An 1898 ruling of the Supreme Court clarified the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, which states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” A challenge to the simple reading of this text was posed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which largely prevented immigration to the U.S. from China, denied the possibility of naturalization to Chinese immigrants who did come to the country, and was used to deny the citizenship of children born in the United States to Chinese parents.
Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese parents. He traveled to China as a teenager in 1890 and returned to the U.S. that same year without incident. But when he returned from another visit to China in 1895, he was denied entry on the basis that he was not a U.S. citizen. He sued, and his case made its way to the country’s highest court.
In a 6-2 decision, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that no act of Congress could overrule the Constitution. The court’s decision, written by Justice Horace Gray, takes up “the single question stated at the beginning … namely, whether a child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China, becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States.” The ruling concludes, “this court is of the opinion that the question must be answered in the affirmative.”