legal battle changed the debate about who gets to be an American.

Speaker 1 This is Zachary from Longmont, Colorado, and you are listening to Through Line from NPR.

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Speaker 21 Part 1, in the land of my birth.

Speaker 2 In August of 1895, a ship called the SS Coptic approached the coast of Northern California.

Speaker 2 On that boat was a passenger from San Francisco, a young man returning from visiting his parents' homeland of China.

Speaker 22 That steamship journey took about a month, and he would have ridden in steerage near the engine room, which is where most of the Chinese immigrants traveled.

Speaker 2 He was a cook named Wang Kim Ark.

Speaker 22 He would have slept on a bunk crammed in with everyone else on steerage, and they overcrowded these boats.

Speaker 22 It would have been certainly a fairly squalid way to travel and very difficult in terms of limited food and water.

Speaker 22 I think when he saw San Francisco Bay emerge out of what was likely the foggy morning, he must have been thrilled to think, I'm finally back home and I can get off this boat and go back to my home in San Francisco.

Speaker 2 But that's not what would happen.

Speaker 13 When this steamship bearing Wong Kimark arrives, the the general manager is forbidden to allow him to leave the steamship.

Speaker 2 A U.S. customs agent declared that Wong Kim Arc was not allowed to step foot onto U.S.
soil.

Speaker 22 At this point, the Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect. And so if you were a Chinese laborer, you were not allowed to enter.

Speaker 2 Wong Kim Ark argued with the customs official.

Speaker 22 He said, yes, I'm a laborer, I'm a chef, but I'm a citizen, and here's the proof. He had his certificates.
He knew that he was born in the United States, and that meant he was a a U.S. citizen.

Speaker 22 But he also must have had a little fear about that because he filed a certificate of identity before he left that had a picture of him and said, I was born in the United States, I'm a U.S. citizen.

Speaker 22 And he had three white witnesses, white people, because that's all, the only kind of witness the U.S. government would accept.

Speaker 22 who were willing to say he was born in the United States and they'd known him from childhood. So he was prepared.

Speaker 2 But that preparation didn't add up to much because.

Speaker 22 Unbeknownst to Wong, while he was in China, the U.S. government had decided it wanted to bring a test case challenging birthright citizenship, particularly for the children of Chinese immigrants.

Speaker 22 So they chose him and they didn't let him get off that boat.

Speaker 11 But they were looking for a test case.

Speaker 2 And he was a perfect test case.

Speaker 11 He didn't set out to be anybody's test case.

Speaker 12 That ever since the birth of said Wong Kim Ark, at the time and place herein before stated and stipulated, he has had but one residence, to wit, a residence in said state of California in the United States of America, and that he has never changed or lost said residence or gained or acquired another residence and there resided claiming to be a citizen of the United States.

Speaker 22 Wong Kim Ark's parents were one of a tiny minority of Chinese immigrants coming into the United States in the 1860s and 70s.

Speaker 22 We don't know exactly when they arrived, but we know they arrived at least before Wong Kim Ark's birth.

Speaker 14 This is Amanda Frost. Amanda is a law professor at the University of Virginia and has practiced immigration law for years.

Speaker 22 And I'm the author of a book entitled, You Are Not American, Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers.

Speaker 11 They came from the Pearl River Delta area. I mean, these trade ports of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Canton were opening up to the world.

Speaker 14 And this is Carol Nakanoff.

Speaker 11 I am a Richter Professor Emerita in the Political Science Department at Swarthmore College.

Speaker 12 Carol co-wrote a book all about Wong Kim Ark.

Speaker 11 The name of the book is American by Birth, Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship.

Speaker 14 Wong Kim Ark's parents, Wee Li and Wang Si Ping, came to the United States like many Chinese immigrants looking for work.

Speaker 14 Most of these immigrants were men coming to build the railroads or to work as agricultural field hands or to search for gold in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Speaker 14 Wang Kim Ark's parents did something different.

Speaker 11 They were engaged in provisioning.

Speaker 11 They were merchants.

Speaker 14 They opened what was basically a grocery store in San Francisco.

Speaker 11 They were largely servicing a Chinese clientele.

Speaker 14 And at some point in the early 1870s, the records aren't totally clear, they welcomed a new baby into the world, Wong Kim Ark.

Speaker 22 He later told immigration inspectors he was born in the middle room on the second floor at 751 Sacramento Street in Chinatown in the residential apartments over his parents' store.

