Source: https://birtherthinktank.wordpress.com/wong-kim-ark-natural-born-citizen/
Timestamp: 2017-06-25 12:03:36
Document Index: 580241299

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 1', '§ 1', '§ 1', '§ 1', '§ 2', '§ 2165', '§ 3', '§ 4', '§ 1993', '§ 1977', '§ 16', '§ 1', '§ 7', '§ 2169', '§ 14']

Wong Kim Ark – Easy Read Version | The Birther Think Tank
Wisely, Wong Kim Ark's Attorney Did Not Call The Parents To The Stand
Introduction: This United States Supreme Court Case is the most birthright citizenship case. While it is relatively long, the decision of the Court is pretty simple. This is from the syllabus:
The language contained in the case makes it clear that Wong Kim Ark, or any other person born in the United States, not including the children of diplomats or invading soldiers, is also a Natural Born Citizen, eligible to be President or Vice-President, regardless of the citizenship of the parents. This obvious fact has been widely disputed by what I laughingly call the Vattle Birthers, because of their reliance on the writings of Emerich de Vattel, Swiss author of the The Law of Nations, who died in 1767. The Vattle Birthers insist that a natural born citizen is a special subset which requires both parents be citizens.
It is not the purpose of this Internet Article to argue that point, but to simply provide an easier to read version of the case so that the reader can judge for themselves. I have indented quoted items, and bolded certain cases and sections so that it is easier to follow the language of the Court. I have not changed any words, or left out anything. The dissent is not included, and I may add it at a separate date. Here is a link to the case for the suspicious:
As appears upon the face of the amendment, as well as from the history of the times, this was not intended to impose any new restrictions upon citizenship, or to prevent any persons from becoming citizens by the fact of birth within the United States who would thereby have become citizens according to the law existing before its adoption. It is declaratory in form, and enabling and extending in effect. Its main purpose doubtless was, as has been often recognized by this court, to establish the citizenship of free negroes, which had been denied in the opinion delivered by Chief Justice Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford, (1857) 19 How. 393, and to put it beyond doubt that all blacks, as well as whites, born or naturalized within the jurisdiction of the United States are citizens of the United States. The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), 16 Wall. 36, 73; Strauder v. West Virginia (1879), 100 U.S. 303, 306.; Ex parte Virginia (1879). 100 U.S. 339, 35; Neal v. Delaware (1880), 103 U.S. 370, 386; Elk v. Wilkins (1884), 112 U.S. 94, 101. But the opening words, “All persons born,” are general, not to say universal, restricted only by place and jurisdiction, and not by color or race — as was clearly recognized in all the opinions delivered in The Slaughterhouse Cases, above cited.
The question is now settled by the Fourteenth Amendment itself, that citizenship of the United States is the primary citizenship in this country, and that state citizenship is secondary and derivative, depending upon citizenship of the United States and the citizen’s place of residence. The States have not now, if they ever had, any power to restrict their citizenship to any classes or persons.
The language employed is unqualified in its scope. There is no exception in its terms, and there can be properly none in their application. By the language “citizens of the United States” was meant all such citizens, and by “any person” was meant all persons within the jurisdiction of the State. No distinction is intimated on account of race or color. This court has no authority to interpolate a limitation that is neither expressed nor implied. Our duty is to execute the law, not to make it. The protection provided was not intended to be confined to those of any particular race or class, but to embrace equally all races, classes and conditions of men.
— the first of which is the exemption from arrest or detention of the person of a foreign sovereign entering its territory with its license, because
Whatever may be the principle on which this immunity is established, whether we consider him as in the place of the sovereign he represents or, by a political fiction, suppose him to be extraterritorial, and therefore, in point of law, not within the jurisdiction of the sovereign at whose court he resides, still the immunity itself is granted by the governing power of the nation to which the minister is deputed. This fiction of exterritoriality could not be erected and supported against the will of the sovereign of the territory. He is supposed to assent to it. . . . The assent of the sovereign to the very important and extensive exemptions from territorial jurisdiction which are admitted to attach to foreign ministers is implied from the considerations that, without such exemption, every sovereign would hazard his own dignity by employing a public minister abroad. His minister would owe temporary and local allegiance to a foreign prince, and would be less competent to the objects of his mission. A sovereign committing the interests of his nation with a foreign power to the care of a person whom he has selected for that purpose, cannot intend to subject his minister in any degree to that power; and therefore, a consent to receive him implies a consent that he shall possess those privileges which his principal intended he should retain — privileges which are essential to the dignity of his sovereign and to the duties he is bound to perform.
