United States V. Wong Kim Ark - Opinion of The Court

Opinion of The Court

In a 6–2 decision issued on March 28, 1898, the Supreme Court held that Wong Kim Ark had acquired U.S. citizenship at birth and that "the American citizenship which Wong Kim Ark acquired by birth within the United States has not been lost or taken away by anything happening since his birth." The opinion of the Court was written by Associate Justice Horace Gray and was joined by Associate Justices David J. Brewer, Henry B. Brown, George Shiras Jr., Edward Douglass White, and Rufus W. Peckham.

Upholding the concept of jus soli (citizenship based on place of birth), the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause needed to be interpreted in light of English common law, which had included as subjects virtually all native-born children, excluding only those who were born to foreign rulers or diplomats, born on foreign public ships, or born to enemy forces engaged in hostile occupation of the country's territory. The court's majority held that the subject to the jurisdiction phrase in the Citizenship Clause excluded from U.S. citizenship only those persons covered by one of these three exceptions (plus a fourth—namely, that Indian tribes "not taxed" were not considered subject to U.S. jurisdiction). The majority concluded that none of these four exceptions to U.S. jurisdiction applied to Wong; in particular, they observed that "during all the time of their said residence in the United States, as domiciled residents therein, the said mother and father of said Wong Kim Ark were engaged in the prosecution of business, and were never engaged in any diplomatic or official capacity under the emperor of China".

Quoting approvingly from an 1812 case, The Schooner Exchange v. M'Faddon, in which Chief Justice John Marshall said, "The jurisdiction of the nation within its own territory is necessarily exclusive and absolute"—and agreeing with the district judge who had heard Wong's original habeas corpus petition that comments in the Slaughterhouse Cases regarding the non-citizenship of children born to alien parents were obiter dicta and did not constitute a binding precedent—the Court ruled that Wong was a U.S. citizen from birth, via the Fourteenth Amendment, and that the restrictions of the Chinese Exclusion Act did not apply to him. An act of Congress, they held, does not trump the Constitution; such a law "cannot control meaning, or impair its effect, but must be construed and executed in subordination to its provisions." Commenting on the Wong Kim Ark case shortly after the issuance of the Court's ruling in 1898, San Francisco attorney Marshall B. Woodworth wrote that "the error the dissent apparently falls into is that it does not recognize that the United States, as a sovereign power, has the right to adopt any rule of citizenship it may see fit, and that the rule of international law does not furnish the sole and exclusive test of citizenship of the United States".