Speaker 11 All the time he was in the United States, he lived within about a quarter mile of the place where he was born.

Speaker 14 This is probably because Chinese people were not welcome in many other parts of San Francisco. And this pattern followed in other cities with growing Chinese populations.

Speaker 14 In response, Chinatowns popped up in cities all over the U.S.

Speaker 14 It was a way for Chinese immigrants to band together, form communities, and try to keep themselves safe in an increasingly hostile country. But sometimes, these enclaves became a target.

Speaker 2 On the evening of October 24th, 1871, in Los Angeles, an angry group of white men descended upon a neighborhood where some of the city's very small population of Chinese residents lived.

Speaker 22 And they dragged men from their beds and hung them and shot them and stabbed them and stole from them. And out of this tiny population, 18 men were lynched that night.

Speaker 2 Many historians believe it's the biggest mass lynching event in American history.

Speaker 22 So this was a shocking event, I'm sure, for Wong Kim Ark and his family.

Speaker 22 And I assume they must have heard about it because, of course, they were living in Chinatown and San Francisco in the same state and not so far away.

Speaker 2 And maybe they thought, this can't happen here.

Speaker 2 San Francisco was much bigger, more cosmopolitan, and had a much bigger Chinatown.

Speaker 22 But if that's what they thought, they were wrong. Because in 1877,

Speaker 22 a very similar attack, pogrom, racial pogrom, occurred in San Francisco in Chinatown.

Speaker 2 In what started as a labor strike, a group of angry men, driven by the idea that Chinese immigrants were taking their jobs by working for less, marched towards Chinatown and started setting buildings on fire.

Speaker 22 They killed four men that night. It must have been terrifying.

Speaker 2 Anti-Chinese violence had landed on the doorstep of Wong Kim Arc's family. Eventually, they packed up their store and moved back to China.

Speaker 22 We don't know exactly why Wong Kim Arc's family left, but we can imagine that that pogrom, that attack on the Chinese population in the few blocks where they lived, must have terrified them and been part of the reason they left.

Speaker 14 Where did all this anger towards Chinese immigrants come from?

Speaker 14 Most people in the U.S. probably would have never encountered a Chinese immigrant.
Yet, in the last half of the 19th century, anti-Chinese sentiment was everywhere.

Speaker 22 At first, Chinese immigrants were welcomed. They were helping to build America.
They were building the Transcontinental Railroad, and they were key.

Speaker 22 They were extraordinarily important and they helped to mine the gold and the precious metals in backbreaking difficult work throughout the West.

Speaker 22 But then, as so often we see in this nation, there was an economic downturn and they were scapegoated and blamed for the lack of jobs and the poor economy.

Speaker 14 There really wasn't much truth to this idea. Chinese immigrants made up a very tiny percentage of the population of the United States in the 19th century.

Speaker 14 But this narrative, pushed by politicians and printed in the newspapers, became increasingly accepted.

Speaker 22 This country was coming out of the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the white workers were told the Chinese are the new slaves and they will undermine your work because they will take jobs at lower pay.

Speaker 22 They're willing to work in slave-like conditions. And they use that as an excuse for violence and their attempt to drive out Chinese immigrants from the United States.

Speaker 14 And this effort didn't just come in the form of violent mob attacks. It was cemented into law.
In 1882, Congress passed a bill called the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Speaker 9 From and after the expiration of 90 days next after the passage of this act,

Speaker 9 and until the expiration of 10 years next after the passage of this act,

Speaker 9 the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be and the same is hereby suspended.

Speaker 23 And this law creates

Speaker 23 a new legal invention.

Speaker 9 Before any Chinese passengers are landed from any such vessel, the collector or his deputy shall proceed to examine such passengers, comparing their certificates with the list and with the passengers.

Speaker 9 And no passenger shall be allowed to land in the United States from such vessel in violation of law.

Speaker 23 It creates a racial distinction that says that the Chinese are a different race, which should not be allowed to immigrate or naturalize.

Speaker 23 There are some exemptions built into the law, which provide exemptions for like students and diplomats and merchants.

Speaker 14 This is Jason Oliver Chang.

Speaker 23 I'm Associate Professor of History and Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Speaker 14 Jason says that as soon as the law passed, customs officials around the country began looking for Chinese laborers who might be in the U.S. in violation of the law.

