Since the 1990s, controversy has arisen over the longstanding practice of granting automatic citizenship to U.S. -born children of illegal immigrants. Legal scholars disagree over whether the precedent applies when alien parents are in the country illegally. Attempts have been made from time to time in Congress to restrict birthright citizenship. No such proposal has been enacted.
About United States v. Wong Kim Ark in brief
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U. S. 649, was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. It held that a child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, and are there carrying on business, automatically became a citizen at birth. This decision established an important precedent in its interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Since the 1990s, controversy has arisen over the longstanding practice of granting automatic citizenship to U. s. -born children of illegal immigrants. Legal scholars disagree over whether the precedent applies when alien parents are in the country illegally. Attempts have been made from time to time in Congress to restrict birthright citizenship, either via statutory redefinition of the term jurisdiction, or by overriding both the Wong KimArk ruling and the citizenship Clause itself. No such proposal has been enacted. The dominant legal principle governing citizenship has been jus soli—the principle that birth within the territorial limits of the US confers automatic citizenship, excluding slaves before the American Civil War. In 1857, the Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford held that former slaves were originally excluded from United States citizenship, and that their descendants could acquire citizenship via a process of naturalization—though originally limited to white slaves, their descendants can now acquire citizenship through naturalization. In 2010, a 2010 review of the history of the.
Citizenship Clause notes that the. decision held that the guarantee of birthright. citizenship \”applies to children of foreigners present on American soil\” and states that the Supreme. Court has not re-examined this issue since the concept of ‘illegal alien’ entered the language. The case highlighted disagreements over the precise meaning of one phrase in the Citizenship. Clause—namely, the provision that a person born in. the US who is’subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ acquires automatic citizenship. The majority concluded that this phrase referred to being required to obey U.s. law; on this basis, they interpreted the language of the fourteenth Amendment in a way that granted. citizenship to children born of foreigners, with only a limited set of exceptions mostly based in English common law. The court’s dissenters argued that being subject to the. jurisdiction of the United. States meant not being claimed as a citizen by another country via jus sanguinis —an interpretation which, in the minority’s view, would have excluded the children of. foreigners, happening to be born to them while passing through the country. In the words of a 2007 legal analysis of events following the court in Wong Kim. Ark, the parameters of the jus Soli principle have never been seriously questioned by the Supreme court, and have been accepted as dogma by lower courts. The ruling was upheld in an 1844 New York state v. Clarke case, in which it held that. a woman born in New York City of alien parents temporarily sojourning there was a New York citizen.
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