U.S. President Donald Trump¡¯s challenge to the longstanding rule that anyone born in the United States, 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 U.S. 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 United States, he was not a citizen. On March 28, 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, recognizing that the U.S. Constitution¡¯s 14th Amendment grants citizenship by birth on U.S. soil, including to those such as 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.
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