Speaker 23 They would inspect their hands to see if they were calloused and say, are you really an upper-class merchant or are you a laborer who's pretending?

Speaker 23 And so they would have these very demeaning, humiliating kinds of approaches to really enforce the racial rule of the land.

Speaker 22 There was a sense too that the Chinese couldn't assimilate and that Chinese immigrants weren't willing to assimilate.

Speaker 23 So we had these constant kinds of battles for the lived reality of citizenship.

Speaker 22 The Chinese population was forced by laws as well as social conventions to live in isolated ways, to live in Chinatowns, in ethnic enclaves.

Speaker 22 The children were barred from attending schools, anti-miscegenation laws barred marriage, the federal law barred Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens.

Speaker 14 There was also the Page Act, which barred all Chinese women, except for the wives of merchants, from entering the United States.

Speaker 14 There was also the Geary Act that required all Chinese immigrants to constantly walk around with identification papers.

Speaker 22 So there was this sense that the Chinese wouldn't assimilate, but of course it was the laws and policies and practices of the nation that made it so difficult for them to assimilate.

Speaker 22 But that also made it easy to view them as others, as people who are not like us.

Speaker 23 These were important messages that also aligned with a broader kind of sense that the West was for white people.

Speaker 14 And for many Chinese people in the U.S., the message was clear.

Speaker 23 Their job in the United States was over,

Speaker 23 their introduction for the railroads was over.

Speaker 2 When Juan Kimark's family left the United States after the 1877 anti-Chinese riots in San Francisco, they never came back. But he did.

Speaker 22 So he reported that he went back to China with his parents around 1877 when he was around eight years old.

Speaker 22 He came back, he said, at age 11 with an uncle, and he began working as first like a dishwasher and then a cook, first in the mine mining communities in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and then later in Chinatown.

Speaker 22 It must have been a very rough life for him. He was clearly not being educated at that point, if he ever got much education.
And also, it must have been very lonely.

Speaker 22 He had come from a small village, Aung Sing Village, where he'd been living with a younger brother and his parents.

Speaker 22 And now he was back in the United States, a country he did know well, having grown up his first eight years in the United States, but he hadn't been for several years and he was in a strange new community working.

Speaker 22 It must have been a lonely and isolating time for him there too.

Speaker 22 We also know from a picture where he's wearing sort of a smock and his hair is standing up on end.

Speaker 22 And you realize, you know, that he probably didn't have a lot of opportunities to shower. He was working probably hot, difficult, hard jobs as a chef in a kitchen.

Speaker 22 So that gave you a sense too of the hardships of his life.

Speaker 22 He lived in the United States until he was about 20. when he went back to China because he wanted to find a wife.
He wanted to get married.

Speaker 2 Something that would have been really challenging in the U.S.

Speaker 2 because there were so few Chinese women and because Chinese men were legally barred or socially discouraged from marrying outside their race.

Speaker 22 So he really had no choice but to go back to China and get married and indeed he did. He went back and married a woman named Yi Shi who was about 17 years old.

Speaker 22 and he got married to her and she moved in with his mother and brother in Aungsing village in Guangdong province in China.

Speaker 2 But he didn't stay long.

Speaker 2 After several months, months, he returned to the United States to work, and he repeated this process again a couple of years later, going back to China to visit his wife and his growing family.

Speaker 2 But in 1895, on what he must have expected to be another uneventful trip from China to San Francisco, Shiri thought it would go smoothly because he'd landed back in the U.S.

Speaker 22 twice before, once in the last five years, and he'd been admitted as a U.S. citizen.

Speaker 14 He had no idea that he would soon be stuck on a steamship off the coast of California, within sight of his hometown, told by his own government that he was not allowed back into the country of his birth.

Speaker 14 That all of a sudden, he was not a citizen.

Speaker 22 And they basically claimed that if your parents were not citizens, then even if you were born in the U.S., you were not a citizen of the United States and you could be barred entry or deported from the United States.

Speaker 22 Coming up, Wong Kim Arc fights back in court.

Speaker 16 Hi, I'm Jade Wynn. I'm in Stanford, California, and you're listening to the Through Line from NPR.

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Speaker 19 Part 2:

Speaker 4 The test case

Speaker 2 in August of 1895, Juan K. Mark was sitting on a steamship, detained and watched over by guards.
He was there because, according to the government, he was not a U.S.