The reasons for not allowing to other aliens exemption “from the jurisdiction of the country in which they are found” were stated as follows:
In short, the judgment in the case of The Exchange declared, as incontrovertible principles, that the jurisdiction of every nation within its own territory is exclusive and absolute, and is susceptible of no limitation not imposed by the nation itself; that all exceptions to its full and absolute territorial jurisdiction must be traced up to its own consent, express or implied; that, upon its consent to cede, or to waive the exercise of, a part of its territorial jurisdiction rest the exemptions from that jurisdiction of foreign sovereigns or their armies entering its territory with its permission, and of their foreign ministers and public ships of war, and that the implied license under which private individuals of another nation enter the territory and mingle indiscriminately with its inhabitants for purposes of business or pleasure can never be construed to grant to them an exemption from the jurisdiction of the country in which they are found. See also Carlisle v. United States (1872), 16 Wall. 147, 155; Radich v. Hutchins (1877), 95 U.S. 210; Wildenhus’ Case (1887), 120 U.S. 1; Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), 130 U.S. 581, 603, 604.
From the first organization of the National Government under the Constitution, the naturalization acts of the United States, in providing for the admission of aliens to citizenship by judicial proceedings, uniformly required every applicant to have resided for a certain time “within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States,” and thus applied the words “under the jurisdiction of the United States” to aliens residing here before they had taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, or had renounced allegiance [p687] to a foreign government. Acts of March 26, 1790, c. 3; January 29, 1795, c. 20, § 1; June 18, 1798, c. 54, §§ 1, 6; 1 Stat. 103, 414, 566, 568; April 14, 1802, c. 28, § 1, 2 Stat. 153; March 22, 1816, c. 32, § 1; 3 Stat. 258; May 24, 1828, c. 116, § 2; 4 Stat. 310; Rev.Stat. § 2165. And, from 1795, the provisions of those acts which granted citizenship to foreign-born children of American parents described such children as “born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States.” Acts of January 29, 1795, c. 20, § 3; 1 Stat. 415; April 14, 180, c. 28, § 4; 2 Stat. 155; February 10, 1855, c. 71; 10 Stat. 604; Rev.Stat. §§ 1993, 2172. Thus, Congress, when dealing with the question of citizenship in that aspect, treated aliens residing in this country as ” under the jurisdiction of the United States,” and American parents residing abroad as “out of the jurisdiction of the United States.”
By the Civil Rights Act of 1866, “all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed,” were declared to be citizens of the United States. In the light of the law as previously established, and of the history of the times, it can hardly be doubted that the words of that act, “not subject to any foreign power,” were not intended to exclude any children born in this country from the citizenship which would theretofore have been their birthright, or, for instance, for the first time in our history, to deny the right of citizenship to native-born children of foreign white parents not in the diplomatic service of their own country nor in hostile occupation of part of our territory. But any possible doubt in this regard was removed when the negative words of the Civil Rights Act, “not subject to any foreign power,” gave way, in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, to the affirmative words, “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.”
This sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment is declaratory of existing rights and affirmative of existing law as to each of the qualifications therein expressed — “born in the United States,” “naturalized in the United States,” and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” — in short, as to everything relating to the acquisition of citizenship by facts occurring within the limits of the United States. But it has not touched the acquisition of citizenship by being born abroad of American parents, and has left that subject to be regulated, as it had always been, by Congress in the exercise of the power conferred by the Constitution to establish an uniform rule of naturalization.
while the United States may, by law, fix or declare the conditions constituting citizens of the country within its own territorial jurisdiction, and may confer the rights of American citizens everywhere upon persons who are not rightfully subject to the authority of any foreign country or government, it is clear that the United States cannot, by undertaking to confer the rights of citizenship upon the subjects of a foreign nation who have not come within our territory, interfere with the just rights of such nation to the government and control of its own subjects. If, therefore, by the laws of the country of their birth, children of American citizens born in that country are subjects of its government, I do not think that it is competent to the United States, by any legislation, to interfere with that relation or, by undertaking to extend to them the rights of citizens of this country, to interfere with the allegiance which they may owe to the country of their birth while they continue within its territory, or to change the relation to other foreign nations which, by reason of their place of birth, may at any time exist. The rule of the common law I understand to be that a person “born in a strange country, under the obedience of a strange prince or country, is an alien” (Co.Lit. 128b), and that every person owes allegiance to the country of his birth.
