At 250, America is still deciding who belongs
Last week, days before the nation’s 250-year anniversary, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutional right to citizenship to nearly everyone born in the
Last week, days before the nation’s 250-year anniversary, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutional right to citizenship to nearly everyone born in the US. Anticipation of this decision had long been building, and you could almost hear a collective sigh of relief when the announcement arrived. The president cannot cancel the Constitution by executive order. The US will remain, at least in this one very specific way, an open and welcoming society. Immigration advocates across the country celebrated. The ruling was a rebuke to the president’s supercharged anti-immigration agenda. It felt like a bullet had just been taken out of a loaded gun. To the administration and its supporters, the Court’s 6-3 judgement was seen as a betrayal. Trump responded with barely concealed racist snark, writing on Truth Social that he “would like to congratulate President Xi, and the Great Country of China, on their massive Birthright Citizenship WIN!” White House adviser Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda (and his unofficial secretary of histrionics), described the court’s decision as “our national self-obliteration”. Well, Stephen. It’s been a good run! In truth, political prophets predicting the demise of the republic due to some misbegotten aspect of the immigration system are as constant as the North Star. We’d do well to remember this fact while the nation commemorates its 250th birthday. We’ve survived everything from the anti-Catholic Know Nothing party (so named because the movement began as a secret society, and members were advised to say they “know nothing” about their own group to outsiders) to the racial terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan (still with us, but a shadow of its former self).
Reading through the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision is instructive, if only because the justices rehearse the ways that different marginalised groups have had their citizenship contested over the years. These include Chinese Americans such as Wong Kim Ark. Wong was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents in the 1870s, but officials denied him citizenship, claiming he owed allegiance to the Emperor of China and not the US. He sued and won, and his 1898 Supreme Court case solidified the legal foundation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which establishes birthright citizenship. Also mentioned in the decision is the 1857 Supreme Court ruling that Black people, enslaved or free, could not be citizens of the US. In that case, the infamous Dred Scott v Sandford, the US was violating its own principle of granting citizenship by jus soli (born on the land). The Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War, corrected that error, the majority wrote. And it should always be remembered that the Indian Citizenship Act, which extended citizenship to the Indigenous peoples of this country, was passed into law only in 1924. Each of these groups, of course, has also had to battle constant voter suppression efforts simply to exercise their full citizenship. Based on this significant Supreme Court decision, it may seem like a tolerant and generous America is being affirmed from the bench. This, sadly, is a hasty and unwarranted conclusion. What the Court’s other rulings on immigration this term make abundantly clear is that, while birthright citizenship has been affirmed, the Court is allowing the government to withhold the promises of liberty and guarantees of freedom from others who have reached our shores and live in our communities.
The BriefWire