Speaker 2 citizen, even though he had documentation showing he was born in San Francisco. It must have been a lonely, bitter feeling to be just a few miles from his hometown, rejected by his own government.

Speaker 2 But he wasn't alone. Almost immediately, a group of people started working to get him out.

Speaker 22 So I'm guessing they had

Speaker 22 lots of contacts and networks who were aware of who was coming in and what was happening on those steamships. The group was known colloquially as the Chinese Six Companies.

Speaker 2 The Chinese Six Companies, also known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.

Speaker 22 It was a group of representatives from all the different regions of China who were immigrants to the U.S., living in the U.S., who had made it in the United States.

Speaker 22 They had some money, they had some resources. And when the Chinese Exclusion Act went into effect, they mobilized and they said, we are going to fight back.

Speaker 2 They frequently hired lawyers, white lawyers, to help Chinese laborers who were subject to deportation under the law.

Speaker 22 And so the Chinese six companies hired a lawyer for Wong Kim Ark, a well-known lawyer named Thomas Riordan, and he files a habeas petition on Wang Kim Ark's behalf.

Speaker 21 A petition for a writ of habeas corpus was filed on behalf of Wong Kim Ark, alleging that said Wong Kim Ark is unlawfully confined and restrained of his liberty on board of the steamship Coptic and prevented from landing into the United States.

Speaker 2 So while Wong Kim Ark sat imprisoned on the steamship, his case headed to a California district court.

Speaker 21 The question to be determined is whether a person born within the United States, whose father and mother were both persons of Chinese descent and subjects of the Emperor of China, but at the time of the birth were both domiciled residents of the United States, is a citizen.

Speaker 2 The district court was faced with a monumental decision, one that hinged on a single sentence in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

Speaker 6 14th Amendment, Section 1.

Speaker 3 All persons born or naturalized in the United States.

Speaker 2 The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution after the Civil War to achieve, quote, equal protection of the laws.

Speaker 2 It was intended to make sure newly emancipated Black Americans had full equal citizenship and rights. Some of the most impactful Supreme Court cases have hinged on this amendment.
There's Plessy v.

Speaker 2 Ferguson, which upheld the constitutionality of segregation. Brown v.
Board of Education, which reversed that, even Roe v. Wade.
which guaranteed the right to abortion.

Speaker 2 Wang Kimark's case focused on a specific part of the 14th Amendment, the citizenship clause.

Speaker 8 All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof

Speaker 6 are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. And of the state wherein they reside.

Speaker 2 That phrase, jurisdiction thereof, it's key because the court had to decide what makes a person a U.S. citizen.
Do all people born on U.S. soil fall under its jurisdiction, its laws?

Speaker 2 Or is jurisdiction about where your loyalties lie? Are Chinese people living in the United States really subject to U.S. laws, or should they be considered subjects of the Emperor of China?

Speaker 2 And then, what does this legal argument mean for all immigrants across the country? Could this same logic be applied to birthright citizens from Europe?

Speaker 13 Given the attention that this case drew in the local press, it seems that everyone understood that this was going to be the big challenge.

Speaker 2 Julie Novkov is the dean of Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, SUNY, and co-author of American by Birth, Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship.

Speaker 13 It was going to have a broader impact. than whatever was going on in San Francisco.

Speaker 18 One of the most important Chinese cases for many years being the application of Wong Kim Ark to land as a native son.

Speaker 2 Wong Kim Ark was still stuck on a steamer off the coast while his case played out in court. It had been months, and he was right in the middle of a bigger battle between the U.S.

Speaker 2 government and Chinese Americans.

Speaker 18 The case of Wong Kim Ark promises to become historic for the question raised is whether a Chinese born on American soil is a citizen of the United States.

Speaker 13 So although there had been previous rulings that had touched on this issue,

Speaker 13 this one did immediately garner quite a lot of attention even before the ruling came down.

Speaker 18 The decision of several hundred other cases depends upon its outcome.

Speaker 2 Finally, in the fall of 1895, the court came to a decision.

Speaker 13 And he wins.

Speaker 13 He wins.

Speaker 21 From the law as announced and the facts as stipulated, I am of the opinion that Wong Kim Ark is a citizen of the United States within the meaning of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment.

Speaker 24 He has not forfeited his right to return to this country.

Speaker 21 His detention, therefore, is illegal. He should be discharged, and it is so ordered.