It is evident from the proviso in the act of 10th February, 1855, viz., “that the rights of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers never resided in the United States,” that the lawmaking power not only had in view this limit to the efficiency of its own municipal enactments in foreign jurisdiction, but that it has conferred only a qualified citizenship upon the children of American fathers born without the jurisdiction of the United States, and has denied to them what pertains to other American citizens — the right of transmitting citizenship to their children — unless they shall have made themselves residents of the United States or, in the language of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, have made themselves “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
These opinions go to show that, since the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the executive branch of the Government, the one charged with the duty of protecting American citizens abroad against unjust treatment by other nations, has taken the same view of the act of Congress of 1855, declaring children born abroad of American citizens to be themselves citizens, which, as mentioned in a former part of this opinion, the British Foreign Office has taken of similar acts of Parliament — holding that such statutes cannot, consistently with our own established rule of citizenship by birth in this country, operate extraterritorially so far as to relieve any person born and residing in a foreign country and subject to its government, from his allegiance to that country.
The object of the Fourteenth Amendment, as is well known, was to confer upon the colored race the right of citizenship. It, however, gave to the colored people no right superior to that granted to the white race. The ancestors of all the colored people then in the United States were of foreign birth, and could not have been naturalized or in any way have become entitled to the right of citizenship. The colored people were no more subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, by reason of their birth here, than were the white children born in this country of parents who were not citizens. The same rule must be applied to both races, and unless the general rule, that, when the parents are domiciled here, birth establishes the right to citizenship, is accepted, the Fourteenth Amendment has failed to accomplish its purpose, and the colored people are not citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment, by the language, “all persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” was intended [p693] to bring all races, without distinction of color, within the rule which prior to that time pertained to the white race.
Benny v. O’Brien (1895), 29 Vroom (58 N.J.Law), 36, 39, 40.
Ex.Doc. H.R. No. 10, 1st sess. 32d Congress, p. 4; 6 Webster’s Works, 56; United States v. Carlisle, 16 Wall. 147, 155; Calvin’s Case, 7 Rep. 6a; Ellesmere on Postnati 63; 1 Hale P.C. 62; 4 Bl.Com. 92.
VI. Whatever considerations, in the absence of a controlling provision of the Constitution, might influence the legislative or the executive branch of the Government to decline to admit persons of the Chinese race to the status of citizens of the United States, there are none that can constrain or permit the judiciary to refuse to give full effect to the peremptory and explicit language of the Fourteenth Amendment, which declares and ordains that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
118 U.S. 368, 369. The manner in which reference was made, in the passage above quoted, to § 1977 of the Revised Statutes shows that the change of phrase in that section, reenacting § 16 of the statute of May 31, 1870, c. 114, 16 Stat. 144, as compared with § 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 — by substituting, for the words in that act, “of every race and color,” the words, “within the jurisdiction of the United States” — was not [p696] considered as making the section, as it now stands, less applicable to persons of every race and color and nationality than it was in its original form, and is hardly consistent with attributing any narrower meaning to the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which may itself have been the cause of the change in the phraseology of that provision of the Civil Rights Act.
The decision in ck Yick Wo v. Hopkins, indeed, did not directly pass upon the effect of these words in the Fourteenth Amendment, but turned upon subsequent provisions of the same section. But, as already observed, it is impossible to attribute to the words, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” that is to say, of the United States, at the beginning a less comprehensive meaning than to the words “within its jurisdiction,” that is, of the State, at the end of the same section; or to hold that persons, who are indisputably “within the jurisdiction” of the State, are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the Nation.
It necessarily follows that persons born in China, subjects of the Emperor of China but domiciled in the United States, having been adjudged, in Yick Wo v. Hopkins to be within the jurisdiction of the State within the meaning of the concluding sentence, must be held to be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States within the meaning of the first sentence of this section of the Constitution, and their children “born in the United States” cannot be less “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
Accordingly, in Quock Ting v. United States (1891), 140 U.S. 417, which, like the case at bar, was a writ of habeas corpus to test the lawfulness of the exclusion of a Chinese person who alleged that he was a citizen of the United States by birth, it was assumed on all hands that a person of the Chinese race, born in the United States, was a citizen of the United States. The decision turned upon the failure of the petitioner to prove that he was born in this country, and the question at issue was, as stated in the opinion of the majority of the court, delivered by Mr. Justice Field, “whether the evidence was sufficient to show that the petitioner was a citizen of the [p697] United States,” or, as stated by Mr. Justice Brewer in his dissenting opinion, “whether the petitioner was born in this country or not.” 140 U.S. 419, 423.
