About 50 University of Michigan community members gathered in the Ford School of Public Policy Friday afternoon to hear a panel from four U-M professors on the historical and current challenges to birthright citizenship in the United States. The event comes at a time of federal opposition to birthright citizenship, with President Donald Trump opposing the right guaranteed in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution with an executive order on his first day in office.
The panel began with Law professor Margo Schlanger explaining Trump’s executive order, which she said has taken on a very loose interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s clause detailing that individuals receiving birthright citizenship must be subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S.
“What we think is permissibly understood to mean is that people who are born to folks here as visitors — those babies are not U.S. citizens, because those visitors shouldn’t be understood as subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” Schlanger said. “And they’ve said that babies who are born to folks who are residents — but are out-of-status residents who are undocumented, or maybe they’re documented but they don’t have appropriate residential status — those babies are not understood as being U.S. citizens because of the ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ clause.”
Following Trump’s executive order, three federal courts issued nationwide preliminary injunctions to prevent the order from going into effect. Since then, Trump has taken the case to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to partially block the injunctions. The court has set an April 4 deadline for plaintiffs to respond to the motions filed by the Trump administration.
Law professor Samuel Erman continued by providing historical context for birthright citizenship, explaining the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court case, which reaffirmed that the 14th Amendment extends citizenship to anyone born in the U.S.
“This was a case where anti-Chinese racist jurists came up with a theory that was designed to exclude the children of Chinese who were residents in the United States from being U.S. citizens,” Erman said. “Their theory was ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ didn’t mean you had to follow the laws. It meant that your parents were not subjects or citizens of any foreign country, and the Supreme Court said no to that.”
Ian Shin, assistant professor of history and American culture, contextualized the Wong Kim Ark case in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States.
“What’s important to know is that birthright citizenship is directly a response and related to the history of racist exclusion laws in the United States,” Shin said. “The reason why (Wong Kim Ark) was stopped at the border is because in 1895 the U.S. government was spoiling for a fight. … The entry of folks like Wong Kim Ark who were birthright citizens posed a direct challenge to the ability of the U.S. government to control who came within its borders. ”
Shin continued by saying many Asian American historians recognize that the Wong Kim Ark case was not a call for the equal treatment of Asian Americans, but rather for the protection of the families of European immigrants.
“I will note one other thing that hasn’t come up yet, which is that a lot of the logic in that case turned on what would happen to other children of non-citizen parents of the United States,” Shin said. “The big concern there was what would happen to specifically European descended children of foreign parents. This was a period of great immigration to the United States — hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States who were children of European immigrants — and they would all potentially lose their citizenship if the Court had ruled against Wong Kim Ark.”
The panel then went into a Q&A session. Schlanger said ending birthright citizenship could lead to a racialized underclass. She said she felt other attacks on diversity, equity, inclusivity and accessibility by the federal government could contribute to the exclusion of minorities.
“The Trump administration in many ways has demonstrated that it is not interested in voiding the creation or maintenance of a racialized underclass,” Schlanger said. “This pushback against DEIA has also been a pushback against civil rights enforcement in many departments. … This is a piece with that, because if birthright citizenship is gone, what we will see is brown people becoming, not second class citizens, not aspirants to citizenship, but just excluded in the way that for generations, the Chinese were, and that’s not a coincidence.”
LSA senior Qihao Liang heard about the panel from his sociology professor and told The Michigan Daily learning about the racial and political context of the Wong Kim Ark case changed his perspective on whether birthright citizenship was more humanistic than politically motivated.
“I was very impressed by (Shin) talking about the historical background of the Wong Kim Ark case and citizenship,” Liang said. “Before that they already have a lot of race discrimination and Chinese Exclusion Act, and because of this background leads to the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction on this case. I feel like it’s so informative, because it would change our (mind about) birthright citizenship. We used to think it is a really humanistic thing, but we also show there is some race element within the historical context.”
Daily News Editor Christina Zhang can be reached at zchristi@umich.edu.
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