Speaker 10 The experiment of blending the social habits and mutual race idiosyncrasies of the Chinese laboring classes classes with those of the great body of the people of the United States has been proved by the experience of 20 years to be in every sense unwise, impolitic, and injurious to both nations.

Speaker 2 Wong Kim Arc was technically free, but his victory was short-lived.

Speaker 22 So the government doesn't give up, but the government immediately says we're appealing this. And in fact, Wong Kim Arc is only allowed off that steamship because he posted a $250 bail.

Speaker 22 And those records are lost to history, but I'm guessing that the Chinese six companies produced that $250.

Speaker 22 He was kept for four and a half months, and he was only released on January 3rd, 1896.

Speaker 2 The government appealed the case up to the Supreme Court. They did this because they wanted to enforce and expand the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Speaker 2 Even the president at the time, Grover Cleveland, was in full support of excluding Chinese immigrants.

Speaker 10 This has induced me to omit no effort to answer the earnest and popular demand for the absolute exclusion of Chinese laborers having objects and purposes unlike our own.

Speaker 2 So the government did it. It appealed the case all the way up to the U.S.
Supreme Court.

Speaker 2 And the solicitor general, the lawyer who represents the government in front of the Supreme Court, was right out of central casting.

Speaker 22 A man named Holmes Conrad.

Speaker 22 And Holmes Conrad was tall, patrician.

Speaker 22 He looked like exactly the kind of person that could be trusted to convey the law clearly and accurately to the justices.

Speaker 22 His reputation at the time was that he was an excellent lawyer, an excellent representative of the U.S. government.

Speaker 22 But if you dig a little deeper into the background of Holmes Conrad, you see some really interesting personal details.

Speaker 2 Holmes Conrad came from a prominent slave-owning family. He had spent the Civil War as an officer fighting for the Confederacy.
And here's some nice irony for you.

Speaker 2 Because he fought for secession during the Civil War, Conrad actually had his citizenship revoked.

Speaker 22 So for at least a little period of time, a short period of time, Holmes Conrad too, was not a citizen of the United States. He wouldn't have been able to vote or hold office.

Speaker 22 It's interesting to think that at least for a brief period of time, he shared this issue with Wong Kim Ark about whether he would be considered a citizen of the United States.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, Wong Kim Ark, after being detained those horrible four months on ships, was back to his hard-scrabble life in San Francisco.

Speaker 2 He was earning money and sending it to his wife and kids in China. And all the while, the government was trying to beat him in court, questioning his citizenship.

Speaker 2 Yet, behind the scenes, he's got an all-star, high-powered legal team on his side, paid for by the Chinese six companies.

Speaker 11 They had lawyers on retainer. Some of these lawyers were extremely well-positioned.
Some of them had had positions in the federal government. Some of them had argued before the Supreme Court.

Speaker 11 Some of them were working for the railroads.

Speaker 11 The businessmen wanted the Chinese that they had brought over to get get into the country.

Speaker 2 For this case, they hired two accomplished white lawyers.

Speaker 22 One was Maxwell Evarts. In a way, he wore a dual hat.
He was hired by the Chinese six companies, paid by them to represent Wong, but the railroad, which he also worked for, clearly supported him.

Speaker 2 Many big businesses had a keen interest in the Wong Kim Arc case. They needed labor, cheap labor, to expand and be profitable.
So they jumped to support Wong Kim Arc's case.

Speaker 22 The second lawyer was a man named Jay Hubley Ashton, who had worked for President Lincoln, and both men deeply believed in Lincoln and the Reconstruction era's mission of not just ending slavery, but establishing racial equality.

Speaker 2 Everts and Ashton had argued cases before the Supreme Court before,

Speaker 12 but...

Speaker 22 I would have to think that they were pessimistic at this point.

Speaker 2 The two of them were coming off a loss in a high-profile case involving a Chinese client.

Speaker 2 Going into this case, they had every reason to doubt the outcome-an outcome that would be potentially devastating for Wong Kim Ark and thousands like him.

Speaker 22 He surely knew that if he lost, he would be forced to leave the United States, the country in which he'd been born and spend most of his life.

Speaker 2 Coming up, Wong Kim Ark heads to the Supreme Court.

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Speaker 16 Hi, this is Dania Colling from Frankfurt, Germany, home of the Europa League Championships Einclass Frankfurt.

Speaker 16 And you're listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 4 Part 3, Jurisdiction Thereof.