In State v. Ah Chew (1881), 16 Nevada 50, 58, the Supreme Court of Nevada said: “The Amendments did not confer the right of citizenship upon the Mongolian race, except such as are born within the United States.” In the courts of the United States in the Ninth Circuit, it has been uniformly held, in a series of opinions delivered by Mr. Justice Field, Judge Sawyer, Judge Deady, Judge Hanford, and Judge Morrow, that a child born in the United States of Chinese parents, subjects of the Emperor of China, is a native-born citizen of the United States. In re Look Tin Sing (1884), 10 Sawyer 358; Ex parte Chin King (1888), 13 Sawyer 333; In re Yung Sing Hee (1888) 13 Sawyer 482; In re Wy Shing (1888), 13 Sawyer 530; Gee Fook Sing v. United States (1892), 7 U.S.App. 7; In re Wong Kim Arm (1896), 71 Fed.Rep. 38. And we are not aware of any judicial decision to the contrary.
In Fong Yue Ting v. United States, the right of the United States to expel such Chinese persons was placed upon the grounds that the right to exclude or to expel all aliens, or any class of aliens, absolutely or upon certain conditions, is an inherent and inalienable right of every sovereign and independent [p700] nation, essential to its safety, its independence and its welfare; that the power to exclude or to expel aliens, being a power affecting international relations, is vested in the political departments of the Government and is to be regulated by treaty or by act of Congress and to be executed by the executive authority according to the regulations so established, except so far as the judicial department has been authorized by treaty or by statute, or is required by the paramount law of the Constitution, to intervene; that the power to exclude and the power to expel aliens rest upon one foundation, are derived from one source, are supported by the same reasons, and are in truth but parts of one and the same power; and, therefore, that the power of Congress to expel, like the power to exclude aliens, or any specified class of aliens, from the country, may be exercised entirely through executive officers; or Congress may call in the aid of the judiciary to ascertain any contested facts on which an alien’s right to be in the country has been made by Congress to depend. 149 U.S. 711, 713, 714.
The power, granted to Congress by the Constitution, “to establish an uniform rule of naturalization” was long ago adjudged by this court to be vested exclusively in Congress. Chirac v. Chirac (1817), 2 Wheat. 259. For many years after the establishment of the original Constitution, and until two years after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress never authorized the naturalization of any but “free white persons.” Acts of March 26, 1790, c. 3, and January 29, 1795, c. 20; 1 Stat. 103, 414; April 14, 1802, c. 28, and March 26, 1804, c. 47; 2 Stat. 153, 292; March 22, 1816, c. 32; 3 Stat. 258; May 26, 1824, c. 186, and May 24, 1828, c. 116; 4 Stat. 69, 310. By the treaty between the United States and China, made July 28, 1868, and promulgated February 5, 1870, it was provided that
16 Stat. 740. By the act of July 14, 1870, c. 254, § 7, for the first time, the naturalization laws were “extended to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” 16 Stat. 256. This extension, as embodied in the Revised Statutes, took the form of providing that those laws should “apply to aliens [being free white persons, and to aliens] of African nativity and to persons of African descent;” and it was amended by the act of February [p702] 18, 1875, c. 80, by inserting the words above printed in brackets. Rev.Stat. (2d ed.) § 2169; 18 Stat. 318. Those statutes were held, by the Circuit Court of the United States in California, not to embrace Chinese aliens. In re Ah Yup (1878), 5 Sawyer 155. And by the act of May 6, 1882, c. 126, § 14, it was expressly enacted that “hereafter no state court or court of the United States shall admit Chinese to citizenship.” 22 Stat. 61.
VII. Upon the facts agreed in this case, the American citizenship which Wong Kim Ark acquired by birth within the United States has not been lost or taken away by anything happening since his birth. No doubt he might himself, after coming of age, renounce this citizenship and become a citizen of the country of his parents, or of any other country; for, by our law, as solemnly declared by Congress, “the right of expatriation is a natural and inherent right of all people,” and