On a fall day in 1870, a Chinese woman with bound feet gave birth to a baby boy named Wong Kim Ark. He entered the world in the back bedroom of 751 Sacramento Street in San Francisco’s Chinatown, above his father’s grocery store. According to the 1870 census, he was an extraordinary rarity—one of only 518 children of Chinese ethnicity to have been born in the United States up until that time. Almost 30 years later, the child’s birth was at the center of a Supreme Court case establishing that everyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen—what is known as birthright citizenship—under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The justices who ruled that Wong Kim Ark was a U.S. citizen might have been surprised to learn that the concept remains contested over a century later. President Trump has repeatedly threatened to end the “crazy, lunatic” policy of birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. Trump rose to political prominence on the baseless claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and during the election campaign questioned the citizenship of Kamala Harris, who was born in this country to legal immigrants. Even in 2021, many Americans are conflicted about whether newly arriving immigrants and their children deserve the full rights of citizenship.
Wong was 24 years old when he began his legal battle. His photo from government archives shows a fresh-faced young man, regarding the camera with a calm confidence. Yet he would endure months in detention and then another three years in legal limbo as his government argued that he was not a citizen entitled to stay in his own country. What motivated Wong to fight so hard for citizenship in a nation whose leaders rejected him?
Government records on Wong and his family stored at national archives in San Francisco and Texas, the states where Wong lived and worked, offer a window into the daily lives of immigrants as well as the inner working of the immigration enforcement system. The government’s oppressive documentation of Chinese immigrants and their families confirmed my worst fears about how racism and xenophobia infused the implementation of the nation’s immigration and citizenship laws. But the archives also led to surprising revelations about Wong and his family—discoveries that cast new light on a man long viewed as the poster child for birthright citizenship, and raised questions about immigration, citizenship, and belonging that still confound the nation today.
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