The Supreme Court on Who Gets to Be an American

"Historians think a lot about contingency-the way specific events are connected in a causal chain. Nothing is foreordained; a single change can mean a different outcome, or a cascade of them, that shifts the course of history."

"One of these hinge moments was the Supreme Court's 6-2 ruling, in 1898, that Wong Kim Ark, a cook who was born in San Francisco, was indeed an American citizen, under a clause in the Fourteenth Amendment that states, 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.'"

"Tens of millions of people in this country today owe their American stories to this decision. Yet there's also an individual, human-scale intimacy to the way history unfolds."

The Supreme Court's 1898 ruling in favor of Wong Kim Ark affirmed that individuals born in the U.S. are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision significantly impacted the citizenship status of millions today. The ruling allowed Wong Kim Ark to facilitate the entry of his sons from China as American citizens. The historical context includes a period of anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly against Chinese immigrants, which parallels contemporary immigration issues. The narrative emphasizes the personal stories intertwined with these legal decisions.

Read at The New Yorker