Amanda Frost
Appearances
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Birthright Citizenship
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' door.
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Birthright Citizenship
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.
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Birthright Citizenship
So this was a shocking event, I'm sure, for Wong Kim Ark and his family. And I assume they must have heard about it because, of course, they were living in Chinatown in San Francisco in the same state and not so far away.
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Birthright Citizenship
But if that's what they thought, they were wrong. Because in 1877, a very similar attack pogrom, racial pogrom, occurred in San Francisco. in San Francisco and Chinatown.
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Birthright Citizenship
They packed up their store and moved back to China. We don't know exactly why Wong Kim Ark'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.
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Birthright Citizenship
At first, Chinese immigrants were welcomed. They were helping to build America. They were building the Transcontinental Railroad and they were key. They were extraordinarily important. And they helped to mine the gold and the precious metals in backbreaking difficult work throughout the West.
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Birthright Citizenship
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.
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Birthright Citizenship
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. 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.
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Birthright Citizenship
There was a sense, too, that the Chinese couldn't assimilate and the Chinese immigrants weren't willing to assimilate.
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Birthright Citizenship
The Chinese population was forced by laws as well as social conventions to live in isolated ways, to live in Chinatowns, in ethnic enclaves. The children were barred from attending schools. Anti-miscegenation laws barred marriage. The federal law barred Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens.
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Birthright Citizenship
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. But that also made it easy to view them as others, as people who are not like us.
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Birthright Citizenship
But he did. So he reported that he went back to China with his parents around 1877 when he was around eight years old. 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 mining communities in the Sierra Nevada mountains and then later in Chinatown. It must have been a very rough life for him.
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Birthright Citizenship
He was clearly not being educated at that point, if he ever got much education. And also, it must have been very lonely. He had come from a small village, Ong Sing village, where he'd been living with a younger brother and his parents. 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.
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Birthright Citizenship
But he hadn't been for several years, and he was in a strange new community working. It must have been a lonely and isolating time for him there, too. We also know from a picture where he's wearing sort of a smock and his hair is standing up on end. And you realize that he probably didn't have a lot of opportunities to shower.
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Birthright Citizenship
He was working probably hot, difficult, hard jobs as a chef in a kitchen. So that gave you a sense, too, of the hardships of his life. 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.
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Birthright Citizenship
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. And he got married to her, and she moved in with his mother and brother in Ongxing Village in Guangdong Province in China.
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Birthright Citizenship
I'm sure he thought it would go smoothly because he'd landed back in the U.S. twice before, once in the last five years, and he'd been admitted as a U.S. citizen.
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Birthright Citizenship
And they basically claimed that if your parents were not citizens, that 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.
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Birthright Citizenship
So I'm guessing they had 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.
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Birthright Citizenship
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. 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.
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Birthright Citizenship
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 Wong Kim Ark's behalf.
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Birthright Citizenship
So the government doesn't give up, but the government immediately says, we're appealing this. And in fact, Wong Kim Ark is only allowed off that steamship because he posted a $250 bail. And those records are lost to history, but I'm guessing that the Chinese six companies produced that $250. He was kept for four and a half months, and he was only released on January 3rd, 1896.
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And Holmes Conrad was tall, patrician. He looked like exactly the kind of person that could be trusted to convey the law clearly and accurately to the justices. His reputation at the time was that he was an excellent lawyer, an excellent representative of the US government. But if you dig a little deeper into the background of Holmes Conrad, you see some really interesting personal details.
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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. 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.
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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.
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Birthright Citizenship
The second lawyer was a man named J. 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.
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Birthright Citizenship
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 spent most of his life. The End
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Birthright Citizenship
They're in the Capitol building because there was no Supreme Court building at this time. 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.
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Birthright Citizenship
Many members of the court were on record as being hostile to Chinese immigrants. The argument took place over two different days, Friday, March 5th, 1897, and Monday, March 8th, 1897.
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Birthright Citizenship
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.
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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. 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.
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And so that means the son cannot automatically acquire citizenship based on birth.
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Also said to the Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is itself unconstitutional. 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. And we can see in that argument, of course, that he's trying to litigate the Civil War. He's trying to say,
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The Reconstruction Amendment should not be law. We should turn back the clock.
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And in fact, the lawyers for Wong Kim Ark call him on that. And they say in their brief, this nation spilled so much blood to fight this. for the end of slavery and to establish the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments and change our nation and change our Constitution. And you should not accept the argument that these amendments are invalid.
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So the length of time between the oral argument and the ruling was over a year. 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. It would be extraordinary today. It was even more so then.
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Birthright Citizenship
So you can imagine the fear that Wong Kim Ark might have been feeling as month after month went by without a decision. 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. But they were brilliant lawyers.
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Birthright Citizenship
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. And the court heard that loud and clear and even noted that in its opinion.
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On March 28th, they issued a ruling, 6-2, because they were down a member, so only eight members.
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Regardless of the immigration status of their parents are citizens of the United States.
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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. 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.
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It's a significant percentage of the country every year is born to immigrant parents.
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Birthright Citizenship
And then the court threw in at the very end, 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.
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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.
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Well, I would love to say it was a fully happy ending. His problems were not over in part because the U.S. government didn't fully give up. It gave up on that formal legal argument. But I feel in some ways they just switched the battle to other venues.
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Birthright Citizenship
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 K. Mark, that he was a citizen born in the United States.
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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. And that must have made him very leery to even think about leaving the United States.
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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, not a native-born American, a Chinese immigrant who was illegally in the United States. He had to post a $300 bond.
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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. This is the racial profiling of its time.
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Including Wong Yuk-Chin, who arrived in 1926, age 11, just a little boy. 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.
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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.
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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. He was a cook named Wong Kim Art. He would have slept on a bunk, crammed in with everyone else on steerage, and they overcrowded these boats.
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It would have been certainly a fairly squalid way to travel and very difficult in terms of limited food and water. 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.
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Birthright Citizenship
At this point, the Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect. And so if you were a Chinese laborer, you were not allowed to enter. Wong Kim Ark argued with the customs official. 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 U.S. citizen.
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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 US citizen.
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And he had three white witnesses, white people, because that's all the only kind of witness the US government would accept, who were willing to say he was born in the United States and they'd known him from childhood. So he was prepared. But that preparation didn't add up to much because... Unbeknownst to Wang, while he was in China, the U.S.
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government had decided it wanted to bring a test case challenging birthright citizenship, particularly for the children of Chinese immigrants. So they chose him, and they didn't let him get off that boat.
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Wong Kim Ark's parents were one of a tiny minority of Chinese immigrants coming into the United States in the 1860s and 70s. We don't know exactly when they arrived, but we know they arrived at least before Wong Kim Ark's birth.
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And I'm the author of a book entitled You Are Not American, Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers.