Who gets to be an American citizen?
4/7/202615 min
The 14th Amendment guaranteed equal citizenship after the Civil War, but who exactly counted as a citizen? Today on the show, the story of Wong Kim Ark, a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents, whose Supreme Court case defined birthright citizenship more than a century ago.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
This message comes from Pod Save the World. If it's hard to make sense of modern global conflicts, Pod Save the World breaks down the week's most impactful foreign policy news with digestible expert analysis. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
Rund Abdelfatah· Host0:15
[upbeat music] This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from Throughline and NPR. I'm Rund Abdelfatah. Each week we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the US that began 250 years ago. As we've been talking about in this series, who is American and what it means to be American have always been in flux, and today that's still true. Just this month, the Supreme Court started hearing oral arguments that those born in the United States are automatically US citizens, regardless of their parents' immigration status. The Court will issue a decision this summer and either undo birthright citizenship or uphold the precedent set over a century ago by another Supreme Court case, the case that started it all.
Speaker 21:10
The question to be determined is whether a person born within the United States, whose father and mother were both persons of Chinese descent and subjects of the Emperor of China, but at the time of the birth were both domiciled residents of the United States, is a citizen.