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United States (US) President Donald Trump’s challenge to the longstanding rule that anyone born in the US, with only narrow exceptions, is automatically a citizen echoes a similar dispute that took place on the shores of San Francisco more than a century ago.
In the late 19th century, amid a wave of fervent anti-Chinese sentiment, the US government sought to prevent a young man named Wong Kim Ark from re-entering the country upon returning by steamship from a trip to his parents’ homeland of China, contending that, despite being born in the US, he was not a citizen.
On March 28, 1898, the US Supreme Court (SC) disagreed, recognising that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment grants citizenship by birth on American soil, including to those like Wong whose parents were foreign nationals.
Now his great-grandson, a San Francisco area resident, worries that the principle enshrined by his ancestor’s case may be in peril.
