United States v. Wong Kim Ark

The Fourteenth Amendment declares that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. The Court read that language against the established common-law rule of jus soli: birth within a sovereign's territory and allegiance ordinarily creates citizenship, regardless of a child's parentage.

Under English common law, which the Court found had been adopted in the American colonies and continued in the United States, a child born in the country to alien parents was a natural-born subject. The traditional exceptions were narrow: children of foreign diplomats, children born to enemy forces occupying domestic territory, and analogous circumstances in which the territorial sovereign lacked full authority over the child or parent.

The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” did not require parents to owe exclusive or permanent allegiance to the United States. Resident aliens are subject to American laws, owe local and temporary allegiance while present, and receive the nation's protection. That relationship places both the parents and their American-born children within the jurisdiction required by the Amendment.

The Court distinguished Elk v. Wilkins, which involved a member of a recognized Indian tribe. Tribal members were understood at the time to owe direct allegiance to their tribes rather than to the United States, an exceptional political relationship not shared by ordinary resident aliens.

The Court also relied on the Amendment's text, purpose, and contemporaneous history. Although the Amendment was centrally intended to secure citizenship for formerly enslaved people, its language applies to all persons without racial limitation. Congressional debates over the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment specifically considered children of Chinese immigrants and did not exclude them from birthright citizenship.

The Court separated citizenship by birth from citizenship by naturalization. The Constitution recognizes birth and naturalization as distinct sources of citizenship: a person born under the Amendment's stated conditions becomes a citizen immediately and needs no act of Congress to obtain that status.

Congress's authority to establish a uniform rule of naturalization is a power to confer citizenship on people born outside the United States; it is not a power to take away or narrow the constitutional citizenship of persons born here. Thus, Congress's exclusion of Chinese immigrants from ordinary naturalization could not imply that their United States-born children lacked citizenship.

The Chinese Exclusion Acts governed Chinese aliens born abroad who remained subjects of China. The Court had upheld Congress's broad authority to exclude or expel aliens, but that power did not extend to a person who was already a United States citizen by birth, whatever his race or ancestry.

Treaties and statutes must yield to the Constitution. The treaty provision stating that it did not confer naturalization on Chinese subjects addressed naturalization, not the constitutional consequence of birth in the United States.

The parties agreed that Wong's residence remained in California, that his trips to China were temporary and made with the intention to return, and that neither he nor his parents had renounced his allegiance to the United States. Those stipulations left no factual basis to find a loss of citizenship.

The Court recognized that an adult citizen may be able to expatriate, but found no need to decide the effect of any act by a minor or by parents acting for a minor. The case presented only the narrower question whether Wong acquired citizenship at birth, and the Court concluded that he did.