Speaker 14 On March 5th, 1897, on a Friday afternoon, the day came. The case of United States for Swan Kim Ark began.

Speaker 22 They're in the Capitol building because there was no Supreme Court building at this time.

Speaker 22 And they were in front of these nine black-robed men with Chief Justice Fuller in the middle, who was very short, so he was sitting on an elevated chair.

Speaker 14 Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller was the leader of the nine justices that made up the Supreme Court. And let's just say they had a bit of a reputation.

Speaker 13 The Fuller Court is known among constitutional scholars as one of the most racist iterations of the the Supreme Court that has existed across the span of American history.

Speaker 13 They're responsible for Plessy versus Ferguson,

Speaker 13 responsible for building the infrastructure that supports the development of Jim Crow in the South in the 20th century. And they actively, in some cases, support white supremacy.

Speaker 13 and white supremacists. And the court is also not

Speaker 13 always all that wonderful to the Chinese specifically.

Speaker 22 Many members of the court were on record as being hostile to Chinese immigrants.

Speaker 22 The argument took place over two different days, Friday, March 5th, 1897, and Monday, March 8th, 1897.

Speaker 14 So the United States government, represented by Holmes Conrad, swung first.

Speaker 22 He would have argued, as he did in his brief, that the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to all born in the United States, has a caveat, or he would have said an exception, which is only those who are born in the United States and who are subject to its jurisdiction are automatically birthright citizens of the United States.

Speaker 18 The case turned upon the meaning of the language, subject to the jurisdiction thereof, jurisdiction being of two kinds, territorial and political.

Speaker 22 And so Holmes Conrad would have grasped on to that language and said, well, Wong K. Mark, sure, he was born in the United States.
We can't refute that.

Speaker 22 But we do not think he was subject to the jurisdiction of the United States because his parents were loyal to the Emperor of China, and so was their son by sort of automatic transmission.

Speaker 22 And so that means the son cannot automatically acquire citizenship based on birth.

Speaker 14 That was the first piece of Conrad's argument. But then he made a bigger, bolder claim.

Speaker 22 Also said to the Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is itself unconstitutional.

Speaker 22 And his reason for that was he said the South was coerced into ratifying the 14th Amendment in 1868, and therefore it was never validly a part of the Constitution.

Speaker 22 And we can see in that argument, of course, that he's trying to litigate the Civil War. He's trying to say the Reconstruction Amendment should not be law.
We should turn back the clock.

Speaker 14 Conrad was making this argument in 1897 in front of the Supreme Court, over 30 years after the ink on the 14th Amendment had dried.

Speaker 22 And in fact, the lawyers for Wong Kim Ark call him on that.

Speaker 22 And they say in their brief, this nation spilled so much blood to fight for the end of slavery and to establish the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments and change our nation and change our Constitution.

Speaker 22 And you should not accept the argument that these amendments are invalid.

Speaker 14 The government made its argument. Then it was Won Kim Ark's lawyers' chance to counter.

Speaker 13 Well, in very simple terms, Won Kim Ark's lawyers have

Speaker 13 two main claims. One is that this principle of birthright citizenship is a long-standing principle in common law, not just American common law, but English common law.

Speaker 14 Their second claim is that this common law principle was adopted in the 14th Amendment.

Speaker 13 And therefore, if you look at the history of this principle, if you look at how it has played out over time, if you look at what the 14th Amendment was attempting to do and how discussions around it unfolded, And then you look at subsequent developments

Speaker 13 in lower federal court cases and a couple Supreme Court cases, there's plenty of grounding there to support the idea that the descendants of Chinese born in the United States are entitled to birthright citizenship.

Speaker 14 Millions of immigrants from Europe and around the world had moved to the U.S. in the 19th century.
They were encouraged to come and populate the West through laws like the Homestead Act.

Speaker 14 And their children who were born here were de facto citizens. They could vote, at least the men could, start companies, and they were making up more and more of the population.

Speaker 14 So the Supreme Court was suddenly having to address a fundamental issue.

Speaker 11 If the sons and daughters of Chinese are not citizens, then what of the sons and daughters of the English, the Irish, the Germans, the French, other people who have come to the United States?

Speaker 11 If you are not a citizen upon being born on this soil, then none of those others are citizens either.

Speaker 13 That principle is universal, and if you undercut it for the descendants of Chinese, you're basically undercutting the foundations of quite a few American citizens.

