Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, reads: “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.”
The obvious purpose of this provision was to establish, beyond any doubt, the legal citizenship of former slaves and their offspring. Section 1 is also a clear repudiation of Chief Justice Taney’s declaration in the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford that African-descended Americans were never and could never be citizens.
This provision has been held by the courts to create something almost no other foreign country except Canada confers: birthright citizenship, the rule that every person born in the United States, or in U.S. territories including Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and the Northern Marianas, is automatically an American citizen.
The only exceptions are those not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” primarily children of accredited diplomats.
In 1898 the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark that a child born in the United States whose parents were foreign citizens residing in the country held U.S. citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment: birthright citizenship.
In recent decades the large number of illegal immigrants’ children born in the United States — estimated by the Pew Hispanic Center at 8 percent of total births, more than 300,000 a year — has prompted arguments that the Fourteenth Amendment does not confer birthright citizenship. Some significant number of Latino pregnant mothers cross the southern U.S. border to give birth in the United States, while significant numbers of Asian, especially Chinese mothers, contrive to give birth in expensive facilities created for that purpose in California and other Western states.
It is pointed out that the parents in the Wong Kim Ark case were legally in the United States. But the arguments against birthright citizenship have not found significant footing in the courts, or in state legislatures and the Congress.
