Repeating something does not make it true

As we have posted previously here, here and here, the proposed health care reform will not give free health care for illegal aliens. A new television ad named "Socialized Medicine" by the U.S. Citizens Association claims that health reform means that we will be forced to pay for health care for "20 million illegal aliens." Either this group has not read the proposed legislation or they are simply refusing to tell the truth.

Natural Born Controversies

Photo of Former United States Supreme Court Justice Horace Gray used under Creative Commons from Political Graveyard.

There has been a great deal of discussion on talk-radio, cable television, and on the internet surrounding the topic of "natural born" versus "naturalized citizens". This is a fairly meaty topic and will be broken up into several different posts. This first post will discuss natural born citizens or “birth right” citizenship.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified and became the supreme law of the land. Article 1 of the Amendment states in part:

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.

But what does the phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” mean?

In 1873, a man named Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco, California. In 1882, the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. This law severely limited immigrants from China and barred Chinese immigrants in the United States from naturalization. It was undisputed that Wong Kim’s parents were not U.S. citizens and they were “subject to the jurisdiction of China.” In 1890, Wong Kim departed to China for a temporary visit. He returned a few months later to San Francisco. In 1894, Wong Kim Ark made another temporary visit to China and returned in the summer of 1895. This time, he was refused entry into the United States on the ground that he was not a U.S. citizen and detained aboard the vessel on which he arrived.

Wong Kim Ark filed a petition for habeas corpus in the District Court for the Northern District of California. The then “district attorney for the United States” intervened and asked that Wong Kim Ark not be released because he was inter alia a “subject of the emperor of China.” The trial judge, after an extensive review of the law, held that Won Kim Ark was indeed a U.S. citizen within the meaning of the 14th Amendment because he was born in the United States. The judge then ordered his release. The case was appealed to the United States Supreme Court. After a rigorous review of the law and history of citizenship laws in the United States and England and the history of the 14th Amendment, Justice Horace Gray gave the opinion of the court that the 14th Amendment, “has conferred no authority on congress to restrict the effect of birth, declared by the constitution to constitute a sufficient and complete right to citizenship.” The Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision and this has been the law of the land since 1898.

Now there are some commentators that have suggested that since Wong Kim Ark’s parents were in the country legally, birth right citizenship does not pass to children of illegal immigrants. The Supreme Court in the case of Plyer v. Doe disposed of this argument by stating that “no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.” Thus, the Constitution guarantees that children of illegal immigrants, born in the United States, are U.S. citizens. That means Congress cannot pass legislation to change this. Only a constitutional amendment can change birth right citizenship.