Speaker 22 So the length of time between the oral argument and the ruling was over a year.

Speaker 22 So the case was argued March 5th and March 8th, 1897, and the final Supreme Court decision wasn't announced until March 28th, 1898. And that was an extraordinary long period of time.

Speaker 22 It would be extraordinary today. It was even more so then.

Speaker 13 If you had been looking at this case, not necessarily knowing what was going to happen, only knowing what you know about the Fuller Court going into it, I think you could be forgiven for being a little bit uncertain about which way this one was going to go.

Speaker 22 So you can imagine the fear that Wong Kim Arc might have been feeling as month after month went by without a decision.

Speaker 22 And it's the sign the Supreme Court was really struggling with what to do in this case and how to decide it. And his lawyers were probably also greatly concerned.

Speaker 22 But they were brilliant lawyers and they told the Supreme Court, if you rule for the government that the children of immigrants are not citizens, you will take away citizenship from hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, including lots of white people.

Speaker 22 And the court heard that loud and clear and even noted that in its opinion.

Speaker 12 That to deny citizenship to one group would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, and other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.

Speaker 14 It took over a year, but finally, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in the case of U.S. v.
Juan Kim Ark.

Speaker 22 On March 28th, they issued a ruling, six to two, because they were down a member, so only eight members.

Speaker 11 And Justice Gray authors the opinion.

Speaker 13 And he finds that Juan Kim Ark and all others similarly situated are indeed entitled entitled to birthright citizenship, regardless of the immigration status of their parents, are citizens of the United States.

Speaker 12 It is conceded that if he is a citizen of the United States, the acts of Congress known as the Chinese Exclusion Acts prohibiting persons of the Chinese race and especially Chinese laborers from coming into the United States do not and cannot apply to him.

Speaker 12 The fact, therefore, that acts of Congress or treaties have not permitted Chinese persons born out of this country to become citizens by naturalization cannot exclude Chinese persons born in this country from the operation of the broad and clear words of the Constitution.

Speaker 12 All persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.

Speaker 12 Justice Gray.

Speaker 22 The court focused on that language, that all persons, this is intended to apply to everyone, and it's not intended to be so restrictive as to take away citizenship or bar citizenship from the children of immigrants.

Speaker 22 And remember, the United States is a nation of immigrants. It's not like there's just a few people who are born to non-citizen parents.

Speaker 22 It's a significant percentage of the country every year is born to immigrant parents.

Speaker 14 Quick note, all persons did not necessarily include Native Americans, and that's because tribes recognized by the U.S.

Speaker 14 government were considered sovereign nations with their own governments and court systems.

Speaker 22 And then the court threw in at the very end.

Speaker 22 They said, and if we were to rule any other way, we would take citizenship away from lots of children of not just the quote-unquote obnoxious Chinese, which is how the court often referred to this group, but also the children of English immigrants and German immigrants and French immigrants.

Speaker 14 The court ruled that citizenship is determined by whether or not someone is born on U.S. soil, not by blood or race.

Speaker 22 That, I think, also pragmatically led them to say, no, Wong Kim Ark, we're ruling for you, not so much because we're sympathetic to children of Chinese immigrants, but because we can't undo the citizenship of the children of immigrants in this country.

Speaker 14 Wong Kim Ark, with the support of the Chinese six companies, had won his case. He was recognized by the U.S.

Speaker 14 government as a birthright citizen, a ruling that his lawyers knew would have an impact on generations to come. And Wang Kim Ark could finally go back to his life in San Francisco.

Speaker 12 Well,

Speaker 22 I would love to say it was a fully happy ending.

Speaker 22 His problems were not over in part because the U.S. government didn't fully give up.

Speaker 22 It gave up on that formal legal argument. But I feel in some ways they just switched the battle to other venues.

Speaker 22 So Wong knew that if he wanted to leave the country again, he would have to prove to everyone's satisfaction, all of these white immigration inspectors, that he was the man who'd won the Supreme Court case, that he was Wong Kim Ark, that he was a citizen born in the United States.

Speaker 22 And that if they disbelieved him, he'd be stuck all over again in the steerage hold of a steamship trying to argue he could enter his country.

Speaker 22 And that must have made him very leery to even think about leaving the United States.

Speaker 14 But Won Kim Ark didn't need to leave the U.S. to land in trouble with authorities.

