By LARRY SMITH
In a matter of days, we will learn the Supreme Court’s decision regarding whether to uphold the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. That clause, which was ratified with the rest of the amendment in 1868, states: “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.”
For 158 years, courts have found that this clause codifies “birthright citizenship.” Still, President Trump issued Executive Order 14160 on the first day of his second term — an order that was designed to scuttle that right. Immediately, civil rights organizations, immigrants’ rights groups, and attorneys general of various states issued legal challenges. The president fully expected the issue to ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court — which has given him virtually unprecedented victories since he returned to office.
All three branches of our government have interpreted the citizenship clause as guaranteeing a broad conferral of U.S. citizenship. For example, in 1898 the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to nearly everyone who is born in the United States. Crucially, this includes children of parents who are not U.S. citizens. To be sure, there are a few exceptions (e.g., it doesn’t apply to U.S.-born children of foreign ambassadors).
For context, in 1857 SCOTUS decided in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Black people — whether enslaved or free — were not American citizens. The Citizenship Clause has always been seen as overturning that ruling. However, Trump seeks to deny citizenship to any U.S.-born baby whose mother is in the country “unlawfully” or “lawful[ly] but temporar[ily]” and whose father is “not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident.” This would mean that children who are born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants, as well as children of parents who are residing here under temporary legal status (e.g., with a work visa or student visa) would not be U.S. citizens.
Today, millions of Mr. Trump’s voters argue that, given its historical context, the 14th Amendment should only apply to U.S.-born Blacks, as opposed to children of immigrants. Of course, it should come as no surprise that nearly all legal experts disagree with that stance. Yet, it may surprise some that famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass — who had been born into slavery — believed that the 14th Amendment should apply to children of immigrants.
Beginning in 1869 — one year after the amendment was ratified — Douglass began delivering a speech titled “Our Composite Nationality.” In the speech, he gives a full-throated defense of immigration, with a particular focus on Chinese nationals who were entering the U.S. to address our insatiable need for grossly underpaid laborers. Douglass’ stance is especially poignant given that the social status and even physical safety of Black Americans was very tenuous. Then again, Douglass was far ahead of his time in other regards. For example, he was one of a relative few famous men who argued in favor of women’s suffrage. That right, of course, would not come to fruition until the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.
Douglass, who was ever prescient, discussed America’s then-current, as well as future, diversity. Eighteen years before the Statute of Liberty debuted in New York Harbor, he said:
“We are a country of all extremes, ends, and opposites — the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world. Our people defy all the ethnological and logical classifications. In races, we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name or number. In regard to creeds and faiths, the condition is no better and no worse. Differences both as to race and to religion are evidently more likely to increase than to diminish.”
Anticipating the so-called “Yellow Peril”, which led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Douglass goes on to ask rhetorically:
“Assuming, then, that this immigration already has a foothold and will continue for many years to come, we have a new element in our national composition which is likely to exercise a large influence upon the thought and the action of the whole nation. The old question as to what shall be done with the negro will have to give place to the greater question, ‘What shall be done with the Mongolian?’— and perhaps we shall see raised one even still greater, namely, ‘What will the Mongolian do with both the negro and the white?’ Already has the matter taken this shape in California and on the Pacific coast generally. Already has California assumed a bitterly unfriendly attitude toward the (Chinese).”
Amazingly, Douglass then addresses an issue that is exceedingly relevant today:
“I have great respect for the blue-eyed and light-haired races of America. They are a mighty people. In any struggle for the good things of this world, they need have no fear; they have no need to doubt that they will get their full share. But I reject the arrogant and scornful theory by which they would limit migratory rights, or any other essential human rights, to themselves and which would make them the owners of this great continent to the exclusion of all other races of men. I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto, and the Latin races, but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man.”
Douglass says further, “If the white race may exclude all other races from this continent, it may rightfully do the same in respect to all other lands, islands, capes, and continents and thus have all the world to itself; and thus what would seem to belong to the whole would become the property of only a part.”
Notably, this speech comes 17 years after Douglass first delivered his most famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” In that unmatched oration, he exposed the abject hypocrisy of white Americans celebrating freedom while concurrently enslaving more than three million Black Americans. That speech was designed to help white Americans wrestle with the extreme lengths to which they went to make Black Americans “the other.”
By contrast, “Our Composite Nationality” was about attempting to help white Americans understand the advantages of melding the jagged shards of a broken nation into a cohesive whole. Some 157 years later, that is still the dilemma, the choice, and the opportunity for America.
Contact community leader Larry Smith at larry@leaf-llc.com For more, visit indianapolisrecorder.com.
