Birthright citizenship: The long history of who gets to be an American

As President-elect Donald J Trump prepares to implement sweeping policy changes affecting American immigration and immigrants, one of the issues under scrutiny by his allies appears to be birthright citizenship – the declaration in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that anyone born on US soil is a US citizen, regardless of their parents’ nationalities or immigration status.

Some prospective members of Trump’s team, including anti-immigration advisers Stephen Miller and Thomas Homan, have said they intend to stop issuing federal identification documents such as Social Security cards and passports to infants born in the US to undocumented migrant parents, according to The New York Times.

This first step down a path to deny citizenship to some individuals born in the United States reflects a conflict that’s been going on for nearly 200 years: who gets to be an American citizen.

Debates in American history over who gets citizenship and what kind of citizenship they get have always involved questions of race and ethnicity, as we have learned through our individual research on the historical status of Native Americans and African Americans and joint research on restricting Chinese immigration.

Nonetheless, even in the highly racialised political environment of the late 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed an expansive view of birthright citizenship. In an 1898 ruling, the court decreed that the US-born children of...

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