Speaker 22 He was living in El Paso, Texas, just a few years later after his win in October of 1901, living and working there. And he was arrested and charged with being a Chinese immigrant.

Speaker 22 not a native born American, a Chinese immigrant who was illegally in the United States. He had to post a $300 bond.

Speaker 14 That's over $10,000 in today's money.

Speaker 22 And it took months before he could convince these officials, I'm the guy who won the Supreme Court case establishing birthright citizenship. That's who I am.
I am a citizen who gets to stay.

Speaker 22 This is the racial profiling of its time.

Speaker 14 Today, on the corner of Jackson Street and Grant Avenue in San Francisco, you'll find a huge mural depicting the faces of some famous Asian American people.

Speaker 14 In the bottom is an image of a 30-something Wong Kim Ark. He's wearing all black, his eyebrows are raised and has a slight smile on his face.
You could almost call his look hopeful.

Speaker 14 Hope. That can be easy to miss in this tale of struggle and resistance.

Speaker 14 But the truth is, Wong Kim Ark, decade after decade, continued to live his life between his homeland, the United States, and where his wife and children lived, China.

Speaker 14 He was even able to bring some of his offspring to live in the U.S.

Speaker 22 Including Wang Yook Jim, who arrived in 1926, age 11, just a little boy.

Speaker 22 He endures this long trip and three weeks on Angel Island and all the questioning that the immigration inspectors put everyone through. But then he was admitted to the United States as a U.S.
citizen.

Speaker 14 Wang Yook Jim grew up in the U.S. He would eventually join the U.S.
military and worked as a merchant marine. He would get married to a Japanese-American woman and start a family.

Speaker 22 His children and grandchildren live in the United States today, so the family established itself in the United States. It was an enormous struggle, but they succeeded in doing so.

Speaker 14 Wong Yook Jim would name one of his daughters Sandra, Sandra Wong, Wong Kim Ark's great-granddaughter.

Speaker 15 Wong Kim Ark was,

Speaker 15 you know, born in San San Francisco and he, you know, was discriminated against and he fought for his right to be here. He fought for what he believed in and

Speaker 15 he won,

Speaker 15 which was significant because it established birthright citizenship for everyone.

Speaker 15 And what is birthright citizenship?

Speaker 15 To me,

Speaker 15 to the regular person, if you are born here, you are a citizen.

Speaker 14 Wong Kim Ark would go back to visit China one last time in 1931. He was in his 60s.
He never came home to the U.S.

Speaker 14 It isn't just on that street in Chinatown that Wong Kim Ark's image looms large. The ruling in the U.S.

Speaker 14 versus Wong Kim Ark has remained firmly in place even though it has and will continue to be challenged.

Speaker 14 Wong Kim Ark's fight for recognition may not have made his life that much easier, but his sacrifices cleared a path for his descendants and for the descendants of millions of others.

Speaker 14 For my son, whose rights as a citizen are secured by birth, for the millions of others whose rights are secured by the soil and not by their skin color or ethnicity.

Speaker 14 And he helped make real the aspirational language of our nation's founding document.

Speaker 3 All persons born or naturalized in the United States

Speaker 7 are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

Speaker 8 No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.

Speaker 7 Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Speaker 14 That's it for this week's show. I'm Ram Tina Arab Louis.

Speaker 2 I'm Randadil Fattar, and you've been listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 14 This episode was produced by me and me and Lawrence Wu.

Speaker 5 Lane Kaplan-Levinson, Julie Kane, Victor Iveez, Anya Steinberg, Yolanda Sanguini, Casey Minor.

Speaker 2 Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vochl.

Speaker 14 Thanks to Casey Morell, Don Gagne, Corey Turner, Blaise Adler Ivanbrook, Lawrence Wu, Casey Minor, Amiri Tulla, Christina Kim, and Devin Katayama for their voiceover work.

Speaker 14 Thank you to the Chinese Historical Society of America for all their help. Thanks also to Tamar Charney and Anya Grundman.

Speaker 2 Special thanks to Sandra Wong and Julie Su.

Speaker 9 This episode was mixed by Josh Newell.

Speaker 2 Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvy, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

Speaker 2 We're going to be talking about the art of cinematic storytelling at the On Air Fest in Brooklyn on February 21st. Want to come?

Speaker 2 Go to onairfest.com and use the code Through Line40 to get 40% off your ticket.

Speaker 14 And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at mpr.org.

Speaker 2 Thanks for listening.

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