Among my most prized possessions in my rather cluttered apartment is a fraying, green document that declares that Thomas Ding-Moon Lee was born on December 12, 1977 in Boston, Massachusetts, 10:41 a.m. to be precise.
I probably value my birth certificate more than the average Joe because it proves that I am, indeed, a citizen of the United States of the America. Since I’m second generation Chinese, born to immigrant parents, I can’t really take anything for granted.
Am I little paranoid? Maybe. But given the ugly debate over immigration in recent years, better safe than sorry.
The latest example is the effort by some lawmakers in Congress and state capitals to deny citizenship to so-called “anchor babies,” the children born to undocumented workers in America.
You would think that we settled this a long time ago. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed 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.”
But these days, nothing seems set in stone, even Constitutional clauses and established case law.
Including this one: in 1894, American-born Wong Kim Ark sailed to China for a temporary visit. When Ark attempted to return to San Francisco, immigration authorities denied him entry, arguing Ark was not a citizen because his parents were subjects to the Emperor of China.
Officials were enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed 12 years earlier, that attempted to limit the number of Chinese immigrants in the country.
In a 6-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ark, reaffirming the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Of course, history has proven that citizenship on paper doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a citizen in practice. It took more than a hundred years for blacks to realistically exercise the rights granted to them by the Fourteenth Amendment.
After the Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the federal government herded Japanese people, citizen or not, to internment camps in the southwest.
But history and law aside, it’s today’s venomous climate that makes me queasy. Targeting adult undocumented workers is one thing. But to target new born babies, who really didn’t have any say in the matter, just seems cruel and mean spirited.
And if we undermine the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, where does it end? What could prevent lawmakers from retroactively denying citizenship to people whose crime was being born in the United States to immigrants, documented or not?
Somewhere, Wong Kim Ark is spinning in his grave.